JD Vance Criticized Tim Walz’s Retirement. But There’s Something He Doesn’t Understand.

Soon after I started my National Guard career, a mentor told me I needed to learn to juggle.

Every part-time service member answers to three masters: their family, their civilian career and their military career. Saying “yes” too often is a surefire road to ruin in one or more of those three domains. One — or two, if you’re lucky — must always take precedence.

Tim Walz knows the act well.

Recently, GOP vice-presidential candidate and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) attacked the Democratic VP candidate over the timing of his retirement from the Minnesota National Guard in May 2005. Vance resurfaced the claim that the future Minnesota governor, then the top enlisted man in the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery Regiment, abandoned his soldiers by retiring 10 months before the unit deployed to Iraq. He also criticized Walz for saying he’d retired as a command sergeant major. Walz was a command sergeant major, but he retired at the lower rank of master sergeant because he didn’t complete a lengthy correspondence course required to keep his provisional promotion. The Harris campaign recently updated his online biography, which previously stated he retired at a higher rank. His initial discharge form indicated command sergeant major rank, but officials issued a corrected version in fall of 2005.

Vance’s own military service gave the attack legs. He served for four years in the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent. He entered active duty shortly after his 19th birthday in 2003, enlisting as a young man with few prospects and even fewer attachments. He deployed to Iraq for six months but did not see combat.

Few can grasp the choice that Walz faced — including Vance, whose life revolved around the Corps during his enlistment.

But I do. I have missed birthdays, anniversaries and career opportunities. I have also gained things that words can’t capture by serving my country during its times of greatest need. Yet for every ball I keep in the air, another hits the ground. I was laid off from my reporting job in July while on military leave.

I see the different variables in Walz’s calculus: family and medical issues, the desire to keep serving, the overlapping moral obligations to self and soldiers. I see someone who made a difficult decision that ultimately benefited not just him, but his unit, too.

And in some ways, I see myself.

In March 2005, high school teacher and then-Command Sgt. Maj. Tim Walz was one month into his bid for Congress. He was a 24-year veteran of the Guard, completing four years beyond the 20 required for retirement. Walz and his unit were less than a year past a deployment to Italy, where they helped with base security.

But that month, news came from state headquarters at Camp Ripley: The 1st Battalion of the 125th Field Artillery Regiment could deploy within the next two years. Walz had become the unit’s top enlisted soldier — a role carrying a near-spiritual obligation to ensure troop welfare — in late 2004 and started arduous correspondence courses in order to seal his permanent promotion to sergeant major. He faced the prospect of leading them into war.

I cannot definitively say when Walz requested retirement (a routine process that sometimes requires a maddening amount of lead time — I’ve seen packets take several months to clear state HQ). Nor can I definitively say when he first knew for certain that his men were bound for Iraq; an archived March 2005 release from Walz’s campaign indicated the matter was uncertain. Former colleagues claimed in recent TV interviews that Walz “knew,” if not officially, in late 2004. A National Guard press release said the 1st Brigade of the 34th Infantry Division (1-125 FA’s parent unit) received official deployment alert orders in July 2005.

But in May 2005, Tim Walz retired from the Guard.

Like almost all other members of the National Guard who accrue 20+ years in uniform, he was able to voluntarily leave. During that era, troops would have had a short window between the time deployment rumors started circulating and when they would have been prevented from leaving because of what’s known as a “stop loss” policy, which would involuntarily extend a service member’s contract through the end of a projected deployment.

The public record indicates that Walz wrestled with that spring’s decision.

In a March 20, 2005 campaign press release , Walz projected optimism about his ability to do it all in the months and years ahead. He stated that he was prepared to deploy (if the final order arrived) and simultaneously run for Congress under a possible policy exception from Pentagon officials that would permit him to conduct partisan political activity while on active duty orders.

“As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq,” Walz said.

But fellow soldiers report that Walz felt torn over where he could make the greatest impact for his men: Could he do more as a combat leader or as a lawmaker?

