Brandon Garrison felt the need to embellish his service in the U.S. Army.
Sgt. Christopher Wilson’s mother had no reason to distrust the soldier and his vivid story of her son’s death in Afghanistan.
Spc. Brandon Garrison found her in the dark days afterward and provided the details — the details a mother fears but needs — of Wilson’s last moments after a Taliban attack in Korengal Valley in March 2007.
The futile attempt to save Wilson, the blood, the coldness of imminent death. It was all there in Garrison’s account, and he provided the memories she clung to for years.
“I just needed to know. It is a knife wound so deep you just have to know every aspect or you can’t breathe,” Wilson’s mother, Ilka Halliday said.
Except none of it was true.
Garrison’s war lies are unraveling, eight years later, after soldiers who were with Wilson when he died came forward.
Garrison was not by Wilson’s side when he died, and had instead spent his Afghanistan deployment inside the wire as a vehicle parts clerk.
The false story of the infantry soldier’s death has exposed the pain such deceit can cause for survivors. For Wilson’s mother and his family, the sting of lies and loss has not been diminished by the passing of years.
But the lie has also unearthed questions about Garrison’s other war claims and cast a shadow over the well-meaning support he has received as a wounded veteran.
In Kansas, where he lives, 29-year-old Garrison is well-known as a combat vet who walks with a cane and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and other health problems he says are related to burn-pit exposure. He recently received a donated home based on his status as an honorably discharged veteran and was given a service dog.
To some who served with him in Afghanistan, he was a lackluster soldier who lied about his Army war record and embellished his combat injuries.
His supervisor in Korengal Valley called him a “compulsive liar.”
“I’m taken back to the time where I was holding a dressing on his stomach as he was bleeding out,” Garrison told an HBO documentary crew in 2007 as he stood at Wilson’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery.
Wilson had died just months earlier. Garrison had told the story before and would tell it again almost a year later.
Before HBO came knocking, Garrison sought out Wilson’s mother during a memorial ceremony in 2007 at Fort Drum, N.Y., for members of the 10th Mountain Division who were killed in Afghanistan. Halliday, an Army veteran, raised Wilson as a single mom, then through multiple marriages. The two had a close and often emotionally intense relationship.
HT: TAH