Here are the ways Tim Walz has been misleading about his military service

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), and now running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris, has made his 24-year military career an important cornerstone of his political persona. He has made multiple references to his time in the Minnesota National Guard, but some of those comments have come under renewed scrutiny due to their misleading nature.

Aside from putting in his retirement paperwork after it became clear his unit was going to be deployed to Iraq, Walz has also suggested in some of his remarks that he was in combat, even though he was not, and said he retired as a command sergeant major when, in reality, he retired as a master sergeant.

The Minnesota National Guard explained "because he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy," Walz was unable to retain the higher rank when he retired.

On the Harris' campaign website page that introduced Walz as her running mate, the post repeated the false rank he retired as: "The son of an Army veteran and a retired Command Sergeant Major in the Army National Guard himself." The Harris campaign has since corrected the sentence to have his true rank.

Walz had deployed once to Italy.

In a video promoted by the Harris campaign, Walz previously told a crowd while advocating for gun control that "we can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war."

The Washington Free Beacon further reported that in 2009, Iraq war veteran David Thul, a sergeant in the Minnesota National Guard, told Walz staffers the then-congressman was misrepresenting his service by claiming to be a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom. OEF was the U.S. military operation that was started in and primarily focused on Afghanistan. Like Iraq, Walz did not serve in Afghanistan.

"Congressman Walz is clearly claiming ... to be an Enduring Freedom veteran. Nobody disputes the fact that he is not an Afghanistan or Enduring Freedom veteran. So this represents a fairly serious issue," Thul told a staffer, who agreed that by using the label of OEF veteran, it could lead to confusion among voters.

Walz had deployed once to Italy in support of OEF, but he was not in a combat zone for that operation.

In 2008, Walz endorsed a book about elections, which included a section about him. In the book, he is falsely labeled as a "National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan."

Walz was also photographed outside a George W. Bush rally in 2004 apparently holding a sign saying, "Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry."

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