GOP Congressman Cory Mills' Incredible Saga of Hunting Terrorists and Fighting America's Enemies Toe-to-Toe in the World's Most Hellish War Zones Launched His Political Career. But Is It True?

Part II: The charge of Stolen Valor.

Congressman Cory Mill has always been a straight shooter so he wasted no time in addressing the questions raised by his critics with maximum transparency. Here’s the cover page of a brochure he sent to the local Republican Party where he proved he had nothing to hide by publishing an official Army document as evidence to bolster his case after carefully scrubbing it of information that undermined his oft-repeated account of epic battlefield heroism.

Part I of this story was published on March 11. You can read it here.

Ever since taking office for his first term in the House of Representatives in January of 2023, Republican Congressman Cory Mills of Florida has regularly regaled his political colleagues, Pentagon officials, and journalists with tales of his combat exploits in the US Army, when he deployed overseas for more than a decade to defend America’s “shores and freedoms” in war zones on three continents. The core of Mills’ account, which he’s chronicled at his official House website, on the campaign trail, at events on Capitol Hill, and to journalists, is that he deployed to Iraq during the US-led invasion of March 2003 and won a Bronze Star for his role in combat operations as an infantryman and reconnaissance scout.

During the post-war occupation, Mills took part in “high-threat operations” in Fallujah and other hot spots. In 2006, he was “blown up twice” in roadside bombings in Baghdad that caused multiple casualties, but fortunately “was able to stabilize himself prior to evacuation.”

In addition to Iraq, where he spent seven years, Mills deployed to hellholes like Afghanistan for more than three years – or sometimes two, depending on which day of the week he’s telling the story – and Kosovo, where he was decorated once again for battlefield valor. Mills has also filed war stories with datelines from Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine, where Mills said mysteriously when C-SPAN interviewed him for a profile piece in January of 2023, the month he was inaugurated to Congress, he’d traveled “to the front lines.”

Six months later, Congressman Mills cited his Army service, when he also gained experience” in counterinsurgency operations, cordon and search missions, and “direct action” and hunting high-value targets, at a hearing on Capitol Hill. “One of the reasons I ran for Congress, is I got tired of people who sit here trying to make decisions that impact us as war fighters on the ground but, yet, they have no accountability, no understanding, and no actual on the ground experience themselves,” he stated.

More recently, a growing group of retired military officers and veterans, including many who worked alongside Mills overseas, have asked pointed questions about just how much actual on the ground combat experience the congressman has himself. The skeptics have expressed doubts about whether he ever set foot in most of the countries he claims he deployed to during his Army career, and accuse him of fabricating his claims of combat heroism and narrowly escaping death on the battlefield.

Army veteran Scott Kempkens was with Mills during one of the congressman’s two supposed near-death experiences in the Baghdad attacks, and suffered serious injuries that day, but said the congressman didn’t suffer a scratch. “Cory’s a lying sack of shit and conman who could sell ice cubes at the North Pole,” Kempkens told me. “If he was wounded at any time when he was in Iraq, it happened when he cut himself shaving.”

Retired Recon Marine Will Kern, who met Mills in Iraq during the same period, offered a similar assessment of the future congressman, who he recalled making extravagant boasts about having first-class warrior skills that were impossible to reconcile with his awkward military lingo that “sounded like lines from movies,” and subpar performance in training. ”Cory is a POS,” Kern said. “He lied about everything.”

Retired US Army Sergeant Bobby Oller, a disabled combat veteran and another of the congressman’s critics, obtained a pile of documents and data that’s posted at CoryMillsWatch.com. The website accuses Mills of “Stolen Valor,” the term used to describe impostors who make false claims, orally or in writing, about their military service, achievements, and medals, which is considered to be particularly immoral if the guilty party’s motive was financial gain.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve read through the evidence posted at CoryMillsWatch.com and a lot of other material provided by Oller and Jade Murray, who created and conducts research for the website, provided me, including witness statements from soldiers who deployed with Mills, and interviewed Kempkens, Kern, and other sources. I also read through documents made public by the congressman – whose office hasn’t responded to requests for comment, but I’ll update this story if I hear from him – that he says debunk the allegations, and spent countless hours more conducting independent research.

