GOP Congressman Cory Mills' Epic Saga of Fighting America's Most Dangerous Enemies Toe-to-Toe During His Military Service Launched His Political Career. But Is It True?

Part IV: In February, Mills' mistress called the police to report he'd assaulted her. He denies it, but if proven true it would be the first time it's been confirmed Mills ever had a role in combat.

Congressman Cory Mills, war hero, as depicted in a drawing made by a highly informed source.

This is the fourth and final installment of this investigation into Congressman Cory Mills. You can read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.

So, what about Congressman Mills’ Bronze Star for combat service in Iraq during the invasion? There are three bright red flags that indicate that was a con as well.

No. 1: The Form 638 nominating him for the award, which the congressman turned over to the Daytona Beach News-Journal last year, said that during a battle in Baghdad, Mills sprang “forward under murderous enemy fire” and saved the life of First Sergeant Joseph Ferrand, his platoon leader, by overpowering an “enemy insurgent” who’d captured him.

There’s just one problem. The scene depicted in the Form 638 “is false and a fabrication,” according to a witness statement written by Ferrand himself. “The act never took place.”

No. 2: On March 31, 2003 at the Battle of Samawah, Mills risked “his own life” to save two “fallen comrades,” Corporal Alan Babin, a combat medic, and Private First Class Joe Heit,” states the Form 638. Both were badly wounded, but fortunately Mills managed to rescue them from the battlefield and assist “in their evacuation back to US forces.”

One of the most famous battles of the 2003 Iraq War, Samawah was covered extensively at the time and books have been written about the firefight. I’ve read or skimmed multiple accounts and Mills’ name doesn’t appear anywhere. Rosie Babin, the former’s mother, told the News-Journal Mills saved Alan's life, though it’s not clear how she knows that unless her source is the congressman, who’s struck up a friendship with her.

The source certainly isn’t her son, a combatwho won a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his actions at Samawah, never fully recovered from the injuries he suffered that day and has no memory of what happened after he was injured. Alan was hit as he rushed to the aid of Heit and the bullet blew “a hole in his gut roughly the size and shape of a football,” reads a 10,000-word account published the following year in the Washington Post. He underwent more than 70 surgeries over the following seven months that “related to his still-gaping abdomen...and burns on his arms and legs [that] required a series of skin grafts.”

I saw witness statements or remarks posted on social media by half-a-dozen US soldiers who fought at Samawah. None recall Mills being on the battlefield; two confirmed that during the firefight, Mills was at a medical aid station five kilometers away.

Heit, who was struck by a bullet that hit him at the corner of his eye socket, remembers a number of other people coming to his aid, including Augest Berndt, who was next to him when he got shot, but not Mills. Berndt, a weapons squad leader, has a clear recollection of events, saying he yelled “Doc” to get the attention of Babin, who grabbed his medic bag and took “two steps” before he was shredded by enemy fire.

After bandaging Heit’s wound, Berndt ran to help Babin, and named four other soldiers who were desperately tending to him as well, he recounted in a statement taken down by Jade Murray, who created and conducts research for CoryMillsWatch.com. Berndt, who remained on the battlefield during the intense, chaotic firefight that continued for another six or seven hours, offered a lengthy account, which includes the section below, which I lightly edited for clarity:

Babin was going into shock. His blood pressure was so low we couldn’t give him anymore morphine. He was just grasping a picture of his girlfriend. A vehicle arrived and took Babin and Heit back to the aid station. About 20 US soldiers were wounded and three or four were medevaced back to Kuwait. They tried numerous times to get Heit to return to Kuwait, but he refused.

“[Mills] absolutely was not there to freaking treat Babin or Heit,” Sergeant Mike Johnson, another was also at Samawah, wrote in a note to Jay Dorleus, a retired Green Beret and popular podcaster who’s questioned Mills account of his military service. “That [Bronze Star] is a croc of shit.”

“We had a group of badass medics, some went on to do great things, some are no longer with us,” Johnson added.” Mills took “bits and pieces of all our stories” and stitched them together to win the Bronze Star.

No. 3: The Form 638 that nominated Mills for the Bronze Star was signed by Brigadier General Arnold Gordon-Bray Gordon-Bray, who as noted in Part II commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq when Mills was there. However, the form itself was written on a model that was introduced in 2021, nearly two decades after the Battle of Samawah. The congressman and general, who retired in 2012, have both refused to say precisely when when the document was prepared, though I’d lay odds it was last year, when Mills suddenly dredged up a bunch of phony records, as described earlier in this series, after he was challenged by political opponents and military veterans to prove his version of events is truthful.

Meanwhile, Bray-Gordon has sought to distance himself from responsibility for the integrity of the document he signed. Actions justifying the Bronze Star and other military decorations are "ordinarily submitted by the observing individuals,” he told the News-Journal, whose account generally bent over backwards to exonerate Mills. The general also hemmed and hawed when he was asked about the Form 638 by a skeptical retired officer who served under him in Iraq, writing in a text message, “I endorsed his Bronze Star as I did for all my NCO‘s. The specific actions had to come from the battalion. Please call me. Critical that I associate my name with facts.”

Incidentally, the Form 638 makes a passing reference that ostensibly bolsters the congressman’s patently fraudulent claim about serving in Iraq on numerous missions with Joint Task Force 20, the uber elite Special Forces unit that operated in Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion. However, given the highly dubious nature of the nominating document, the assertion in it about Mills being “sought after by every echelon” in Iraq, including TF 20 – which was quite handy as that and his oft-touted Bronze Star are two key items he’s ben accused of lying about – further undermines the integrity of the Form 638 and Mills’ already ridiculous fairytale about being a member of the Task Force.

