Mike Waltz, first Green Beret elected to Congress, has a lesson for us all

Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) knows all about being the target of “stolen valor” claims.

Unlike the charges being hurled at Democratic vice presidential pick Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the politically driven accusations Waltz faced two years ago in his campaign for a House seat had no basis in reality since he was a legitimate Green Beret hero in Afghanistan.

While Walz has ducked questions about his military claims, Waltz wanted to hit back at his critics immediately.

“A local veteran was questioning very publicly my service, and it was stolen valor, and my first instinct was to punch the guy back as hard and publicly as I could,” Waltz said, recalling the attack during his initial bid for office in 2018 which made him the first Green Beret in Congress.

“My wife and others said, ‘No, this is a time for restraint,’” he told Secrets. 

Still, it was impactful and memorable, so much so that when Waltz began writing a second book about his life lessons, he started with restraint. “I’ve seen the value of restraint. Restraint saves lives, it wins hearts and minds, and it preserves relationships with family and friends,” he wrote in the book Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret.

It is due out Oct. 22 and is published by St. Martin’s Press.

As a soldier who fought hard to win his Army Special Forces beret and who was involved in well-known wartime events, including the search for deserter Bowe Bergdahl, restraint was a hard pill to swallow.

“In a political environment where every instinct is to hit back harder and bigger and more publicly, sometimes restraint is the right call, and that is baked into our Green Beret training,” he said.

Waltz served over 25 years in the Army. He is a retired colonel in the National Guard who has been awarded four Bronze Stars, two with valor.

While “lessons learned” books from ex-military and business leaders are a dime a dozen, Waltz succeeds by using gripping stories from the battlefield to prescribe realistic lessons in a way that sticks with the reader.

Take the chapter on loyalty. Of course, he focuses on Bergdahl. Loyalty demanded that every American in Afghanistan had to look for the soldier who walked away from his base and into the arms of the Taliban.

He felt Bergdahl should be forgotten and that U.S. troops should not be required to risk their lives to save him. Waltz felt that way even more when former President Barack Obama took a victory lap after Bergdahl was rescued, making the private out to be a victim.

The lesson he pulled from that debacle was America needs to give up its “culture of victimhood” and that loyalty means “the essential virtue of coming together for a cause.”

The book also hits on the power of “resilience,” “persistence,” “vigilance,” and speaking “truth to power.”

“I wrote this book because I wanted to honor some of those important attributes of the Green Berets,” he concluded. “We have a right, too, to expect these attributes in our national leadership.”

He also wrote it to nudge on the growth of veterans running for public office, something that began after President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago this month.

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“Really, the marker was the withdrawal from Afghanistan,” he said just days before he accompanied GOP running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) on a campaign trip Thursday to one of the nation’s largest Veterans of Foreign Wars halls to urge veterans to vote for former President Donald Trump.

“Veterans started coming out of the woodwork, saying, ‘We can’t sit on the sidelines … we’ve got to get back involved and back engaged,’” he said of the surge in veterans running in 2022. “They came out in numbers. It was great.”