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 III: The incredible true story of how a Florida man fabricated a decade of combat heroism and parlayed a brazen tale of Stolen Valor into a seat in the House of Representatives.

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

Future Congressman Cory Mills was born in Winter Haven, Florida, a picturesque all-American small town blessed with “beautiful lakes, bountiful opportunities, and gorgeous weather,” but was largely raised in a nearby city by his loving but desperately poor grandparents because his parents were in and out of prison on drug charges during much of his childhood. Between 1999, after he enlisted in the US Army straight out of high school, and 2022, when he was elected to his first term in congress to represent a district that includes his hometown area, Mills had completed an improbable rags-to-riches journey from late-adolescence as a destitute, prospectless, preordained loser to early-middleaged adulthood as a multimillionaire businessman with boundless opportunities that exceeded his wildest dreams during his dismal origins in Winter Haven.

On the 2022 campaign trail, Mills rarely discussed the successes he won fighting enemies in corporate boardrooms and suites, though, but instead focused almost exclusively on the dramatic combat victories he achieved during his earlier career in the military, when he protected America’s “shores and freedoms” from the world’s worst dictators and terrorists for seven years in Iraq, three years in Afghanistan, and shorter stints in Kosovo, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. “After Al Qaeda and the Taliban” stopping radical Democrats like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi “doesn’t scare me one damn bit,” Mills humble-bragged in a campaign ad that featured him wearing combat gear and holding a weapon.

In his enthusiastic endorsement of Mills, Donald Trump, who at the time was at the midway point of the four-year period he spent between being a past and future president, emphasized Mills’ combat experience as well. The heroism he displayed fighting “all over the world” demonstrated Mill’s love for the homeland and that he’d always “stay back and fight” even while lesser men fled when their courage immediately wilted under fire.

As noted in the two previous installments of this story, Mills was reelected to a second term last year, but was forced to present evidence in an effort to refute charges hurled by his political enemies and – in a much more menacing development – a growing chorus of retired military officers and veterans who worked alongside him overseas, that he embellished or completely fabricated the key details of his oft-repeated wartime chronicles. Last June, the congressman delivered a a 15-page booklet to the local Republican Party in his home district of Volusia County that unveiled explosive, never-before-seen photos of Mills smiling valiantly while standing next to an American flag; documents that irrefutably disproved allegations of subsequently proven allegations regarding unrelated matters, such as the “false claim” of the true claim that he’s under investigation for violating House ethics rules; and three documents he said exonerated him on charges of fraudulently claiming he took part in “active ground combat,” which were so comically fraudulent they could only have been convincing to morons with room temperature IQs.

Mills produced one document that seemed potentially legitimate at first glance, but appears to be equally tainted upon further investigation: the Form 638, the document used when nominating service members for military decorations. Brigadier General Arnold Gordon-Bray, who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division during the invasion, signed and submitted the one that recommended the congressman be awarded the Bronze Star for his combat role in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Mills has never released two genuinely critical documents, his Official Military Personnel File, or OMPF, and DD 214 form, which taken together would provide a comprehensive record of the basic details of his military career. Those items were obtained by a few reporters and critics of Mills, including retired Army combat veteran Sergeant Bobby Oller, a disabled combat veteran who’s part of a group of detractors affiliated with CoryMillsWatch.com, who received the congressman’s official records under the Freedom of Information Act, and provided me with the documents.

In Mills’ defense, he would have to be clinically insane to have disclosed his Army records unless compelled to with a gun pointed at his head, because after even cursory review they prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mills’ put together the longstanding account he’s offered about his military service – it’s important to note here that the congressman has periodically altered some details of his story depending on what day of the week he’s lying about it, as far as I can determine – using a sophisticated technique professionals call, “Fuck, there’s no way to back up this bullshit I made up with real facts, I guess I’ll just have to pull them out of my ass again and hope no one notices.”

Oller and other investigators provided a mountain of other information, most importantly Mills’ 2009 application for a job in Iraq with the private military contractor DynCorp, and I interviewed sources with eyewitness accounts and discovered additional data, which shredded pretty much anything that was left standing from the congressman’s story. After going through the new material I learned after writing Part II of this story, I’ve concluded there is only one way he can fully salvage his credibility at this point, but fortunately it’s a simple one Mills could accomplish by selecting whichever option he likes best among countless possibilities open to him.

