A Republican candidate for U.S. Senate is facing new questions about his service as a Navy SEAL
Tim Sheehy has made his service with the elite fighting force in Iraq a centerpiece of his Senate campaign in Montana in a race that could decide the majority, but the Washington Post has found some inconsistencies in his account of his time as a SEAL.
"Most notably, Sheehy, who now owns an aerial firefighting business, has told voters that he has a bullet in his arm from combat in Afghanistan," the Post reported. "But he told a National Park Service ranger in 2015 that he had accidentally shot himself when his Colt .45 revolver fell and discharged in Montana’s Glacier National Park, according to a record of the episode filed in court.
"When asked about that account last week, Sheehy told The Washington Post that he had lied to the ranger to protect himself and his former platoonmates from scrutiny over an old bullet wound that he said he had suffered in Afghanistan in 2012."
Sheehy responded to a new set of questions from the newspaper by posting them on social media and warning supporters of a coming “hit piece attacking me for serving my country.”
“Tim Sheehy humbly served our nation with honor as a Navy SEAL," said his campaign spokeswoman Katie Martin. "He has never called himself a hero, but he served alongside plenty of them. His military service is well documented and is a matter of public record.”
The official SEAL ethos states that members "do not advertise the nature of [their] work, nor seek recognition for [their] actions," but that's challenging to abide by when running for Congress, as five former SEALs have successfully done since 2014, when Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) became the first to be elected.
“There’s this conflict inside the SEAL teams between being the quiet professional, which is the professed ideal, and trading on the reputation of the organization for your own personal benefit,” said Dave Madden, a former Navy SEAL who served with Sheehy in Afghanistan but declined to comment specifically on his former comrade.
The 38-year-old Sheehy wrote in his memoir that he was "eager to fight" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but he applied to and was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy because his parents insisted he finish college, and his former classmates spoke highly of his maturity, work ethic and attention to detail.
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He completed SEAL training in 2009 and was deployed right away to Iraq, where he joined a team that was already deployed, but he spent much of that first tour in an operations center in Baghdad, and Sheehy says he completed several additional deployments in the Middle East and Central Asia and conducted counternarcotics work “deep in the Amazon."
Sheehy also took part in the failed effort in fall 2010 to rescue British aid worker Linda Norgrove, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan but was accidentally killed by a grenade thrown by a U.S. service member.
“One of the most daring hostage rescue missions ever," he said earlier this year at an event promoting his memoir. “I’m up there running ... you know, a task force to find a hostage.”
He was the officer in charge of a small platoon that spent much of 2012 in souther Afghanistan, where a platoon mate says they endured “firefights, IEDs almost daily,” and Sheehy was knocked unconscious by an IED blast in an attack that earned him a Purple Heart, and he earned a Bronze Star that same month after carrying a wounded comrade on his shoulder to a helicopter.
“The guys in war that had been hit had this kind of sick thing where whenever you got hit or shot, you had to do a picture with your thumbs up,” said platoonmate Scott Weaver. “It was like the cool guy picture, right?”
Sheehy apparently broke with that tradition of posing for a photo when he told the Post he was struck by a ricochet bullet that may have come from friendly fire, but he told the newspaper he kept quiet about that wound to protect the fellow SEAL he believes might have been responsible.
"Sheehy said he received no treatment for the wound and feared disclosing it to the park ranger in Montana, three years later, because he was still a reservist at that time and thought such a disclosure could spark a Navy investigation — a possibility that some military experts said was remote," the Post reported.
"Sheehy said he didn’t shoot himself in the park but rather fell and cut his arm, an injury that he worried might have dislodged the bullet. He said he decided to go to the emergency room, where he said he informed hospital staff of the bullet in his arm, and hospital officials said they had to alert law enforcement of all gunshot wounds, leading to the interaction with the park ranger."
His campaign arranged for the Post to interview a former platoon member who recalled Sheehy telling him about being struck by the ricochet bullet and his reluctance to report the wound, but that individual requested anonymity as a military reservist, and the newspaper interviewed other former comrades who understood why he would have kept the incident quiet but did not recall that injury.
Sheehy claimed in his résumé submitted to the Montana legislature in January 2021 that he was “medically separated from active duty due to wounds received in Afghanistan," but in his 2023 memoir wrote that he decided to leave the Navy after a submarine incident in the Pacific left him with decompression sickness that would keep him from serving active duty.
“Sheehy was honorably discharged from the Navy after being declared medically unfit to continue to serve as a Navy SEAL," said his campaign spokeswoman.