Did a Montana candidate for Senate in lie about being shot in Afghanistan?
Former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy has long contended he was shot during his time in the service. Sheehy, running to unseat Democrat Jon Tester, wrote in his book about the bullet lodged in his forearm. The Senate hopeful claims he suffered the injury while serving in Afghanistan, but a pair of new interviews in the New York Times and Washington Post call that fact into doubt.
The interviews with Sheehy's fellow former SEAL and a Montana park ranger indicate Sheehy may have accidentally shot himself in 2015.
“I have a bullet stuck in this arm still from Afghanistan,” Sheehy said in December of last year, per the Washington Post.
Dave Madden, who described himself as a close friend of Sheehy before his deployment, told the New York Times that the candidate never mentioned the wound when it was supposedly brand new. Madden showed the Times emails exchanged between the pair in spring 2012, and said they met in July of that year, two to three months after Sheehy contends he was shot.
Sheehy's story has faced intense scrutiny since April, when Glacier National Park ranger anonymously told the Post that Sheehy had suffered the wound in 2015 while hiking. Sheehy admitted that he was injured while visiting the park, but told the Post in April that he invented the shooting story as a cover for the bullet that was already in his arm. He said that he hoped to cover-up a 2012 shooting in Afghanistan that he never reported to superiors, for fear of a military investigation that might reveal a friendly fire incident.
The ranger who saw Sheehy that day spoke on the record to the New York Times and refuted Sheehy's story. Kim Peach told the New York Times on Friday that she was “100 percent sure he shot himself that day.”
Sheehy stands by his story, telling the Times that their investigation was “tantamount to falsely accusing him of stolen valor” in a Friday statement.
