Video of Native American tribal elder Nathan Phillips claiming to be a Vietnam veteran who served “in theater” surfaced Thursday, despite military records proving otherwise. Phillips, who falsely accused Covington Catholic High School students of swarming, surrounding, and mocking him in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March for Life, claimed he served in the Marine Corps from 1972 to 1976 and that his service record shows that he served in theater during the Vietnam war, meaning that he was in Vietnam. The U.S. Marine Corps, however, issued a statement Wednesday with details of Phillips’ service, showing that he never deployed. (RELATED: Nathan Phillips’ Military Record Reveals He Was Not A Vietnam Combat Veteran) “I’m a Vietnam Vet. I served in Marine Corps 72 to 76. I got discharged May 5, 1976. I got honorable discharge and one of the boxes shows peacetime or, what my box says is that I was in theater,” Phillips says in the video. “I don’t talk much about my Vietnam times.” ??? ?Nathan Phillips, January 3, 2018???? “I’m a Vietnam Vet. I served in Marine Corps 72 to 76. I got discharged May 5, 1976. I got honorable discharge and one of the boxes shows peacetime or, what my box says is that I was **in theater**. I don’t talk much about my Vietnam times.” pic.twitter.com/nIoYxGoPqM — Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) January 24, 2019 Phillips also claimed in the past that he served as a “recon ranger,” and that when he returned home he was “spit on” and called “a baby-killer.” The USMC clarified that Phillips served in the Marine Corps Reserve from 1972 to 1976 as a refrigerator technician and an anti-tank missileman. He was discharged as an E-1, or private. When asked Thursday on the “Today Show” how he characterized his military service, Phillips replied: “I went to boot camp. I stayed there. That Marine Corps was a reservist guy, so I stayed in the reserves for a couple years. That was during the time of the American Indian Movement, the AIM trials. There were a lot of things going on during those years and The Vietnam War was still going on.” WATCH: When asked to clarify whether he was saying that he served during the Vietnam war, but not in the war, Phillips adamantly denied ever saying that he was in theater. “What I’ve always said is I’ve never stepped foot in south Vietnam. And that’s — I don’t know how clear — how much clearer can that be, you know?” Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.<doc-sep>Native American activist Nathan Phillips faces questions about reports that he’s a veteran of the Vietnam war. According to multiple news accounts, the activist is 64 years old, which means he would have been 18 years old in 1973, the last year any U.S. combat units were stationed in Vietnam. Mr. Phillips also claims to be a Marine veteran, although the last Marine combat units left Vietnam in 1971. A careful reading of Mr. Phillips’ own descriptions does not make clear if he ever set foot in Vietnam. Instead, he has used much more careful language claiming he is a “Vietnam times veteran,” an ambiguous phrasing that led many media accounts to conclude he was a combat veteran. Mr. Phillips could not be reached for comment Monday. Nick Sandmann, who was in Washington, D.C. over the weekend as part of the March for Life, is the student caught on video wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and facing Mr. Phillips. The encounter was virally framed as Nick “confronting” Mr. Phillips, although video from multiple sources and angles shows it was Mr. Phillips who initiated the contact and bewildered Nick. Sign up for Daily Newsletters Manage Newsletters Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.<doc-sep>Nathan Phillips (right) confronts a student from Covington Catholic High School in Washington, D.C., January 18, 2019. (Kaya Taitano/Social Media/via Reuters) There was far more than met the eye to the Covington Catholic story, but that didn’t stop the popular press from vilifying its students. If you’re in a public place and someone starts heckling you, are you entitled to heckle back? How about if someone does something much worse than heckling you in a public place? What if that person in fact takes a drum up to you and starts banging it in your face? Are you entitled to heckle back? How about smirking? Are you allowed to smirk? Advertisement I think you are, even if you’re wearing a MAGA hat. Even if you’re an entitled brat. Even if you’re an entitled Catholic brat. We’ll stipulate that the Catholic boys from a high school in Kentucky were a little obnoxious when an indigenous man named Nathan Phillips banged a drum at them in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday. But Phillips was being a lot more obnoxious. To put it another way, if you were minding your own business in a public place and someone came right up to you and put a drum up to your face and made a huge racket inches from your nose, would you be happy about it? The kids from Covington Catholic High School in Covington, Ky., were ambassadors for causes much bigger than themselves: Catholicism and the right to life. As such, they should have comported themselves better than to jeer and do a tomahawk chop in front of Phillips. Ideally, the kids would have ignored him and walked away. Until about ten minutes ago, it was broadly agreed in our culture that kids are allowed to do some dumb things because they’re kids. Should these kids’ lives be ruined because some of them responded to obnoxious provocation by being a bit rude themselves? I’d say their reaction was if anything more restrained than you would expect from teenagers. I’d advise them to do better next time. I certainly wouldn’t consider expulsion. Advertisement Phillips, on the other hand, is an adult, and he repeatedly lied about what happened to the Washington Post, which was utterly taken in by him and reported everything he said uncritically. It would have been revolting if Nathan Phillips had been minding his own business doing a tribal chant while a gang of kids swarmed around him and started jeering. That’s what many media outlets reported: “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March,” ran a New York Times headline over a story that said “a throng of cheering and jeering high school boys” were “surrounding a Native American elder.” That isn’t what happened. Phillips was the aggressor in the situation. It’s a curious feature of our