“His feeling was, where can I do best for my soldiers?” one former colleague told The Daily Beast . “He thought he could do more in Congress than he could do if he stayed with the unit.”

But Walz’s choice was more complicated than combat vs. Congress.

In fact, if the National Guard had its way in 2002, Walz would have been forced into early retirement.

That year, the future governor was hauled before a medical retention board due to his hearing loss. Such panels determine whether a soldier is medically fit to continue service; Walz was retirement-eligible and could have bowed out with a pension. But instead he successfully argued he was medically fit to stay in the National Guard.

The impacts of his bilateral hearing loss and tinnitus only mounted, though. Walz underwent a surgery in 2005 that replaced his damaged ear bones with synthetic ones, though it’s unclear whether the surgery occurred before or after his retirement. Nonetheless, he was having health issues when deployment rumors arose.

Beyond the military’s duties and his civilian career ambitions, Walz faced significant family demands when he hung up his boots. He and his wife Gwen struggled to conceive children naturally, so they spent seven grueling years pursuing in vitro fertilization , or IVF.

Their efforts paid off in 2001, when their daughter Hope was born. In 2005, Gwen continued the emotionally difficult treatment — and faced the prospect of doing so with her husband at war. (The couple’s son, Gus, was born in 2006.)

But perhaps most salient to Walz, his troops and his fellow leaders was concern over whether he could continue leading soldiers while running for Congress on a platform that openly questioned the war in which they were to fight. The military requires that members abstain from partisan political activity while on active duty, though exceptions to policy sometimes occur.

In a 2009 oral history interview for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project , Walz said he’d worried about violating laws and regulations preventing soldiers (and other federal government employees) from participating in certain types of partisan political activity. He said he tried to hide his political views while in uniform because the military workplace “wasn’t the place to be [political].”

Regardless of how long or how well Walz hid his politics, the schoolteacher turned Democratic-Labor-Farmer congressional candidate let the cat out of the bag when he entered the race in February 2005. I can’t speak to how Walz felt when he walked into his unit headquarters at the New Ulm armory, but I vividly remember the anxiety I felt driving through the mountains to my monthly drill weekend during my reporting partnership with The Texas Tribune investigating the Texas National Guard’s failures at the border .

And that’s where I begin to wonder whether Walz’s choice was really his to make after the political die was cast.

Would a battalion commander prepping for a potential combat deployment want a command sergeant major who was seeking political office and denouncing the war? Would the soldiers on the line question the motivations of a leader who actively, publicly and diametrically opposed the administration exercising lawful civilian control over their unit? How would the men with stars on their collars feel about the liberal political upstart from southern Minnesota?

Regardless of when he asked to retire (or when he personally learned the deployment was confirmed), Walz left the unit with enough time for another man, retired Command Sgt. Maj. Thomas Behrends, to take the battalion’s reins for 10 months before going overseas. In the years since the grueling 22-month deployment, where the unit was involuntarily extended as part of the Iraq troop “surge,” Behrends has spoken out repeatedly against Walz.

He epitomizes the feelings of those who believe the now-VP candidate’s duty to his soldiers was paramount, other factors be damned. Behrends has characterized Walz as a “coward” and a “traitor” during media interviews.

After more than six years of juggling, I still get frustrated. Often it feels like there are too many balls in the air to track. It’s only gotten harder as I’ve progressed in my respective careers. Losing my job knocked me off-balance, too.

For those of us predisposed to service, the idea of walking away with more left to give is unnerving. But those of us familiar with the realities of part-time soldiering see it happen every day; we lose good men and women who are ready for their act to end.

I fear that I won’t recognize when it’s my turn to stop juggling someday. Will there ever be a right moment?

Walz’s decision makes one thing clear: Sometimes leaving means letting a ball drop — and living with the consequences.

Winkie's views are his alone and bear no relation to the official policy or position of the National Guard or the Department of Defense.