In 2005 when President Bush wisely enacted the Stolen Valor Act we had just heard the tales of Steve Burton,the bogus Marine Lt. Colonel who sported a chest full of medals and ribbons he awarded himself by filling out some mail order forms.

Steven Burton was a bank teller with a fantasy life that consumed him. Since the outing of Burton, approximately 60 others have  been nabbed in their quest for a confabulated notoriety.

Curiously there are no women in these ranks. There must some deep archetypal  meaning to this gender tilt and the need for men to reinvent for themselves a past life of valor. After all, the root of the word valor simply means ‘value.’  Are these men so suffering from the lack of value and self-esteem that the impostor persona affords them a Walter Mitty life in real time?

This syndrome does not discriminate against socio-economic status. When Illinios Circuit Court Judge Michael O’Brien got caught in the cookie jar of bravery for polishing his two Medal of Honor medals—yes two, he simply resigned to avoid prosecution for fraud.  Wrong! There should be no path around prosecution. At the very minimum the offense of stolen valor should carry the same weight as impersonating a police officer.

If as Shakespeare penned, “the better part of valor is discretion,” then our courts need to valorize with great discretionary courage the distinction between a combatant, who wrote the proverbial blank check for liberty with his/her life, from the commoner who may well be a fine citizen but must be stripped of the warrior moniker and resume add-ons.

Possibly a community penance and public apology instituted by the courts would abate such egomaniacal behavior. A Scarlett Letter in the form of an upside down “V” worn for a month in public parks may be the proper consequence.

It does appear, however, that a man will starve his own infirmities to support his intractable vanity, as the beat goes on with the continued emergence of the vulgar feigning of valor.

In our own Arizona backyard, JD “Duke” Schechter, an Arizona State Senate candidate was exposed for claiming a Silver Star and Purple Hearts.   Don’t you love these tough guys named Duke?

David Vincent Weber, 69, from San Diego was charged with a misdemeanor for wearing fake medals at a Veterans Day event. Weber was posing as a retired Marine General and was given the red carpet treatment. Bold eh? Maybe there should be a ribbon for such aberrant behavior.  It could be laced with pepper spray that is released each time they lie.

One would think that the fanfare given in the media would scare the crap out of these phony GI Joe”s, but it does not.

In my travels amongst  a wide population of veteran circles I hear stories to this day. It may be that so much time has been spent on the construction of a war time edifice that the individual actually believes and lives out snippets of truth– so the parts become the whole.

An acquaintance of mine, a retired Army Captain, Tom Carhart  who served in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Tiger Force and works as a speaker/archivist for West Point, hosted us in September of 2003 at his home in Falls Church, Va.  The war stories were flowing amongst a collection of combat veterans and good wine.  Carhart suggested to to us old grunts that because of the duration of the war and the immense number of veterans one could meet, in that 15 year period,  hundreds of vets and a good wanna-be could actually cobble together  a plausible story by adopting bit and pieces of everyone else’s war encounters.

While the result of these confabulated tales was just one big fat lie, we all concurred that these dudes were good hearted men who embodied a pronounced, paradoxical as it may be, respect for the the combat soldier. They are mostly helping spirits who have had trauma elsewhere in their lives and use the war as a mask for other symptomatic behavior they would rather not expose.

Our motorcycle traveling partner, ” Manic Mike,” once said, “I feel both sympathy and pity for those REMF’s,( Rear Echelon Mother F- – kers) who wanted so badly to be in the tall grass.”

I am reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s  rather twisted characterization of the support soldier who never fired his weapon, nor was fired upon.  “And they never even got to experience the glory of war,” Hemmingway said.   If you place that phrase in the context of his novel, you will see he was satirizing the glory of war while shedding light on the profile of certain non- combatants.  It pans two ways.

” It is a vulgar error that the thunder never kills anyone who is asleep.”  Cotton Mather

“The vulgar, thus through imitation errors.” Pope

The meaning of the word vulgar has its roots in a slam on common people.

Is the motivation to fictionalize ones soldiering into a non-fiction war documentary but a self imposed initiation rite and a way out of the intolerable mediocrity of the commoner?

In now the sixth episode of the HBO series, “Pacific.” I am struck by the humility and lack of boisterous tales from the men who so valiantly fought at Guadalcanal and many of the Solomon Islands. That is valor! That is a Band of Brothers with a chemistry that is palpable.

Should you ever wonder if you have Stolen Valor at your Church, School, Soccer, Boy Scouts or the workplace—look and listen for the most vocal in the bunch. They probably lack a valence factor, defining what happens when atoms bond with each other. Most of these men will be singular actors with no supporting cast.