All that Mills needs to do is change the name of publish a fresh account with a different, more accurate name than the one he slapped on the booklet he gave to the GOP affiliate in his home district last year, which he boldly titled, “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory Mills.” I came up with three simple fixes in a manner of minutes that would work perfectly well.

Option I: “The New and Improved Adventures of Congressman Pinocchio.” Option II: “A Contemporary Version of Grimms' Fairy Tales.” Option III: “Cory’s Adventures in Wonderland: The Incredible Story of How a Disgraced Congressman Fabricated His Epic Tale of Stolen Valor.”

The Form 638 Congressman Mills has presented to prove he’s an honest-to-goodness war hero. It sure seems impressive but he and the general who signed it have refused to answer questions about some glaring defects in the document.

Next let’s lay out what the actual facts show Mills did when he was in the Army and then do a side-by-side comparison to highlight the discrepancies between a reality-based depiction of events and Mills’ long-peddled fantasy-based version. I’ll start with the macro, big picture issues – how much time did Mills actually serve in the Army before he was discharged, where and when did he deploy overseas during that period, and how often did he take part in combat operations – and in the next section I’ll turn to the more specific, micro issues, meaning what he in fact doing when he was overseas – was he a sniper, and did he get actually get “blown up twice” in Iraq and narrowly escape death? – and ask the same questions about the other specific claims the congressman has made about his battlefield heroism.

To quickly summarize things, Mills career with the Army officially kicked off in July of 1999, two months after he graduated from high school, when he reported to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. He completed basic training there six months later and after making a brief stop at an Army installation in Georgia, where he spent a few weeks at Jump School, Mills moved on to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division, in February of 2000, where he was attached to the 82nd Airborne’s 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, the “Red Falcons.”

In January of 2001, Mills deployed overseas for the first time, to Kosovo, and returned to Fort Bragg six months later. Roughly 19 months later, Mills went abroad for the second time after enlisting, heading to Kuwait with the Red Falcons in February of 2003, the month before President George W. Bush ordered troops into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He was back in the US by mid-June – that’s not clear from his military records, but in an Army document I’ll discuss shortly – and received an honorable discharge in August, retiring at the rank of sergeant.

The first thing that’s immediately apparent at this very early stage is that Congressman Mills wasn’t deployed in Iraq for seven years, as he’s asserted time and time again. That’s an obvious lie as the duration of his entire Army career, from boot camp to discharge, was four years and one month.

Nor did Mills spend three years in Afghanistan, or two-and-a-half years or even two years, as he has also said. In fact, according to his Army records, Congressman Mills wasn’t in Afghanistan for a single day when he was in the Army, and he wasn’t in Pakistan or Somalia either, which he’s routinely asserted as well. He didn’t set foot in Ukraine either, which he has occasionally added to the list of combat zones he allegedly served in.

The congressman’s Army records confirm he deployed to Kosovo, so a round of applause for Mills, it doesn’t happen often but every once in a while he tosses out an actual fact when describing his military service. Returning to form, though, Mills wasn’t a member of a “long range reconnaissance and surveillance scout recon team” when he was in the country, as he claimed in his LinkedIn bio, and he wasn’t decorated for his wartime service, which is one of the standard highlights of the congressman’s script of wartime chronicles.

He even brazenly lied about that in “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory Mills,” the bullshit booklet he proudly shared with the local Republican Party in Volusia County, when he accused his enemies of falsely slandering him by saying he’d never fought on the battlefield during his Army career. To prove he “engaged in active ground combat” in Kosovo, Mills reproduced a certificate of a medal he won to honor his wartime service.

However, the certificate wasn’t for a Kosovo Campaign Medal, which is awarded by the Army for wartime service, but a NATO Medal, which the Alliance’s Secretary General authorizes for exemplary conduct during a post-war peacekeeping mission, and is the equivalent of a participation trophy as it was doled out to everyone who took part. Mills' certificate shows he received the medal for the role he performed after arriving in the country, as is reflected in his official Army records, in January of 2001 – 18 months after the Kosovo War ended.

A few of Mills’ critics have voiced suspicions that he was never in Iraq during his military career, but was stationed at the 82nd Airborne Division’s headquarters at a US Army base in Kuwait. However, I found a photograph posted on Facebook six years ago by an Army veteran that showed Mills and eight other Red Falcons in the country in late-March 2003, about ten days after the invasion began.

