Graham Clumpner; phony Ranger who tossed medals had no medals

We wrote about Graham Clumpner last year when he was with a group of IVAW hangers-on when they went to Chicago to protest something or other, I’m sure they didn’t even know;

“I wanted so badly to believe in the idea of America. I wanted to believe that every war we ever fought, we won; that we were always just; that we were always doing the right thing, and trying to help, and save, and protect,” said former Army Ranger Graham Clumpner, who was deployed twice to Afghanistan. “And I bought into it hook, line, and sinker.”

Clumpner was given a Global War on Terrorism Service Award for his service fighting against the Taliban.

He said he was proud to join the military, but grew disillusioned, and ashamed of how operations were carried out.

“We’d go into people’s houses and go through literally all of their things, open up every single drawer and dump stuff on the ground, push things over, kick things over, and … make absolutely no effort to apologize, or pay people, or explain,” Clumpner said. “That process, for me, was the most traumatizing.”

Clumpner said he’s not happy with how troops were treated when they returned home, or how troops were trained to interact with native Afghans on the ground.

Um, no. Any medals that Clumpner tossed weren’t his because according to the Army, he doesn’t have any medals. And since he doesn’t even have service medals, we have to assume he wasn’t deployed either. There isn’t even a National Defense Service Medal only a pair of jump wings. I heard from a fairly reliable source that Clumpner was supposed to deploy and refused which is probably why they stripped him of his service medals. Notice how his records say that he was supposed to be discharged in 2010, but he was actually discharged in 2007.

For shits and grins, here’s one of his tales that he told to the Inter Press Service about his pretend deployment;

Graham Clumpner, 27, is an ex Army Ranger who served in eastern Afghanistan. In February 2005 after a night raid in a village mistakenly stretched until dawn, Clumpner’s humvee was rocketed, and flipped. He was hurled into a wall and blacked out for what he describes as over ten minutes. When he regained consciousness he drove back to the base. “It was just actions, I was doing what I was told,” he says. He finished the remaining two months of his rotation.

Clumpner says his company was asked to fill out forms evaluating their mental health before they returned to the U.S. He didn’t know what TBI was. “We were told if we replied ‘yes’ to the question, ‘are you angry?’ we would be kept in country,” he says. All the troops he was with marked ‘no’.

Clumpner suffered short-term memory loss, mood swings, and depression. He is grateful for the understanding of his college professors, which enabled him to graduate college.

He also credits Iraqi Veterans Against the War (IVAW), which provided him a strong support network. “We have developed good ways to keep people alive,” he says. “But when you get back to the U.S. there is no rehabilitation, especially as you are an individual, and removed from your unit.”

IVAW – saving fake soldiers from their imaginary battles since 2006. His HMMV was rocketed and flipped, but he still drove back to base. What did he drive? I guess in an imaginary battle, you can imaginary fix your rocketed vehicle enough to imaginary drive it back to your imaginary base.

Thanks to Mary for riding herd on this one for more than a year. Yes, sometimes it takes that long to get these FOIAs back.

Category: Iraq Veterans Against the War, Phony soldiers