Stolen Status

Chicago Tribune:

The story that Richard Barr Cayton has told of his Vietnam War service features a torturous march through the jungle in January 1971, his arms tied to a branch across the back of his neck and shoulders. He was a prisoner of war, he said, until a bombing distracted his captors, and he and a fellow soldier escaped.

Cayton recounted the episode for a Texas newspaper in 2002, saying that he and the other Army Ranger, David Meyer, traveled by night and hid during the day until they were found.

For all its drama, Cayton's story of captivity and a flight to freedom is not supported by military records or interviews with his fellow soldiers. Records show that Cayton was a soldier but never a prisoner of war, and he admitted that in an interview with the Tribune.

"I made a mistake," Cayton said. "I did something wrong and apologized for it."

Cayton's tale is perhaps one of the more dramatic examples of someone who falsely maintains that he was a prisoner of war. Such claims are so common that a cottage industry of sorts has emerged to expose phony POWs, Navy SEALs, Green Berets and others falsely claiming that they served in elite military units.

A recent Tribune investigation highlighted a similar problem that is just as pervasive: false claims of earning the military's top medals for valor, a lie that also is now a criminal offense.

The private watchdogs who investigate such claims are vigilant and aggressive. This summer, an Oklahoma newspaper published the story of a man who claimed he was a former SEAL who, during Vietnam, was held in a bamboo cage for four years. Former SEAL Steve Robinson, who wrote a book about exposing phony SEALs, immediately suspected the man was a fraud. He checked a database of real SEALs to confirm his suspicions, then wrote the newspaper to say it had been hoodwinked.

"When I read the story," said Robinson, "right away I'm thinking something is up."

Less than a week later, the man admitted to the newspaper that he had lied.

The POW watchdogs who exposed Cayton are retirees who work out of their home in the tiny Missouri town of Skidmore.

By their count, Mary and Chuck Schantag of the P.O.W. Network have exposed close to 1,900 impostors since 1998, when they began to check POW claims. They say they have exposed another 2,000 men who claimed they were in elite units.

"It's taken over our lives," said Mary Schantag. "We check reports of phonies when we get up in the morning and before we get to bed at night."

Their motivation is simple. "The lies are changing history. It's wrong. It causes the real heroes to be grouped with the phonies and frauds," she said. "The integrity and honor should be given to those who really earn it."

...

I prosecuted a guy who swindled returning POW's out of their back pay by pretending he had been a POW in Korea. He also embellished his record in Marine Corps. The Corps supplied his service record for the trial along with a witness to testify about it. While he had made fraudulent statements about the securities he was selling, one of my main fraud counts was his misrepresentation of his status as a POW in order to claim some affinity with this victims. The jury was unforgiving and they gave him the maximum sentence under Texas law.

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