Stolen Valor or Lazy Reporting?

In the past couple of years, many veterans have gotten involved in professional mixed martial arts (MMA). Former Marine Staff Sergeant Kenneth Alexander is one of those veterans who has been able to find some success and publicity as a professional fighter. Part of the attention that he gotten has been based on the belief that he is a former “Recon Sniper”. Here is an excerpt from an article about Alexander (who is fighting at Camp Pendleton tonight) from an ABC News affiliate in California:

Alexander served as a recon sniper in the U.S. Marine Corps until 2004, spending time in the Middle East and Africa on missions he says are still classified almost a decade later.

“You don’t send special forces in for peacekeeping missions,” said Alexander. “Basically, my job was to go in, and go undetected and if we got the ‘green light,’ we were pulling triggers.”

Yeah, like we haven’t heard that before. Of course thats all a bunch of BS and the Marine Corps Times confronted him about it:

Reached by phone two days before the fight, Alexander acknowledged that he never put boots on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia, though he had done one deployment each to Kuwait and Kyrgyzstan before the left the Corps in 2004.

According to the Marine Corps Times article, he was an intelligence specialist who appears to have spent most of his career attached to Marine Corps Air Wing units and was never a sniper or Recon Marine. However, despite the fact these claims have appeared more than once in the media, Alexander pleads ignorance:

He claimed not to know how the information about Special Forces and his stint as a sniper made it into the articles, though he surmised his brief attachment to a division headquarters intelligence section may have led to some confusion.

To be perfectly honest, if this were a one time thing, I would have given Alexander the benefit of the doubt. We all know the media likes to exaggerate stuff like this and when it comes to reporting on the military and war, the media is extremely lazy in many regards. Regardless, Alexander quite clearly made no effort to correct these lies in multiple printed articles (including a 2008 write-up in the Marine Corps Times) and appears to have gone along with the lies in the above ABC article. Maybe as a result of being knocked around so much, this intelligence specialist doesn’t seem to have a lot of intelligence left (yeah that last bit is corny but I couldn’t resist…)

Like Jonn says all the time, they never claim to be pogues.

Category: Media, Phony soldiers