As in the case of Kosovo, however, other than Mills’ claim that he was in Iraq, the congressman fabricated nearly everything else he’s said about his time there. I’ll go through a longer list in the next section, but there’s one important issue that’s highly pertinent here. The second of the three documents from “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory Mills” was a badge he won for ground combat in Iraq. It looked like Mills had found just what the doctor ordered to shut down his critics’ charges of Stolen Valor, but curiously he made strategic redactions to the certificate that blacked out the section that showed when he was deployed in Iraq.

As luck would have it, the Army provided the answer to that question when it issued a memorandum a month after Mills delivered his self-published booklet that allegedly verified the badge was one of four decorations the congressman won for “wartime service” in Iraq. According to the memorandum, Mills flew into the Iraqi theater on February 28, 2003 – but that was the date he arrived in Kuwait; the invasion didn’t get underway until March 20 and Mills’ unit didn’t deploy to Iraq until six days later – and flew out on June 15, two months before he processed out of the Army from Fort Bragg.

In other words, Congressman Mills exaggerated his battlefield history a wee bit when he won office in 2022 by promising to continue his legacy of defending America “against all threats,” whether foreign enemies such as lethal, bloodsoaked leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban or unarmed yet equally dangerous domestic foes like terror chieftains Sheikh Joe bin Biden and Mullah Nancy al-Pelosi. On the campaign trail, Mills told voters he spent more than a decade overseas in multiple foreign war zones, cheerfully staring death in the face while engaged in active ground combat.

In reality, as the Army memorandum revealed, Mills never deployed to four of the six countries he boasted of serving in, and lied about fighting on the battlefield in Kosovo, No. 5 on his list. The only time the congressman was in an active war zone during his Army career was his perilous excursion to Iraq, and he was in the country, not the theater, for no more than about 80 days.

Whether he ever was closer than five kilometers away from the battlefield when he was there, though, rests mostly on the Form 638 signed by General Gordon-Bray, however, neither the general or the congressman have deigned to answer questions about the document. As it stands, the Form 638 has such paltry credibility that an attorney who cited it as evidence during a trial would be laughed out of court.

Mills during an interview last July on CNN, which invited him on to share his expertise as a former sniper following the failed assassination attempt against then-former President Trump at a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Receiving the Bronze Star is one of the old chestnuts Mills trots out when inventorying his greatest hits on the battlefield. The other Top Ten tales on the congressman’s personal highlight reel of wartime courage unfold in Iraq as well: Deploying on numerous missions with Combined Joint Task Force 20 (TF 20), an uber elite Special Forces unit that implements top secret operations; training Kurdish forces to thwart terrorist attacks; and, of course, surviving the two roadside blasts in Baghdad, one “which resulted in numerous casualties” yet somehow managing “to stabilize himself and other members on his team who were injured in the explosion prior to evacuation.”

But that’s not even the half of it. In his spare time, Mills served in combat as an infantryman, sniper, and took part in counterinsurgency operations and “direct action” strikes against “high-value” enemy targets.

It’s hard to imagine how he was able to squeeze it all in since back on Planet Earth, Congressman Mills was only on Iraqi soil for less than three months when he was in the Army. The answer was provided in an article that ran in the Orlando Sentinel last October, which noted that when Mills chronicles his wartime history, he “rarely differentiates” between events that unfolded during “his actual military service” and those that took place afterwards when he was working for private contractors in “much higher-paid positions.” Mills didn’t spend years overseas due to patriotic fervor and love of country, retired Major General Randy Manner told the newspaper, he “was doing it for the Benjamins.”

That’s true, and it gets to the heart of the congressman’s grift, but the Sentinel completely missed the central point. Mills not only pretends that the heroic actions he brags about uniformly date to “his actual military service,” he fabricated all of them, whether they’re tenuously linked to events he saw or heard about when he was a soldier or when he was a private contractor.

Erasing the line enabled Mills to convert a real-life 15-year period comprised of three distinct eras – four years of military service, Army, two years in Florida, where the congressman was having fun in the sun while pursuing an Associate in Arts degree, and nine years with private firms – a fairytale that takes place during one continuous era when Mills was deployed overseas with the Army for a long period of undefined length, though clearly well over a decade as he claims to have spent that much time in Iraq and Afghanistan alone.

The new and improved timeline Mills cobbled together allowed him to pull off the immensely profitable Stolen Valor scam he’s been running for the past two decades, which was his broader goal all along.

