Ignoring John Kerry, who is to me the most blatant about trumping up his war record (Christmas in Cambodia?  Not!), there is a large list of people who have used the exaggeration of service, or whole cloth creation for that matter, to enhance their status, make money or attempt to achieve power.

The Rush comments have brought to light a sickening history of it, and some of them are a surprise to me.  Here is an interesting list:

• When Walter Williams, America’s last living Civil War veteran, died on December 19, 1959, the city of Houston gave him a funeral procession the likes of which the town had never before seen. A week of official mourning was declared, and more than 100,000 people lined the streets to salute the passing of the last link to a war that had torn America apart.

  There was just one problem. Williams had never served in the Civil War. He was a fraud, as writer William Marvel discovered when he began researching a story for Blue & Gray magazine a few years ago. Although Williams had passed himself off as a Confederate soldier for 27 years, records proved he had actually been just five years old when hostilities broke out — too young even to serve as a drummer boy.
  

• Amusingly, the man from whom Williams inherited the “Oldest Living Confederate” title, John Salling, was another phony. In fact, a dismayed Marvel wrote, “Every one of the last dozen recognized Confederates was bogus” — including all three attendees at the last United Confederate Veterans’ reunion, where, one imagines, they shared made-up stories of how they whipped the Yankees at Bull Run, witnessed the burning of Atlanta, and gave Scarlet O’Hara directions to Tara.
  
• For years, James Harris Reed entertained his nursing home pals with memories of his days as a flying ace, shooting down 13 German planes and battling the legendary Red Baron. Following his 1995 death, investigation revealed that Reed had been an 11-year-old school boy at the end of the Great War. (The Navy’s only WWI ace, with five kills, was Lt.(j.g.) David Ingalls.)