Daniel Whitworth; phony in the Virginia NG

Someone sent us a link to an article in the Virginian-Pilot about this Staff Sergeant in the Virginia National Guard by the name of Daniel Whitworth. He tells the reporter about his military career;

First there was Panama in 1989. Then Desert Storm two years later. Next, Somalia in 1993. In 1994, it was Haiti , followed by two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan as a contractor.

First it was the Marines for four years. Then the Army for eight. Next, three years in the Texas National Guard. From 1999 to 2008, a military contractor, followed by three years in the Virginia National Guard.

First he lost a buddy in Panama . When all hell broke loose in Mogadishu , he lost a bunch more. In both Iraq and Afghanistan , colleagues were killed. On Feb. 28, 2009, Marine Corp. Donte Whitworth, 22, was killed in Iraq .

Any of these could be the introduction for Staff Sgt. Daniel Whitworth, 45, of Virginia Beach.

In 2011 he is once again heading into battle. This time to Iraq – not far from where his son died – with the Virginia National Guard’s 2nd, 183rd Cavalry as part of the Guard’s largest deployment since World War II.

“It’s when I saw all those caskets. All those wives and their children. That’s when it finally hit me,” Whitworth said about returning from the battle of Mogadishu in 1993. “As many times as I’ve had a muzzle pointed in my face, I always thought about how am I gonna get through this. But seeing them, seeing the ones left behind, you realize what sacrifice is all about.”

Well, it seems that he’s the most deployed Guardsman in history, doesn’t it? So we asked the National Personnel Records Center about his records, they send us the results. The only active duty service that he has is a little less than four years in the Marine Corps from 1984 – 1988. He hasn’t been on active duty since he left the Corps. We specifically asked for any active duty service with the Guard or the Army. You can see in the last paragraph of the FOIA letter that there is none [We’ve verified that he did have some active service in the early 90s that NPRC failed to discover];

You can see that in the picture at the top of this post, from the article at the V-P, he’s wearing a Ranger scroll as a combat patch, that’s a lie. Also, in the below picture he’s wearing a Ranger Tab[We’ve verified that he did graduate from Ranger School in 1993];

So, I called SSG Whitworth. He tells me that he is no longer a Staff Sergeant, that he was reduced in rank to Sergeant because of this article. He tells me that he went to Ranger School and that has been verified by his unit, but I can’t get verification on that, for some reason. He didn’t serve with any of the Ranger Battalions and he admits that the combat patch was phony. He also didn’t serve in Somalia. He claims the only service that he did in the War Against Terror was as a contractor, of course, I can’t verify that.

The “buddy” that he says he lost in Panama just happened to attend the same jump school class, he admits that he didn’t know him much at all.

The Virginian-Pilot has been contacted about their story and their pictures, but they don’t seem to care much about accuracy. He tells me that his unit punished him and that he’s moving forward from here, so we wish him luck, but he shouldn’t have put his phoniness in the public forum – or tried to be something he’s not. So this is a lesson to all of the kids out there.

Category: Phony soldiers