I didn’t confirm all of the charges that have been made against Mills, and debunked one significant allegation he hasn’t been able to do himself. I believed the allegation was probably true when I wrote Part I and will correct that in Part III, where it has more relevance. The disproven accusation doesn’t undermine the thrust of the case against Mills, though, nor do the documents he’s presented that he claims exonerate him. Indeed, most of them are utterly farcical, of extremely dubious provenance, or tainted, in one case by redactions the congressman made for obvious reasons, that they strengthen the case against him rather than weaken it.

In lieu of Mills providing hard evidence, which he’s had plenty of time to do already, it seems abundantly evident the congressman egregiously and deliberately misrepresented his military service. In doing so, Mills, by all appearance, taffy-stretched the truth far beyond the breaking point long ago, but continues to berate his critics for indecency as he stands in public naked with his dick in his hand.

Very loosely based on the Army career of Cory Mills, emphasis on the word “loosely.”

As Mills tells the story, his fraught-filled years in Iraq began when he deployed to the country with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division during the runup to the 2003 invasion, or more precisely to neighboring Kuwait, where he decamped at a US military base before crossing the border when fighting commenced. A rapid reaction force that conducts forcible entry parachute assaults and “leapfrogs enemy lines” to clear the way for advancing ground forces, the 82nd Airborne is headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

When he went into Iraq on combat missions, Mills was attached to Combined Joint Task Force 20, a Tier-1 organization that planned and directed top-priority black ops in Iraq by assembling “hunter-killer” teams on an ad hoc basis from a handful of ultra-elite special forces units and the CIA’s paramilitary division. A similarly named sister outfit was established to operate in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and organized the raid ten years later that killed Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Mills’ post-invasion combat roles in Iraq included training Kurdish forces in northern Iraq in counterterrorism tactics, and, as the congressman said during an interview with CNN last July, he’d also “run a counter-sniper team” that protected VIP visitors from the US. As an example, he told the network, which invited him on to share his expert insights after a rooftop gunman tried to assassinate President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Mills’ said during the Obama years his crack team had been called on to protect then-Vice President Joe Biden during an official visit to Erbil to meet Kurdistan Regional Government President Masoud Barzani.

Mills hasn’t said nearly as much about his time in war-torn Afghanistan, but in the same interview he said his counter-sniper team had operated there as well. When First Lady Laura Bush visited Kabul to inaugurate the country’s first women’s university, he’d been entrusted with ensuring her safety, the congressman disclosed.

Mills saw combat in Kosovo even before he’d been called on to protect America’s freedoms by helping take out the Taliban and Saddam in the two major military operations during the Global War on Terror. The Army dispatched the congressman there during the bloody war that erupted in the late-1990s between a separatist militia and troops from the former Yugoslavia, which quickly ended in favor of the pro-Kosovo independence forces NATO and US troops intervened on their side by land, sea, and air. As in Iraq, Mills was decorated for his services, winning the Kosovo Campaign Medal for “exemplary military conduct.”

Perhaps owing to his humble, modest nature, Congressman Mills has been notably less voluble about his activities when he donned his battlefield fatigues to fight in the other trio of hardship posts he deployed to during his Army career: Pakistan, though he hasn’t breathed a single word about what he was up to there; Somalia, where he said little more than that he operated in the wilds of the Puntland autonomous region, and Ukraine, where he made his excursion to the “front lines.”

Despite all his selfless sacrifices after enlisting in the Army – a decision driven by the “sense of duty and gratitude” the congressman felt even as a wee lad walking the halls of high school in the small town of Eagle Lake, Florida, from whence he departed almost immediately upon completing his studies, as he emphasizes in his House biography – Mills’ foes have demanded proof that substantiates his war stories. To refute the naysayers’ baseless allegations, he’s come forward with a wide assortment of evidence, including a packet of defense material contained in “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory MIlls,” which he sent to the local Republican Party in Volusia County last June.

Well, well, well, this ought to shut up the naysayers once and for all. Hold on, why did Congressman Mills redact key information from this copy of an Army award before making it public as part of his defense case?

“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to defend these defamatory lies,” Mills wrote weirdly, yet not entirely inaccurately, in the brochure. He provided three exhibits to clearly demonstrate he’d been “engaged in active ground combat and debunk the lies that Congressman Cory Mills was never deployed and never saw combat.”

