Error, fraud mar vets’ oral histories, critics say

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

A seven-year, multimillion-dollar effort by the Library of Congress to gather American veterans’ personal war stories is peppered with inaccurate information and fraudulent claims of heroism, critics say, casting doubt on its value as a historical record.

Staffers at the Veterans History Project on Tuesday were hastily removing from the project’s Web site a number of references that bestowed the nation’s highest military honor on soldiers who never won it, confirmed Matt Raymond, the library’s director of communications.

The incorrect Medal of Honor listings are just the tip of the iceberg in a collection of 50,000 oral and written histories that also includes numerous other errors regarding everything from lesser medals to rank attained and whether or not the soldier was ever a prisoner of war, according to outside experts on the database.

“You can’t tell what’s historical fact and what’s not,” said Mary Schantag of POW Network, a Skidmore, Mo.-based group that tracks information on U.S. prisoners of war and exposes fraudulent POW claims. “It’s a terrible tragedy. They’ve spent millions of dollars trying to record these stories, and they have no way of knowing which ones are true or not.”

Tuesday’s scrubbing of the Web site came as the result of a story by John Hoellwarth published online in the Marine Corps Times. Using information provided by Medal of Honor expert Doug Sterner, Hoellwarth’s story named 24 men who were listed on the Veterans History Project Web site as Medal of Honor recipients but who did not receive the award.

Alice Keeney / AP Medals of Honor for different service branches were displayed at a May 21 ceremony in Charleston, S.C.

Permanently established by Congress in 1863, the Medal of Honor is given only for the highest acts of valor in combat by members of the U.S. armed services. For all the millions of soldiers, sailors and fliers who have fought under the American flag in the past 144 years, the medal has been awarded to just 3,463. There are only 109 living recipients of the medal. Just two have been awarded during the Iraq war, both posthumously to men who sacrificed their lives to save their fellow soldiers.

Hoellwarth, who has outed numerous phony military heroes over the past two years, starting with a fake two-star general in Louisiana, was stunned by Sterner’s data. “This Library of Congress stuff, I’ve never seen anything like it. That's incredible,” said Hoellwarth, who served with the Marines during the invasion of Iraq.

The library’s Raymond told msnbc.com that “as soon as this issue was brought to our attention, the staff immediately began to do some additional verification measures.” Raymond called the erroneous Medal of Honor listings “largely the result of innocent mistakes,” such as transcription errors or faulty recollections.

Sterner and Schantag were not buying that. First, Sterner pointed out, the Veterans History Project only contained histories of 49 purported Medal of Honor recipients, meaning just shy of half were incorrect. In addition, they said, their review showed at least 32 participants in the project were wrongly credited with Distinguished Service Crosses out of 100 such listings, and 14 out of 150 entries improperly claimed the Navy Cross. And of 144 participants who said they were Vietnam-era POWs, at least 45 were not, they said.

“Clerical errors to this extent are unsatisfactory,” Sterner said. “While everyone may make a mistake now and then, when 50 percent of the individuals listed by the Library of Congress as Medal of Honor recipients are not, that is gross negligence if the fault is even partially due to data entry errors.”

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