Stolen Valor

Apparently there are a lot of these pieces of dirt out there.

A New Yorker who for 40 years passed himself off as Vietnam war hero who had been decorated for extreme gallantry was sentenced to community service Wednesday after being outed as a fraud.

According to prosecutors, Louis Lowell McGuinn claimed to have been a lieutenant colonel in the US special forces and had used his fake military history since 1968 to get work or to win kudos at social functions.

His military records showed that McGuinn had indeed been in the US Army and served in Vietnam, but was discharged as a private without being decorated.

In 2006, McGuinn, who is now in his 60s, attended a ball in New York's glitzy Pierre Hotel wearing the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, awarded for being wounded in action.

The Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest military decoration of the US Army, is awarded for acts of extraordinary heroism.

A real lieutenant colonel and West Point graduate, Mark Kimey, instantly spotted there was something not quite right about McGuinn and reported him.

"They're always (Navy) SEALs or special forces," Kimey told the New York Daily News last year. "Nobody ever masquerades as a cook."

I joined the Air Force in 1977 and ended as a weekend warrior with the Florida Air National Guard in 1998. The Fly remembers me coming back to the RU dorm from drill weekends on Sunday night.

All I did was drink beer on three continents. Now they don't give out medals for that, and I don't have a whole lot of documentation of my beer-drinking (though I have proof I was on three continents, and I have proof that beer was sold on those same continents) so my claims of engaging in warfare against foriegn beers can be challenged.