The first was a Certificate of Appreciation he received from US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad in recognition of Mills’ “prompt and brave actions” during the Baghdad bombings. The second was his medal for fighting in Kosovo. The third was a copy of a badge from the Army for taking part in “active ground combat.”

Unfortunately, the exhibits raised far more questions than they answered, if anyone had been paying attention anyway. The certificate from Khalilzad said the bombings took place in 2006, which as it turned out was three years after his discharge from the Army, when he waved farewell to his fellow warriors in Iraq and headed home to bunker down in the library while pursuing an Associate in Arts degree from the Florida State College in Jacksonville. That further showed he served in the Army for only four years, as he’d enlisted in 1999, and that was another head scratcher because Mills somehow managed to squeeze in ten years of service in Iraq and Afghanistan alone during that period.

The date of his discharge also was hard to square with Exhibit II in the packet, the congressman’s decoration in honor of his combat role in Kosovo, where he claimed he was a member of a “long range reconnaissance and surveillance scout recon team.” The mystery in this case was that the Kosovo War ended in June of 1999, a month before Mills started basic training. Furthermore, upon closer examination, the award wasn’t a Kosovo Campaign Medal for ground combat, but a medal for his service two years later during the post-war NATO-led peacekeeping mission.

Exhibit III, the combat badge, was equally problematic. Though Mills wanted to do everything possible to end the baseless slander campaign against him, the copy of the badge he included in his defense brochure was heavily redacted. Comparing it to an unredacted image shows there was nothing confidential about the sections he cleansed, however, for one reason or another Mills left in the reason he received the badge – his engagement “in active ground combat” – but scrubbed the line that identified how long his engagement lasted.

Never mind that, though. Mills dredged up all sorts of other exculpatory evidence he provided to shut down his critics, including several photos that showed him in an Army uniform during his deployment in Iraq. There wasn’t any way to know he was actually in Iraq when the photos were snapped or when they were taken, because in his zeal to be fully transparent Mills cropped most of the photos so they only showed him alone, not any of the warriors he was with at the time, or he subsequently deleted from his Instagram account, or they were images that he indicated showed him in combat, but were pulled from Wikipedia.

But hey, the guy’s a respected member of congress, let’s just take his word for it.

In any case, Mills had another ace up his sleeve – a Form 638, the document used to nominate service members for military decorations. The one Mills voluntarily forked over to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, was signed by Brigadier General Arnold Gordon-Bray, who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq when Mills said he was there.

The Form 638 presented an impressive list of Mills’ achievements on the battlefield, such as his “exceptional bravery” in combat operations during the invasion and repeatedly exposing “himself to enemy fire” to rush to the aid of wounded coalition forces and civilians” during battles across Iraq. Even more impressive were Mills’ courageous actions at two firefights Gordon-Bray cited in the Form 638.

In one emotionally wrenching scene depicted by Gordon-Bray that took place during a battle in Baghdad, the audience finds Mills “bounding forward under murderous enemy fire” to rush into a building where his platoon sergeant was being held by an Iraqi fighter and throw “himself at the enemy insurgent and subdue him,” thereby saving his comrade’s life. The second scene, another five-hankie tearjerker, involved events that took place on March 31, 2003 at the Battle of Samawah, “the largest sustained urban combat...American paratroopers had been involved in since World War II.” Mills one again again paid no heed to the barrage of enemy bullets that whizzed past him and choose, “at great risk to his own life,” to come to “the aid of two fallen comrades” and save both of their lives by assisting “in their evacuation back to US forces.”

Game, set, match to Congressman Cory Mills, right? Well, it sure looked that way, but a few niggling issues soon emerged. For example, the Form 638 Gordon-Bray signed wasn’t in use until almost two decades after the events described in it had occurred. Also, why wouldn’t Mills or the general, who’d retired in 2012, say when the document was created and signed when they gave it to the News-Journal last year?

Relatedly, but in a question that applies to Mills’ general honesty and forthrightness in addressing the allegations of Stolen Valor, why has the congressman refused to this day to release his Army records, which would make it very simple to know if he’s telling the truth or not?

Coming in Part III: Game, Set, Match.