my ex is continuing his stolen valour charade

A few years ago I had a relationship with a guy who pretended to be a vietnam vet who had served with American special forces despite being Canadian. I fell for it hook line and sinker and all his made up stories of valour.

Eventually I realized it was all fake and found a historical photo archive of pictures he had taken back in Canada during the vietnam war. He was actually newspaper photographer and a lot of his photos from that time were preserved with date, name and location.

The man would lie about what he had for breakfast. He pretended to have ptsd from his fake war experiences in vietnam including flashbacks.

Recently I ran across a video on facebook for a trauma group where they celebrate their veteran member "Roger" on Veteran's day. He's convinced all these other people now that he served, when I know he never did.

I was sorely tempted to post a reply but rarely post anything on facebook and it isn't a healthy look to still be thinking about someone you last saw almost 4 years ago.

Why would someone invent a whole fake history?

My dad is of the age that he couldve gone to vietnam. Last week he and my sister went to the war memorial as tourists. He was in a wheelchair because hes in bad shap from his alcoholism. So hes sitting next to this other guy in a wheel chair and the guy turns to my dad and asks when he was there. My dad goes "Oh! Seventy!" And then told a few more lies. Its not that hes that senile- hes in bad shape for sure but I think he deliberately lied. Why? I dont know but I thought you could appreciate the story. Btw my dad WAS in the airforce in '70.

You should out him, real vets take a dim view of pretenders

Moose72, thanks for sharing your experience. Sorry to hear your Dad is an alcoholic. So is mine.

Nammu of course you are right that real vets take a dim view of fakes, but I am not going to reintroduce myself into his life and any problems that might come with that. It is just amazing that he is so persistent he has convinced a veteran's charity and a trauma support group and charity that he is a vietnam vet with 'severe ptsd'. I wasn't the first nor the last that he scammed.

I finally came to the conclusion he either had some kind of personality disorder or was just a psychopath.

Yes and perhaps people who lie about things like this also don't feel good about who they really are and what they have accomplished or overcome?

He wants sympathy/attention he hasn't earned (I hope he is not being rewarded financially for this scam) -- something for nothing -- deep down he MUST know it's not right. If what he is doing keeps him up at night--that would be justice. If he doesn't have any regrets about it then that would be extremely scary (psychpathic/scary).

It would be justice to out him but you never knpw how a person like that might react. I would be cautious too.

I am sorry you've had to deal with this at all!

People who are persistent can, somehow, pull this stuff off. A guy married into my family. He had this big story about being in the Army, being trained to go to Germany to help a spy get out, etc. He even claimed to be a character in the movie made about this. (The movie is real.)

Well, I have never believed the story. Why? He was in the military, state-side only, for 3 years. In his story, he claims to speak German fluently. When I had asked him to speak in German, he could not do so. Not a word! And... the guy was a nervous wreck all of the time (no ptsd). He is far too anxious to send in to rescue a spy! ROFL!

Well, he persisted and 99% of people bought the story. When he'd passed on, he had written his own obituary, detailing how he was trained to go get a spy out of Germany and he referenced the real names of those involved. Now his obituary is all over the place and, for some, he goes down in history as quite a hero. NOT!

Anyone having served in the military knows his stories are BS. Yet, he could gain the confidence of many not knowing much about the military.

His real problem? He was quite a storyteller... and he'd wanted to feel like he was somebody he'd felt was important. His self-esteem was poor and this helped him to boost it. (He went into the military because he was drafted and was NOT a dedicated soldier/hero. He had asked his parents to write letters to get him an honorable discharge and was in the military only three years, was a Private.)

I cannot believe how many people bought that whole story! Even his children -- in their 50's-- watch the movie and think one of the characters is portraying their dad. So not true! His stories never add up.

There are plenty of these types out and about, unfortunately.

I agree you will be better off to just walk away.

Please take care!

WC

^^^ Yes! ^^^

Yikes. Did he put on a show about other things too, or just the Vietnam veteran status?

Yes he lied about big things and small, but the most elaborate was when he would have 'flashbacks' to scenes in Vietnam where he was never there but taking photographs for the local newspaper...

He told me he was on the 'third to last' helicopter out of Saigon. He operated behind enemy lines with macv-sog special forces. He was a sniper.

He would lie about what we did together the day before too.

Nowinners, I don't recall him ever expressing remorse. I think he enjoys pulling the wool over people's eyes or he's been doing this for so long that he isn't distinguishing truth from fiction. Truth is whatever he wanted it to be.

Unfortunately they are not as rare as I thought when I came around to slowly realizing all his stories were made up. He also claimed to have served with Israeli special forces and pushed an 'ex-Nazi' out of an airplane to his death over Mexico.

I don't know if my ex suffers from self-esteem issues or if he is just a genuine con artist for whom truth is whatever is convenient for him at the moment.

That's clever in a way to tie your memory to characters in a movie and the plot behind it.

I don't think all people who steal valour are psychopaths or have a personality disorder but I would bet a fair percentage do.

One of the favourite phrases of my ex was 'Trust has to be earned."

Finding these videos of him talking about his 'ptsd' and so on has brought back a lot of the confusion I had. It was devastating to realize that he was lying about who he was so then i realized that the whole relationship was fake too.

I was quite ill at the time I fell for him and the experience has put me off of the idea of getting into another relationship perhaps for good because I really lost trust in my own judgement.

In a way it is kind of a relief to see all these other people fall for his con too.

I am very sorry this happened to you.
Had to be devastating!

WC

There were lots of warning signs telling me to run away, but I continued seeing him and got sucked into a giant whirlpool that ended when our relationship ended with me hospitalized in 2015.

He left strange files on my laptop and I eventually incorporated him into deep paranoid delusions that ended with my hospitalization last year. I am doing pretty well not to be hospitalized I think.

One of the things he does is try to drive people crazy. He could be unbelievably cruel when he was in discarding mode. I never really settled on how much I thought it was part of narcissism like NPD or how much psychopathy. He often talked of killing people with his bare hands. We would sit at the dinner table and he would tell me story after story of espionage and killing and the Vietnam War.

Now I see that he's actually proficient at drawing people into his lies... it wasn't just me that fell for it. I have often thought of him as some kind of a monster rather than a human being.