What it strongly suggests instead is that General Bray-Gordon signed the Form 638 many, many years after it would normally have been submitted, and Mills dictated the contents based on what lies he most needed “evidence” to support his bullshit narrative.

Congressman Mills’ story about his alleged wartime service is obviously a steaming pile of dogshit. Nevertheless, he’s suffered no consequences for fabricating the story with President Trump and his GOP colleagues in congress, who profess to care so deeply about the military, veterans, and honor. Sad.

In May of 2010, Mills landed his first job after fleeing from the DynCorp compound in northern Iraq the year before to avoid being exposed as a serial liar, when he was hired by Special Tactical Services, LLC to be a Maritime Security Specialist and Anti-Piracy Advisor. That apparently served as the basis for his frequently repeated claim that when he was in the Army he deployed to Somalia, though according to his LinkedIn page he was based at the firm’s corporate headquarters in the terrifying badlands near Norfolk, Virginia.

Six months later, Mills “deployed” to Afghanistan and Pakistan with his new employer, beltway bandit Chemonics, though once again it appears he was based domestically, this time in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Miraculously, he survived despite facing the daily of bleeding to death from a paper cut or suffering a painful injury by tripping on the carpet on his way to the water cooler during a badly needed rest from the stress of “creating, improving, monitoring, and promulgating emergency action plans, operational manuals, security policies, and trainings for Chemonics employees,” who were actually living in Afghanistan and Pakistan while working on working on projects for USAID.

During his time at Chemonics Mills “played a vital role in the evacuation of 34 Chemonics field staff members in Egypt in February 2011 during Arab Spring movements as the Information Coordinator for the crisis management team,” according to his LinkedIn. In a rare lapse on the congressman’s part, he apparently forgot to convert the dramatic evacuation of the corporate employees – which may have happened I suppose, though as far as I can tell he made that up as well – into “deploying to Egypt during my military service, where I hunted the world’s most dangerous terrorists.”

Between June and November of 2011, Mills actually deployed to Pakistan, at least based on his LinkedIn profile. He worked with two US firms there during those six months: Management Systems International, who hired him to streamline “the security field staff recruitment process” and conduct “threat analysis and risk assessments,” and Pax Mondial, where his combat duties ranged from having responsibility for “contractual deliverables” to “capacity building of staff.”

In late-2011, Mills took a job with Pax Mondial as “the Director of its Information Operations Division” in Arlington, Virginia. A year later, General Mills was promoted to Senior Vice President of the company’s “most profitable department” and took part in combat operations while looking for ways to improve Pax Mondial’s “HR onboarding process” and “corporate protocol evaluations.”

Mills resigned his position in March of 2014 and later that year co-founded DC-based PACEM Solutions, which sells riot-control gear to law enforcement and security agencies at home and abroad.

Last August, a group of 50 congressional Republicans who served in the military, Mills among them, signed a letter accusing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, of Stolen Valor for misrepresenting his 24-year-career in the Army National Guard.

“Repeatedly claiming to be a ‘Retired Command Sergeant Major’ when you did not complete the requirements was not honorable,” read the letter. “Nor was it honorable to claim to carry weapons ‘in war’ when you had not served in war, and abandoning the men and women under your leadership, just as they were getting ready to deploy was certainly not honorable either.”

Other than Walz’s claim that he carried weapons in war, which he deserved to be criticized for, most of the accusations in the letter were wildly overblown or simply ridiculous. Walz resigned from the National Guard in May of 2005 as a Master Sergeant, one rank below Command Sergeant Major. In March of that year, months after Walz submitted his retirement paperwork, his battalion was notified about a possible deployment to Iraq within two years, according to a report on Fox News.

But even if Walz was guilty of everything as charged, his sins still would have paled in comparison to the egregious fraud Mills perpetrated in fabricating his astonishing tale of Stolen Valor. Future Congressman Mills was scheming to get out of Iraq almost from the moment he arrived there from Kuwait in March of 2003 and used a loophole to flee Dodge City a few months later, when he waved farewell to the men and women who remained behind on the battlefield and headed home to Florida to get a college degree.

Two years later, he monetized the first draft of his fairytale about his military service when DynCorp hired him, and Congressman Mills has kept on lying about his Army heroics ever since.

But that’s hardly a surprise. Mills, who claims he decided to enlist in the Army due to the “sense of duty and gratitude” that’s been his guiding star since he was a teenager, has been lying for so long it’s doubtful he even knows the difference between fact and fiction at this point.

On February 19 of this year, a 27-year-old woman called for help from the local police in Washington, saying her “significant other” – Mills, it soon emerged – had “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door,” according to the initial report filed by the responding officer. Congressman Mills “vehemently denie[d] any wrongdoing” through his press office and his mistress later recanted her account, however, the first police report about the case, which reportedly remains under investigation, said the alleged victim had "bruises on her arm which appeared fresh" and that she let officers listen in on a phone call with her significant other, who told “her to lie about the origin of her bruises.”

So, to judge from the first account the congressman’s girlfriend told the police, it appears likely that in 2025, 22 years after he abandoned his comrades in Iraq without once engaging in ground combat while he served in the Army, Mills got his first real experience on the battlefield by beating up his mistress.