In an on-the-record interview last month, in which one other person plus a digital recorder were present, Brandon Griffith described for this reporter the details of his service in the United States Navy. During the course of the 65-minute interview, the polite, 39-year-old Burlington native paid special attention to a day in September of 2016 when he claimed to have been shot in the abdomen by a Taliban sniper on a road outside Kabul, Afghanistan.
Griffith said he was employed as a chief warrant officer in the Navys Explosive Ordnance Disposal division at the time, after having worked his way up from an E1 the lowest rank in the Navy to an E9. His bomb dog, Phoenix, a Rottweiler-Lab mix, was by his side throughout the firefight.
During our interview, Griffith lifted his shirt and pointed to a scar just above his waist on his right side, which he claimed marked the bullets entry. He pointed to a second scar, a short vertical line running down the center of his abdomen, which he said was the legacy of the emergency surgery he underwent in a German hospital following the attack.
In the days immediately following the interview, I asked Griffith through text message to send me as many photos depicting his years in the Navy as possible, focusing primarily on photographs related to his combat tours, his dog, and his weeks of recovery. He said they would be difficult to locate, but that he would try.
On Friday morning, only hours before the article went to press, I texted Griffith again, asking for pictures. He responded with three photos: the first showed him as a younger man, seated at a table, in what appeared to be a service uniform. The second showed Griffith in civilian clothes, seated on a couch, next to a large black dog he claimed was Phoenix. The final photo was of two men in a desert landscape kneeling or sitting beside what appears to be an explosive device. The men’s faces are partially obscured by their hats and by shadow, and so I texted Griffith again to ask which of the two men was him. He wrote back: the one on the left.
Of the three photos Griffith sent, the only picture of sufficient resolution to print was this final photograph, the one showing the two men.
That picture appeared on page A4 of Saturday, September 29th’s newspaper. That picture was a hoax.
Griffith lifted the image from the internet and passed it off as his own. The man on the left is not Griffith. The photograph is of U.S. Navy Lt. Mike Runkle. Griffith does not appear in the image.
Thanks to a small crowdsourcing push that sprang up in the wake of the article on Griffith a push which raised questions about other elements of Griffiths tale, too we were moved to investigate the credibility of each of his other claims.
THERE IS, at this point, sufficient evidence to doubt the veracity of nearly all of Griffiths claims, and to conclude, on the basis of countermanding research, that the military story laid out by Griffith is, by its truest name, a parade of lies.
The occasion for the original, Sept. 29 article was a story wed been told about Mr. Griffiths involvement in a serious farm accident, for which we know that he received medical attention. This, too, appears to be a fabrication, at least in many of the details described by Mr. Griffith, who has long since stopped replying to my phone calls and texts.
BY MOST ACCOUNTS Griffith did serve in the U.S. Navy from 1997 to 2001, and has received in recent years, at least according to one close family member, a diagnosis of PTSD. (I was not able to confirm this diagnosis, but was told as much by Mr. Griffiths youngest brother, who called me to rebut the truth of every one of Griffiths other claims.)
The purpose of this article is not to embarrass Mr. Griffith or to invite additional scrutiny into his life. There are deep-seated, psychological reasons for chronic, grandiose lying that can only require compassion. And while military imposters certainly dishonor the real-life heroics of honest veterans, it is also the case that, as one active duty Naval master chief I interviewed for this article put it: Theyre the ones that have to look themselves in the mirror every day, not me.
However, it will be necessary in correcting the account set down by Mr. Griffith to touch on certain disagreeable points in his biography moments that contradict the military timeline he described to the Register, and moments that go some way toward establishing his occasional unreliability as a narrator.
The Register recently obtained records from the Burlington Police Department that show interactions with Griffith on dates that are at variance with the deployment calendar he described in the Sept. 29 article. These reports also hint at a different provenance concerning the scars on his abdomen.
For instance, on the afternoon of July 22, 2016, police were dispatched to Griffiths home, where they found Griffith bent over in his shed with five or six homemade wire-hanger barbs embedded in his abdomen. Each bent barb was cut to a length of between four and six inches, and sharpened. The barbs were connected to a bungee cord, which Griffith claimed was part of a booby trap that someone had apparently planted against him in the dark hollow of his shed.
Griffith was transported by ambulance to the emergency room at Coffey County Hospital, where he was treated by the attending ER doctor, who then ordered Griffith transferred by air to Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka, where he was to undergo exploratory surgery on his abdomen.
