“You abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq,” Mr. Vance said.
Mr. 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 Mr. Walz of “conveniently retiring a year before his battalion was deployed to Iraq.”
The criticisms were first leveled by Mr. Behrends and Mr. Herr during Mr. Walz’s first campaign for governor.
But Joseph Eustice, a 32-year veteran of the national guard who led the same battalion as Mr. Walz and served under him, said in an interview on Wednesday that the governor was a dependable soldier and that the attacks by his fellow comrades were unfounded.
“He was as good a soldier as you’d find, and to have two former sergeant majors say that he wasn’t, it’s just not true,” Mr. Eustice said, adding that he disagreed with Mr. Walz’s politics and most likely would not vote for him in November even though they were friends.
Mr. Eustice recalled that Mr. 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.
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