We all cheer when veterans call out stolen valor. We don’t want to see people taking credit for military service that never existed. But what happens when stolen valor… isn’t?
Jack McHugh was flying home from a St. Louis Veterans Day event and was at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, wearing a jacket with his ribbons and medals on it. Then a group of men approached him, filming the encounter. A man shouted in his face that he was a fake and a phony, saying that his ribbons were crooked. People watched as they taunted him, and then assaulted him. They tried to rip his Purple Hearts off, given for injuries he received in battle in Vietnam, and then ripped the buttons off of his jacket.
Police finally intervened, but refused to arrest him. Instead, he made the men — one of whom had been shouting that he was an active-duty Marine — apologize. But McHugh says it isn’t enough.
When he came home from Vietnam, he received plenty of abuse. When he came home from war in his uniform, people threw rotten eggs at him. But it was this encounter, knowing that a veteran would treat another veteran this way, that brought him to tears. “I just can’t believe that one veteran or a group of veterans would do that to somebody else,” he said.
He gave a local news outlet evidence of his service: pictures of an officer presenting him with one of his medals while he was in the hospital, the telegram to his parents saying he had been wounded, his VA health care card. He says he showed them his VA health care card as well, but they still refused to believe that he was a veteran. And when McHugh thinks about what happened, he still cries. “I gave everything I had, for them to degrade it that way.”
