By Michael C. Bender and Thomas Gibbons-Neff New York Times
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Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday of quitting the Army National Guard two decades ago to avoid being deployed to Iraq and of exaggerating his service record to claim falsely that he had served in combat.

Both provocative charges amounted to some of the sharpest Republican attacks yet on the Minnesota governor, and appeared aimed at disrupting what has been a run of positive news coverage of the Democratic ticket since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the party’s nominee.

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The accusations by Vance, who served a four-year active duty enlistment in the Marine Corps, about Walz, whose career in the national guard spanned 24 years, also served to pit the military records of the two major party’s vice-presidential candidates against each other.

Speaking at the police department in Shelby Township, Michigan, on Wednesday morning, Vance said Walz had effectively deserted his fellow soldiers to avoid serving in Iraq because he retired from the National Guard in May 2005, several months before his artillery unit received orders to deploy there.

“You abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq,” Vance said.

Vance based his accusations on a Facebook post from 2018, and a paid letter to the editor to the West Central Tribune that same year in which the writers, Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr, both retired command sergeant majors in the Minnesota National Guard, accused Walz of “conveniently retiring a year before his battalion was deployed to Iraq.”

The criticisms were first leveled by Behrends and Herr during Walz’s first campaign for governor.

But Joseph Eustice, a 32-year veteran of the national guard who led the same battalion as Walz and served under him, recalled in an interview Wednesday that Walz’s decision to run for Congress came months before the battalion received any official notice of deployment, though he said there had been rumors that it might be deployed.

Vance was on active duty with the Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 during the Iraq War.

Vance, who then went by the name James D. Hamel, was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006 with the aircraft wing but did not serve as a front-line combatant.

His official military occupation, known as a combat correspondent, meant he was tasked with basic communication roles such as writing articles about the happenings in his unit.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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