Questioning Walz's Military Service is Just Plain Stupid

[Bucky]

17. His former CO in the MNARNG is miffed at him

It's gonna get aired on Fox soon enough, so be prepared for this to be hyped. But here is the real vulnerability:

There's was no stolen honor. But he ended his enlistment contract before it expired so that he could run for Congress. As a 24 year veteran, that was his right. He gave plenty of notice.

After he gave notice, after he was in the pipeline to exit and run for office, his unit got deployment orders. The position he had moved into was Sergeant Major, and he would have held that rank in the deployment had he gone over to Italy with his battalion. (They were relieving a regular army battalion that was deploying to Afghanistan).

Only he had been calling his exit rank "Command Sergeant Major" (the patch with the star and laurels below) which he would have been had he deployed. But he exited a month or two before that, having achieved the office for that. Since he didn't deploy to the field, he was still a regular Sergeant Major, even if he'd received his insignia for the CSM posting. So in theory he was still at SgtMaj rank, the stripes with the star, but not the laurel leaves (below).

Both jobs are at E-8. Only the CSM is the command partner with the Major or Lt Col who commands the battalion and the SgtMaj has other administrative duties. If the SgtMaj moves over to the command partner position with the CO, then promotion to CSM is more or less automatic, as I understand it. But the field deployment itself didn't happen while Walz was in uniform. He'd actually been planning to exit his 24 years of service since February, but the paperwork went through in May and the deployment occurred in July.

It's an understandable but exploitable misunderstanding. But his exCO is correct about this break in protocol. I suspect he's a Trumper humper, but he's right that Walz should not be claiming CSM exit rank when he only had made SgtMaj.

Honestly, if his position was so critical, they would have stop-lossed him. But they didn't, so it's not like he left his team high and dry; he simply just kept getting promoted while his exit status was being processed.

I believe his ARNG pension rank is really only Master Sgt (E-7) since he held his last rank for less than two years, but that's a different discussion.

Anyhoo, here are the different E-8 insignia concerned

CmdSgtMaj


SgtMaj