culture that people aggressively seek to be victimized, go out of their way in hopes of getting punched in the face, but here we are. People do that because they know the media hand out condemnation based on perceived ranking in the victim hierarchy. “Old Ypsilanti man” is near the top, while “privileged-looking young white male probable heterosexual in a MAGA cap” is the absolute bottom. The surface appeal of the story short-circuited the reporters’ brains to such a degree that they failed to perform basic tasks such as asking the people they were accusing for their version of events. The Times and other outlets had zero evidence that a “mob” “surrounded” Phillips, except a claim of Phillips that he has since backed away from. Phillips has on at least one other occasion gotten himself into what he says was a racist altercation with a group of youths. This one, four years ago, also involved him approaching others, in this case a group of college students. (“Why did Phillips go over to the fence? Why not just walk away?” wondered a reporter. “For me just to walk by and have a blind eye to it,” Phillips said. “Something just didn’t allow me to do it.”) Advertisement Friday he waded into a group of Covington students, evidently hoping to troll a response out of them suitable for a viral video. According to the Washington Post, Phillips, 64, said that he felt threatened by the teens and that they swarmed around him as he and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave. This is a lie. They didn’t swarm around him. He strolled right into the middle of their group: https://twitter.com/matthewschmitz/status/1086994001801158656 Phillips then pivoted to a completely different version of his story with the Detroit Free Press, in which he admitted that he approached the students, not the other way around. His interviews and the various videos of the incident paint a picture of him saying he is a) terrified of the Catholic students yet b) walking right up to and into their group; a) doing his best to leave yet b) pressing forward insistently; a) trying to go up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial yet b) not noticing that there is a clear path up those steps approximately ten feet to his right. Advertisement Phillips, who claims to be a former Marine and a Vietnam veteran, told the Free Press the Covington kids “were in the process of attacking these four black individuals. I was there and I was witnessing all of this. . . . As this kept on going on and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something or you walk away, you know? You see something that is wrong and you’re faced with that choice of right or wrong.” Because naturally, when you see a group of individuals “attacking” another group in a public place where there are lots of police, the proper response when you’re a 64-year-old man is not to inform a cop but to take charge of the situation yourself. Go up to the “attackers,” stand toe to toe with one of them and start loudly banging a drum in his face.<doc-sep>Correction: After this interview was conducted, Phillips told CNN he was Vietnam-era veteran. He did serve in the military during the Vietnam War, but according to his service records, he was not deployed to Vietnam. (CNN) — Native American elder Nathan Phillips, who has made headlines everywhere after a video showed him in a face-off with a Catholic school student in front of the Lincoln Memorial, spoke at length with CNN the day after the incident. Phillips described what he felt was hatred coming from the young people in the crowd, who are pupils at Covington Catholic School in Kentucky and who had traveled to the nation’s capital to attend the March for Life rally, also held Friday. The interview was conducted Saturday after the video went viral. Since the interview, the diocese in charge of the school has denounced the students’ actions, a lawmaker has defended them and the boy in the video, Nick Sandmann, has denied characterizations of his and his classmates’ behavior and said he was simply standing in front of Phillips to let him know he wouldn’t be baited into an altercation. Also, several new videos have surfaced, including one showing the students engaging in a “Tomahawk chop,” mocking the Native Americans, and another showing a group of Hebrew Israelites hurling slurs and epithets at the teenagers both before Phillips arrived on the scene and after he left. Here is the transcript of Phillips’ interview, which has been lightly edited for flow and content: CNN: Tell us what happened, what transpired between you and the young people who were all standing around you? How did you end up surrounded by this group of young people with the MAGA hats on? Phillips: There was a disturbance there on the Lincoln Monument grounds. We were finishing up with Indigenous Peoples March and rally and there were some folks there that were expressing their (First Amendment) rights there, freedom of speech. … Then there was this young group of young students that came there and were offended by their speech, and it escalated into an ugly situation that I found myself in the middle of. Yeah, I found myself in the middle of it, sort of woke up to it. CNN: You just sort of decided to try and stop this or at least have an impact on it, calm the waters. Is that right? Phillips: Yes, that’s the impression that everybody has, and I guess that’s what I was doing. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. When I started taking those steps and using the drum, it was just spur of the moment. I don’t like to say it that way, but it was just, “What do you do? What do you do now?” Here’s a moment where something that’s really ugly in our society, in America, something that’s just come to a boiling point, as they say. Does that make sense? CNN: Sure. So you’re sort of in between these two groups, yes? Phillips: Yes. CNN: What happened? What is it like standing there? 