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Combat tales, video have Marines smelling faker
Gina Cavallaro staff writer (14Apr)
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2012/04/marine-combat-tales-video-marines-smelling-faker-041412w/
(Video link below)
His own brother calls him a fraud. The Marine Corps has no record of him. His war stories don’t add up, and his “war photos” are blurry images of partially hidden faces.
Yet a man from Harrisburg, Pa., with several aliases ended up posing in a video documentary as a Marine first sergeant with harrowing stories of combat, losing friends in battle and the pain of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The eight-minute video — “Soldier On: a conversation with 1st Sgt. Brian Camacho USMC” — was produced in Toronto for MilitaryMinds.ca, an online forum where combat vets can share their stories in the hopes others will break their silence on the burden of PTSD
Several attempts to reach Camacho, whose real name is Brian Khan, were unsuccessful. Emails went unreturned and phone numbers were no longer in service.
Khan reached out to MilitaryMinds in mid-February to the site and found a sympathetic ear in its founder, Cpl. Chris Dupee, an infantryman with the 3rd Royal Canadian Regiment and a veteran of combat in Afghanistan who has been diagnosed with PTSD.
After exchanging messages and calls with Khan, Dupee asked him if he’d travel to Toronto and tell his story on camera.
Dupee raised $1,400 in four hours with a call for donations on his Military Minds Facebook page. Another $300 was raised later.
In Toronto a week later, Dupee and the first sergeant bonded, partied and built a mutual trust. It was all captured on video.
But even as he bonded with the Marine, Dupee said, he had doubts.
“A couple of things did not add up, but we pursued it anyway. He was going to kill himself, and our knowledge of the U.S. military was limited,” Dupee said.
In one instance, Khan told a story of having left the wire for a patrol with a 10-man team and returning with only two. The next time he told it, four had returned.
“I can count every friend I lost over there; it just didn’t sound right,” Dupee said.
Interspersed with footage of real combat, Khan is seen in a red, letterman-style satin jacket bedecked with patches, pins, ribbons and scrolls. In other scenes, he wears a woodland MARPAT uniform with jump wings and a Marine Corps Combatant Diver insignia above the service tape.
“I was attached to a recon unit. Did a lot of special ops, a lot of snatch and grab, a lot of patrols, a lot of security force,” he says as the video opens.
Referring to his purported PTSD, he adds: “This is the hardest fight I’ve ever been in — this is every day. Right now, I would prefer to go in a firefight.”
And smaller details were wrong. For example, Khan uses the Army “hooah” instead of the Marines’ distinctive “oorah” in the video trailer.
But when video director Paulo Rubio asks: “Did you lose any friends?” and Khan replies “Too many to count,” it was, for Rubio, a signal that the first sergeant might be lying.
“I would have [their names] tattooed on my body; I would commemorate every one,” Rubio said as he recalled his reaction to Khan’s vague statement. “Marines know who they’ve lost.”
Days after the video was posted on March 25, vigilant Marines began to call foul, including leaders within F’n Boot, a rough-edged watchdog group of Marines who ruthlessly go after fakers.
“Any Marine knows, just taking one look at that [expletive] video, he’s not a first sergeant,” said an active-duty staff sergeant who contacted Marine Corps Times after he found the video on YouTube. “I don’t know if he’s ever been in, but I can’t find him anywhere.”
And he won’t, because according to Brian Khan’s brother, Ian Khan, the 45-year-old has never served in the military.
“My brother’s a fraud. He’s obsessed with the Marine Corps but he never went in,” Ian Khan said in a phone interview.
It became clear that Camacho was really Brian Khan after a cursory search for him and his likeness online. Though his Facebook page quickly vanished after the fraud was uncovered, videos of him and his kids at a cellphone store in Harrisburg, and his true last name, were an easy match with his kids’ Facebook pages and those of other family members.
At a loss to explain his brother’s eagle, globe and anchor tattoo, Ian Khan said, “It’s all a game to him. He really believes that he went to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Brian, he said, has also masqueraded as a Marine colonel.
No record of service for Brian Khan or Brian Camacho was found in an inquiry with Manpower and Reserve Affairs.
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Link to video: http://sofrep.com/4957/recon-marine-or-stolen-valor/
Photo:
Canadian Cpl. Chris Dupee with “1st Sgt. Brian Camacho,” an alleged Marine faker whose real name is Brian Khan.
