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This is one of the most amazing stories to come down the pike in I don’t know how long, published over the weekend in The Washington Post. The short version is that Tim Sheehy, probable Republican nominee for Senate in Montana, is a comical liar and is trying to cover up that lie with a story so preposterous that it’s kind of a joy to run through because it’s so hilariously bad.
Seriously, I’m not overstating the case.
Let’s dig into the details.
Sheehy says on the campaign trail that he has a bullet lodged in his right forearm from back during his service in Afghanistan. “I got thick skin — though it’s not thick enough. I have a bullet stuck in this arm still from Afghanistan,” he says in one video. The service is real. Sheehy served in Afghanistan as a Navy Seal and has the kind of service record that shows real physical bravery. So the bullet story sounds plausible.
But an Afghanistan mountain-pass mudslide of evidence says that part of his story is not true. In fact, Sheehy accidentally shot himself with a Colt .45 revolver when he was on vacation with his family in Glacier National Park in Montana in 2015. That’s a year after he left the Army and three years after he now claims to have taken a bullet in Afghanistan.
Who says? Well, Sheehy. That’s who.
After he was shot, Sheehy went to an emergency room for treatment. The doctors at the facility said they were required by law to report any gunshot injury. This lead them to call a park ranger. Sheehy explained that he dropped the Colt .45 on the ground and it discharged, hitting his right arm just below the elbow. He was issued a citation for the unlawful discharge of a firearm in a national park. Sheehy paid the $525 with a credit card and was able to get his gun returned to him.
Seems clear enough. So what exactly is Sheehy’s explanation for this?
Here’s Sheehy’s version of events.
Sheehy now says he fell while hiking, injuring his forearm in roughly the same place as the three-year-old bullet wound. He went to the emergency room and in the course of treatment explained that there was a bullet lodged near the current injury. He now seems to have claimed on his second go at explaining things to the Post that he told the doctors it was an old injury. The doctors explained that they had to report any gunshot injury to law enforcement.
Here’s where things get squirrelly. According to Sheehy, the doctors said it didn’t matter if the gunshot was fresh or had happened years earlier. They had to report it regardless. This seems very hard to believe. Certainly doctors can distinguish between a fresh gunshot wound and one that happened three years earlier. And Sheehy didn’t specifically tell the Post what the examining physician had been told. Critically, he refused to allow the people who had treated him to speak to the Post. The people who treated him must have known whether it was an old or new injury and whether they would have called in law enforcement over a gunshot wound from three years earlier in a warzone. Sheehy told the Post he’d requested copies of the records but that they hadn’t come yet. Oh well.
Okay, so the doctors call the ranger and the ranger comes to interview Sheehy. At this point it would seem pretty straigthforward that he’d just say look I served in Afghanistan and I was shot when I was there and that’s what the bullet is from. Instead, he says, he made up the story about accidentally shooting himself when the gun fell on the ground.
Now why would he do this? According to Sheehy it was because he was afraid the ranger would report the shooting in Afghanistan to the Navy and that this would trigger a “massive NCIS investigation” that would mean he and his fellow SEALs would get “dragged through the mud over this.” As an example of SEALs who had been “dragged through the mud” he referenced the case of Eddie Gallagher, who had been tried and eventually acquitted of killing a prisoner in 2017. The best Sheehy did at explaining what the issue could be was that he thought the purported gunshot injury may have been the result of a ricochet of a shot fired by one of the soldiers under his command — in other words, friendly fire.
Let’s unpack this. Sheehy’s theory assumes that a park ranger hearing that a veteran had been shot in Afghanistan would report this to the Navy. Why? Good question. Maybe park rangers are way more hard core than I imagine but that seems absurd. And why would the Navy launch an investigation? I don’t know a lot about Navy processes but that seems unlikely. People get shot in combat. The bigger question would be why it wasn’t reported. Sheehy says he didn’t report the injury and presumably didn’t get medical care because he didn’t want to be separated from the troops serving under him. Here, again, I’m pretty far out of my area of knowledge. But I think if you have a bullet lodged in the muscle in your upper forearm you probably need to have that looked at, not because you’re a wuss but because it could end up making you lose some or all of the use of your arm, or even your arm itself if it became infected. Indeed, Sheehy said he only realized he’d been shot after the adrenaline from the mission wore off and he noticed two of his fingers stopped “working very well.”
One more bonus fact. The one thing Sheehy showed the Post was an x-ray of his arm, on the condition they could describe it and show it to doctors but not publish it. The doctors the Post showed it to said it appeared to be a bullet but one of those doctors, a 30-year trauma surgeon named Thomas J. Esposito, said that it appeared to be a bullet from a low-velocity firearm like a handgun and was unlikely to be from a ricochet from an assault weapon because of the smoothness of its edges.
We can also add that experts on military law tell the Post what common sense would suggest that it seems highly unlikely that the bullet in Sheehy’s arm would trigger any investigation at all since he wasn’t accusing anyone of doing anything wrong and neither was anyone else.
One more additional point: other weapons experts told the Post it’s extremely unlikely that a Colt .45 would discharge when dropped as Sheehy claimed to the ranger. Does that make it more likely that this happened in Afghanistan? I doubt it. More likely the story of how the Colt .45 shot him was more embarrassing or maybe harder to explain than the drop story.
It seems like an understatement that everything about Sheehy’s story is absurd. It seems highly unlikely that doctors would be compelled to report a three-year-old gunshot injury to law enforcement. If they did, why not just say it happened in Afghanistan? No ranger is going to launch his own private investigation and bring the matter to the Navy. And if he did, who cares? He can just say, I’m sorry I didn’t report it but I’m just totally hardcore and getting shot just didn’t seem like a big deal. The whole thing is absurd. The answer is that Sheehy is caught red-handed making up a story to tell constituents.
A more generous read is that Sheehy served honorably in Afghanistan and also has a bullet in his arm and has kind of conflated the two things together in his stump speeeches. People have certainly done worse. But presumably he doesn’t think voters will be that generous.
The coda to this story is that the Post talked to the ranger who agreed to talk to them on condition that he remain anonymous because he didn’t want to be targeted by Sheehy’s supporters. He told the Post that he had voted for Tester in the past but that it didn’t affect his story. Notably, the only part of this that relies on the interview with the ranger is that according to the unnamed ranger he examined the gun and found that it was loaded but with one bullet missing from the chamber. In other words, consistent with the accidental discharge. In response, Sheehy’s MAGA supporters were able to identify a man they claim is the ranger in question and he’s been attacked all over social media as a Trump-hating maniac. But again, everything but that single data point about the spent round is in his report from nine years ago.
It’s a standard story. “Outsider” candidate gets caught fibbing to his constituents, concocts an absurd story and has his supporters go ballistic on the guy who had the misfortune to be doing his job nine years ago.