Look, if there is one thing I can’t hardly tolerate is to see one veteran pit his/her service against another’s. I have had in-depth conversations with veterans who have refused to sign up for their VA benefits because they didn’t serve in a war zone. I’ve had discussions with men and women who came home from those war zones and did not feel deserving of even having a life. I’ve known veterans who drank or drugged away their own PTSD because of the sense of unworthiness. Just yesterday at the gym a man told me he was a Vietnam veteran. He had no idea who I was or what my background with that war is. I listened as he told me his story of his struggle with PTSD and how it bothered him to come home from Vietnam while so many of his hooch mates did not. I’ve heard this same story hundreds of times, and each time I count it an honor. I always welcome them home and tell them how glad I am that they survived.

And I mean that. I am happy for each one that survived the battlefield.

I am also glad for those protestors who took to the streets and demanded an end to the war that took my father’s life.

I have a deep and abiding respect for our veterans, men and women, whether they served stateside, overseas, or on the battlefield.

So it grieves me to no end to hear JD Vance trash talk Tim Walz, to call into question his years of service, to suggest that Walz’s years of service did not matter because he served with the National Guard and was not on the front line getting shot at.

Walz retired a Command Sgt. Major. (My dad was a Staff Sgt. in the Army). Vance and the MAGA crowd are condemning Walz for retiring from the NG months before his unit deployed for Iraq. The implication being that Walz failed his unit and was too cowardly to go and serve on a battlefield. This from a party whose felon candidate dodged the draft five different times.

Vance was a pencil pusher during his six months of duty in Iraq. He worked in the Public Affairs office of the 2nd Marine Aircraft wing, so he was hardly doing the kind of job my dad did (Chief of Smoke, 25th ID, 2/9th Artillery, literally on the front lines).

I am loathe to compare anyone’s service, as I said, but I will not be silent and watch JD Vance rail against a man who is literally his superior in most every way, but especially in regards to military service. Vance retired after four years of service as a Corporal. Walz after 24 years as a Sgt. Major.

Vance has said of his own service that he was “lucky to escape any real fighting.” (Because Public Affairs people are the ones writing about the fight, not carrying it out.)

I know a little something about Stolen Valor. I’ve met a handful of men over the years who claimed to have been veterans who never served, men who claimed to have served in a war they never served in, men desperate for attention. Men like Donald Trump who claimed that escaping a sexually transmitted disease was his own personal Vietnam and that he deserved the Congressional Medal of Honor given the number of women he’d been intimate with.

I am, as you might imagine, deeply hurt whenever I encounter such people. It is part of the basis of my sheer outright disdain for Trump.

Today Vance accused Walz of Stolen Valor: “What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage. Do not pretend to be something that you’re not,” Vance said.

According to Rolling Stone, Vance’s comment was prompted by Walz’s stance on banning military-style weapons: “Vance also accused Walz of feigning a record in active combat: “[Walz] said — and he was making a point about gun control — he said, ‘we shouldn’t allow weapons that I used in war, to be on America’s streets.’ Well, I wonder, Tim Walz, when where you ever in war?”

It’s all a purposeful mischaracterization on Vance’s behalf: “The senator actually misquoted Walz in his screed. In the clip Vance was referencing, Walz says that he “carried” weapons in war, not “used.” Given that Operation Enduring Freedom was a part of the post-9/11 War on Terror, and that Walz was deployed to Italy under it — and likely had a service weapon — the claim that he is engaging in “stolen valor” holds little water.”

Sadly, I’ve encountered this same sort behavior before. I was a presenter at a Vietnam Symposium at Texas Tech years ago when the Swift Boat veterans targeted Senator John Kerry and called into question his service and his Purple Heart.

I had the distinct honor of meeting Senator Max Cleland, who lost three of his limbs in Vietnam, shortly before he was challenged by Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.

Saxby, who I also happened to meet at a dinner gathering in Georgia, used images of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein next to pictures of Cleland in commercials in one of the most disgusting campaigns in modern political history. Saxby, like Trump, dodged the draft a couple of different times due to what he claimed was an old football injury.

There are patterns to these sorts of attacks Vance and his creepy friends carry out.

Each of these veterans – Kerry, Cleland and Walz – were targeted for their honorable service, sometimes by other veterans, sometimes by draft-dodgers, but in each case by members of the Republican Party for whom honor means nothing. As the very Honorable Senator John McCain, himself a war veteran, a POW, and the subject of such attacks from Trump noted about Saxby’s conduct: “It’s worse than despicable. It’s reprehensible.”

In East Tennessee where my Appalachian parents are buried, people have a term for the behavior JD Vance displayed: “That fella’s plumb sorry.“

Vote Blue.

Karen Spears Zacharias is a Gold Star daughter and author of the memoir After the Flag has been Folded (Wm. Morrow).