On the campaign trail, Sheehy says he was medically discharged from the military – but in his book he says he voluntarily left

Helena, MT – Breaking reporting from The Daily Beast reveals yet another inconsistency Tim Sheehy has told about his life story: the circumstances under which he left the military. 

On the campaign trail, Sheehy has repeatedly said he was medically discharged due to his injuries, saying the Navy told him “you’re out of here.” 

But in his book, Sheehy’s account is different. He describes choosing to leave of his own accord following a training exercise injury, being “alive, healthy, and seemingly unencumbered by any long-term injury.” 

Read more from Daily Beast:

Daily Beast: Senate Candidate Tells Different Story of Navy Discharge Than His Book Does
May 21, 2024
By Martin Pengelly 

• Tim Sheehy, the Navy SEAL running to unseat Democratic Montana Sen. Jon Tester, has repeatedly told voters he was “discharged” from the military for medical reasons, owing to wounds sustained in service.

• But the Republican’s own autobiography, published just last year, says otherwise; he wrote that he became disillusioned with military personnel policies and left of his own accord after being injured in a training accident.

• [T]he discrepancy is the latest to dog Sheehy, 38, who has described himself as a “war hero” on the campaign trail.

• Audio obtained by The Daily Beast reveals that in February, at a Bozeman Public Library event to promote his autobiography, Sheehy said: “After I got wounded the final time, I got discharged.”

• In March, he told a podcast host he “proudly served multiple tours overseas,” including in Iraq and Afghanistan, and “got wounded and injured a handful of times, so eventually was medically discharged from the military.”

• And in a November episode of the First Class Fatherhood podcast, Sheehy said: “So finally, they said, ‘Hey, you’re at the end of the road, you know, you’ve got shrapnel in you, you’ve got a bullet in you, you’ve had a head injury, you know, you’re out of here.’”

• But in the pages of Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting, his memoir, there’s a different narrative.

• Sheehy also described an accident while training on submarines off Hawaii in late 2013 in which, he says, he suffered a case of decompression sickness, commonly known as the bends.

• “As it turned out,” Sheehy wrote, “the decompression sickness had left me with a tiny hole in my heart. It could have been much worse. I felt fine. I was alive, healthy, and seemingly unencumbered by any long-term injury. But I was, in the eyes of the Navy, damaged goods.”

• According to Sheehy, he was told he would need “a period of recovery and evaluation… before I could return to active duty,” a period that could last a year, two years or more, after which it was possible he might not return to active duty.

• Given the option of a “staff tour”—meaning desk jobs, possibly at the Pentagon, White House or U.S. Naval War College—Sheehy decided he was “no longer interested in following that path if I could not know I could return to operational status. If I couldn’t be out in the field, leading from the front, then it was time to consider doing something else. I had put in my time: I was free to go if I wanted.”

• Sheehy added that he and his wife, Carmen, a U.S. Marine, were disillusioned with the American campaign in Afghanistan and had “kind of grown frustrated with the military.”

• “What we hated was the military’s constriction of your life and your path,” Sheehy wrote. “The fact that the trajectory of your career was not determined by your merit, but rather by a giant 1950s-era corporate promotion system… by all sorts of other extraneous ****—all the garrison **** and *** kissing.”

• Sheehy also cited frustration with “social initiatives” under the Obama administration and a dislike of “corporate analysis of the military.”

• And so, after sustaining combat injuries and a heart problem sustained in training, but having by his own description been told a return to combat was possible, Sheehy quit the SEALs.

• In April, as Sheehy’s campaign to unseat Tester warmed up, The Washington Post reported that the version of Sheehy’s departure from the Navy in his autobiography differed from a résumé he submitted to the Montana legislature in 2021 that said he was “medically separated from active duty due to wounds received in Afghanistan.”

• A spokesperson for Sheehy told the paper: “Sheehy was honorably discharged from the Navy after being declared medically unfit to continue to serve as a Navy SEAL.”

• But that statement is also contradicted by Sheehy’s own written account: He says he chose to leave the Navy rather than complete a spell of desk jobs before a possible return to active duty.

• Sheehy’s differing versions of why he left the military stand to add to issues on which he will face tough questions.

• In its own recent report, The New York Times chose a headline that pointed to Sheehy’s biggest challenge: “Montana’s Senate Race Could Come Down to One Question: Do I Trust You?”