Chuck Palazzo; phony Vietnam veteran

For several years, this fellow Chuck Palazzo has been exploiting the stank-ass hippies claiming that he was a Vietnam veteran who went back to Vietnam to deal with his PTSD. He’s been living in Da Nang where he claimed that he patrolled the outskirts of that city as a Recon Marine in the early 70s, like in this PBS article;

He’s also written a number of articles on the effects of Agent Orange on the local Vietnamese for those cranks at Veterans Today. His crowning achievement, though, seems to be fleecing Veterans For Peace Chapter 160 in Vietnam for several thousand dollars according to Vietnam Express;

This July, Drew Brown, a photographer, journalist and veteran of the U.S. invasion of Panama sent out a letter to members of the Veterans for Peace Chapter 160 accusing Palazzo of lying about his experience in the U.S. Marine Corps.

“Palazzo’s a total fraud,” Brown told VnExpress International when reached on his cell phone in Byron, Georgia.

Brown wrote that he decided to share the findings of his investigation into Palazzo’s military record after receiving a letter from two VFP 160 members announcing that Palazzo had “stolen practically all of chapter 160’s money.”

Brown wrote that he first met Palazzo in 2012 while writing a story on him for McClatchy newspapers.

“Palazzo told me that his recon team had been sent regularly into North Vietnam to locate and ‘take out’ surface to air missile sites,” he wrote in his letter. “He also told me that he had been exposed to Agent Orange when a U.S. helicopter sprayed defoliant nearby while his team was on a mission in the hills near Da Nang […] Palazzo later claimed in a February 2013 interview, for which I shot the pictures, that he had also parachuted into combat on several occasions.”

Profiles offering a similar account of Palazzo’s life have appeared in the Guardian, Bloomberg, The New Yorker and in the Vietnamese media.

Brown says that Palazzo duped them all.

This is from a VFP bio for their annual trek to Vietnam;

Yeah, the real truth is that Palazzo was a Marine 1971- 1975. From his enlistment until September 1972, he was a General Warehouse Man at Camp Lejeune. In September 1972, he went to the Support Company, Support Battalion, 3rd Force Service Regiment Fleet Marine Force, Pacific as a legal clerk. By the time he got there, 3rd Force Service Regiment was in Okinawa. In October, 1973, he returned to El Toro, California as a legal chief where he stayed until he was discharged – no Vietnam;

No Marine Recon training, no parachute training, no service in Vietnam.

Of course, finding a phony veteran among the stank-ass hippies of the VFP is nothing new for us. We’ve been doing that for a decade;

Brown says he initially planned to keep the information to himself for fear that he might cause strife among the veterans community.

“Had I come forward a year ago, when I finally realized that my project with him had really been nothing more than a vehicle to fund his living expenses for a year, then perhaps his embezzlement of Chapter 160’s money might have come to light sooner,” he wrote. “I sincerely regret not doing so.”

VFP isn’t really the “veterans community” per se, they’re just a bunch of stank-ass hippies who love people who will say that which is politically expedient for them. Remember Jaymond Polk?

There’s no Vietnamese prosecutor to get Palazzo arrested, so the only thing Brown could have done was expose him and cut off his funding – but that’s a tough decision to expect from a stank-ass hippie.

Category: Phony soldiers, Valor Vultures