04:07 - Source: CNN How video of a confrontation spread Phillips: When my young friend that came up there said, “Let’s hit the drum” because there’s a point there where it just got to really a crescendo, I think they say it sometimes, but it was like the thunder, the storm was coming. CNN: What did it feel like that you were witnessing? Phillips: Oh, what I was witnessing was just hate? Racism? Well, hate. What I’m saying is that when these folks came there, these other folks were saying their piece, and these others they got offended with it because they were both just expressing their own views. And if it’s racism, that’s what it was because the folks that were having their moment there, they were saying things that I don’t know if I agreed with them or not, but some of it was educational, and it was truth, and it was history about religious views and ideologies, but these other folks, the young students, they couldn’t see it. They had one point of view, it seemed, and that was that their point of view was the only point of view that was worthwhile. And that’s now what I was feeling. CNN: Were you trying to calm the situation down basically when you saw kind of things seemed to spiral out of control? Phillips: I think so. I think that was the push, that we need to use the drum, use our prayer and bring a balance, bring a calming to the situation. I didn’t assume that I had any kind of power to do that, but at the same time, I didn’t feel that I could just stand there anymore and not do something. It looked like these young men were going to attack these guys. They were going to hurt them. They were going to hurt them because they didn’t like the color of their skin. They didn’t like their religious views. They were just here in front of the Lincoln – Lincoln is not my hero, but at the same time, there was this understanding that he brought the (Emancipation Proclamation) or freed the slaves, and here are American youth who are ready to, look like, lynch these guys. To be honest, they looked like they were going to lynch them. They were in this mob mentality. Where were their parents? Because they were obvious a student group. Where were their– CNN: Chaperones? Phillips: Yeah, chaperones. Where were they? What were they doing? Why did they allow them to come to such a boiling point? To allow such hate and racism, just to be – just to be, and not teach them that this is wrong. America foundations, freedoms, the reason white people came to this country is for freedom of religion, freedom of speech. Not to allow these men to have their freedom to say what they felt was hurting them as a people, as a religion. I was listening to what they were saying. I was there for a different purpose.<doc-sep>
Nathan Phillips on CNN (CNN/via YouTube) As I wrote on the home page today, it’s disturbing to see the left-wing hate that is still being directed at the Covington Catholic students — days after the initial framing of the story was thoroughly debunked. Judging from the vitriolic online responses to my piece, it’s apparent that many folks on the left are basing their understanding of the incident by still taking Nathan Phillips entirely at his word about the incident. They credit his good intentions. They credit his good faith. And they credit his version of the story. This is a grave mistake. As my colleague Kyle Smith documented in a viral piece this weekend, in his initial account of the event, Phillips gave substantially different accounts to the Washington Post and the Detroit Free Press. But the inconsistencies don’t stop there. Perhaps his longest statement is contained in this CNN interview, and — quite frankly, it’s simply incredible. There’s an alarming number of falsehoods, inconsistencies, and nonsensical statements. For example, there’s the interesting question of his alleged service in Vietnam (the Washington Post reported today that he served in the Marines from 1972 to 1976 but was not deployed). In the transcript, he appears to falsely state that he served in Vietnam twice: CNN: Let me ask you about what happened to you. These boys in the middle of this group and you find yourself surrounded. How did that happen and what did that feel like as a person standing there face to face with a young man who seems to be staring at you or glaring at you? How would you describe that moment? Phillips: When I was there and I was standing there and I seen that group of people in front of me and I seen the angry faces and all of that, I realized I had put myself in a really dangerous situation. Here’s a group of people who were angry at somebody else and I put myself in front of that, and all of a sudden, I’m the one whose all that anger and all that wanting to have the freedom to just rip me apart, that was scary. And I’m a Vietnam veteran and I know that mentality of “There’s enough of us. We can do this.” (Emphasis added.) Here’s the second: CNN: One of the things they said is we weren’t protesting against Native Americans. We were there for the March for Life and we were just chanting — and this is kind of putting the blame on you — and that this person came into our space and we were just getting all hyped up. Do you buy that? Phillips: Not in the least. CNN: What really happened? Phillips: They were there looking for trouble, looking for something. Everybody knows the right to life and (pro-choice), it’s been like this and they’re hateful to each other. And it’s because I’m a veteran — I’m a Vietnam veteran — that these two groups even have the right in this country to have protests, to have conflicting opinions. If they were doing that, they should’ve done that there and then when they come into public, that wasn’t the place for that. That was a public forum where we was at. We were still under the protection of our permit for the indigenous peoples rally. (Emphasis added.) If you watch the available video, the first transcript entry is wrong. He says the more ambiguous “Vietnam-times.” I can’t find video of his second statement (CNN apparently aired only excerpts of the larger interview), but why emphasize Vietnam when you didn’t serve there? This is deceptive at best and an outright lie at worst. But look closer at those same transcript excerpts. Do they comport with the video evidence of the event? He disagrees with the kids’ defense that Phillips “came into our space and we were just getting hyped up.” He says that is “not in the least what happened.” But the video is crystal clear. He walked into their midst just after they did a series of school cheers. Moreover, he says they were “looking for trouble, looking for something.” Yet again, the video shows something substantially different. The Black Israelites were hurling homophobic and racist taunts. If anyone was “looking for trouble,” it was the people who were calling kids homophobic slurs, “crackers” and “incest babies.” But “looking for trouble” is a subjective judgment, so it’s difficult to categorize as a flat-out lie.