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Web Posted: 12/14/2008 12:00 CST
Invalid valor: Vet lied about his service
By John MacCormack- Express-News
Boasting a military record that included two Purple Hearts, decorations for valor and combat service in Somalia with the Army Rangers, Brian Culp seemed the perfect war hero to be honored last year as grand marshal in LaVernia's patriotic parade.
“He was very deserving because of his military experience, battles and honors. And he had gotten hurt,” said Merrie Monaco, president of the Lions Club that sponsors the Bluebonnet Fest Parade.
“We actually made a quilt with his patches and medals, like a memory quilt, and we gave it to him,” she recalled.
A large and rugged outdoorsman, Culp, 38, also merited special recognition because of his nonprofit organization Veteran Adventures, that takes injured service members on hunting trips around South Texas.
But even as Culp was bathed in adulation as he rolled along Main Street at the head of the LaVernia parade, time was running out.
Smelling something fishy in his improbable war stories and claims to being a brother in arms, members of the small fraternity of Army Rangers already were comparing notes and digging into his military past.
Then on Aug. 23, 2007, Culp overplayed his hand when he tried to enter Lackland AFB using an ID card that identified him as a retired master sergeant.
The gate guard turned Culp away and confiscated the card, which investigators soon determined to be well-done forgery.
When Culp came in for questioning, Air Force detectives Stephen Vaughan and Sean Garrettson at first found denial and defiance. But eventually, they say, he admitted to even more elaborate fictions.
“This guy came in and thinks he's gonna run the interview,” recalled Vaughan, who had just returned from his second tour in Iraq.
“I was personally offended by his behavior. I found it reprehensible,” he said.
Culp first claimed he knew nothing about the fake ID card that bore his name and photo, but when the stakes were raised, he crumbled, Vaughan said.
“I said, ‘So check it out, Culp. What if I run a search warrant on your house right now? Do you want to bet there's something on your home computer to make this ID card?'” he recalled.
He said Culp eventually admitted he had used his computer to create not only the fake ID card, but also an authentic-looking military discharge paper called a DD-214 larded with fictional honors and service.
Culp admitted to using the fake documents to obtain benefits and services from on-base haircuts to Purple Heart license plates to disability payments from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Vaughan said.
“He said he lied to the VA counselor about having post-traumatic stress disorder from serving in Bosnia and witnessing mass graves there,” Vaughan said.
And while Culp had served honorably in both wars against Iraq, he never was wounded, never served in Somalia or Bosnia and never had been a Ranger, Vaughan said.
“All of us want to be John Wayne, but most of us outgrow it when we're 12,” he said.
Almost a year later, Culp was charged with four federal offenses related to making false claims to military honors and to using a fake ID card to try to enter Lackland.
Culp, who last year convinced a San Antonio Express-News reporter that he had been wounded while participating in the 1993 Ranger rescue mission in Somalia known as “Black Hawk Down,” declined to be interviewed.
The real story, he said in a brief e-mail, is about the wounded servicemen he helps.
“I was and am one of them. An honorably discharged, multiple combat, disabled veteran,” he wrote.
Hunting trips
According to his Veteran Adventures Web site, which solicits donations and once claimed he shed blood on foreign soil, Culp has sponsored a handful of hunting trips in the past two years.
Louis Dahlman, 24, a long-term patient at Brooke Army Medical Center, was a guest on a recent axis deer hunt on a ranch in Bandera County.
Dahlman, of Iowa, was badly injured in May 2007 while serving in Iraq with the Army.
“We were doing convoy escort and I was the gunner on the lead truck when a roadside bomb blew off my jaw,” Dahlman said.
“I've had seven or eight surgeries so far. I've got a year or two of surgeries left,” he said.
Despite coming home empty-handed from the September hunt with Culp, he had nothing but praise.
“He was a super nice guy, and it's a great organization,” Dahlman said.
“It's just a chance for guys to get out of the hospital, get 'em outdoors and get their minds off their surgeries and injuries,” he said.
Stolen valor
Embellishing military records has a long and rich history in the United States, dating at least to the Revolutionary War when a German soldier of fortune gained George Washington's confidence with false credentials.
Claiming to be having been a key military aide to the King of Prussia but alas, having no papers to prove it, Baron Von Steuben proved to be the exceptional imposter, providing valuable service in training the rag-tag revolutionary army.
But more than two centuries passed before it became a crime to lie about military honors and achievements.
Since passage of the Stolen Valor Act, in 2005, such deceptions are punishable by up to a year in prison, and dozens of fake vets have since been prosecuted. Others have gone to prison for receiving financial and medical benefits based on false claims.
A force behind the new law was B.G. Burkett, an Army veteran of Vietnam who spent more than two decades exposing legions of fake heroes and co-authored the book “Stolen Valor” that documented the phenomenon.
“It wasn't just post-Vietnam. It's every single conflict that's ever occurred. It happened after the Civil War and it's happening right now in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said of false claims by soldiers.
“The No. 1 reason people do this is low self-esteem. The second you say you are a heroic warrior, people treat you differently,” he said.
Culp, who played quarterback at Stroman High School in Victoria, joined the military in 1990 after attending one semester of classes at a small school in Kansas.
According to Vaughan and other sources familiar with his background, Culp apparently made false claims to being a Ranger repeatedly while in the Army and was seriously disciplined at least twice.
“In high school, he was this big football superstar. He was used to thinking he was hot stuff,” one person who knew him well recalled.
“And when he came into the Army, the Rangers were the elite infantry soldiers. Brian was used to being in the limelight, so he put his mind on that,” said the source, who asked not to be named.
While in Germany in the early 1990s, Culp allegedly was caught with Ranger tabs on a uniform.
At the time, he had completed pre-Ranger school in Germany and was in line to attend Ranger School in Georgia. But his misconduct ruined that, the source said.
A decade later, after re-enlisting in the Army, Culp allegedly lost a plum job as personal driver for a general at Fort Hood when a background check turned up a similar false claim that he was a Ranger, several sources said.
His service records reflect a significant demotion, which sources attributed to his false claims.
Holes in the story
But it was a chance encounter with a former Army Ranger last year that led to Culp finally being exposed. Highway patrolman Derome West said he came upon Culp while patrolling U.S. 281 near Bulverde.
“A pickup with a Ranger tab and Purple Heart plates pulled into the Valero in front of me, so I pulled up beside him,” West recalled.
“He started telling me about how he was in the 3rd Ranger Battalion in Mogadishu, and we got to talking a little bit. There's a little bit of a vetting process,” he said of the Ranger fraternity.
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