Mills’ racked up his biggest score as a military impostor three years ago when he rolled out his bullshit military history on the campaign trail to win his initial run for congress. However, he’s been successfully monetizing his fictional record since at least 2005, two years after his discharge from the Army, when he turned his fictional war stories into a job protecting diplomatic personnel with DynCorp in Kabul. Mills transferred to Baghdad in 2006 to take the same position and three years later, when he was stationed in Erbil in northern Iraq, his annual salary was in the neighborhood of $180,000 to $200,000 when bonuses were included, according to one of his former supervisors I recently interviewed.

Will Kern, a former Recon Marine who worked for DynCorp with Mills met him for the first time at a former Republican Guard base south of Baghdad, where a group of company employees were testing their sniper skills on a shooting range. Kern quickly became suspicious of Mills boasts of being a first-rate military-trained marksman – which he’d listed in citing his qualifications in his initial job application in 2005 and another one four years later when he was hoping to be promoted to a position as Shift Leader – after watching his pitiful performance, and his bona fides were further undercut by his conversational banter as it was obvious he had no idea what he was talking about when he was talking up his sniper skills. “Cory sounded like a babbling idiot, based on the laws of physics,” Kern told me.

Yet last July, Congressman Mills told CNN he’d run a counter-sniper team during his military service and had conducted “thousands of operations” in not only Iraq but Afghanistan as well. As examples, he said his team had protected VIP political visitors from the US such as former First Lady Laura Bush when she was in Kabul for a ceremony inaugurating Afghanistan’s first women’s university,” and then-Vice President Joe Biden, who he’d been assigned to keep in one piece when he was in Erbil to meet ex-President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

It took less than five minutes to confirm Mills was lying. Laura Bush visited Kabul in March of 2005, to inaugurate a women’s dorm, not a university. That was two years after Mills had been discharged from the Army and, according to his own 2009 Shift Leader application, he was still in Florida at the time the former first lady was in Kabul for the ceremony and didn’t arrive in Afghanistan to begin working for DynCorp for another two months.

Biden met with President Barzani in Erbil twice when he was vice president, in 2010 and 2011. At the time of Biden’s first visit, future Congressman Mills had already been out of the Army for seven years and out of DynCorp, and Iraq too, for one year. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mills was then in Norfolk, Virginia working for a different private military firm.

Mills stated on his DynCorp job applications in 2005 and 2009 that he deployed in Iraq during his military career with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, a premier light infantry assault force that led the first wave of US troops that established beachheads at Normandy during the Allied invasion on D-Day. He made the same boast to his co-workers, at least until one – an actual Ranger veteran – warned Mills that if he persisted in repeating the claim he’d beat so badly he’d have to be medevaced back to the US, Kern and two other of the congressman’s erstwhile DynCorp colleagues told me.

His co-workers knew Mills’ self-proclaimed status as an ex-Ranger was pure garbage for the same reason it’s obvious his more recent boast of having deployed with TF 20 is also bullshit. Both of Mills’ proclamations, which by the way are refuted by his own official Army records, which makes no mention of either, were simply impossible to square with his woeful warrior skills, as Kern spotted immediately at the shooting range in regard to his claim of being a military-trained sniper.

During his actual military service, Mills wasn’t engaged in active ground combat with TF 20 – or the 82nd Airborne Division, which is the only unit he was actually attached to when he was in the Army – as an infantryman, or when he was taking part in counterinsurgency operations or direct action” strikes against “high-value” enemy targets. Mills’ main role in the military was as a medic, which he mentions far less frequently than the fairytale acts of heroism he routinely trots out at every available opportunity.

Serving as a medic during combat operations requires great skill and courage, but Mills clearly felt the truth wasn’t enough to make him an Official War Hero. Hence, he conjured up the facts that elevated him to the stature he desired, which not coincidentally paved the way for him to maximize his winnings from the larger Stolen Valor grift.

When he’s periodically pressed to back up his tall tales, Congressman Mills tries to weasel his way out of the predicament, as occurred during a January 2023 C-SPAN interview when he was asked to specify his military occupational specialty shortly after he casually claimed he’d been a combat infantryman and reconnaissance scout in Iraq during the invasion. “I was lucky enough to be able to cross-train and then just work directly with the teams,” Mills ad libbed moronically. “You’re really out for the mission first and then that medical background and experience” kicks in “after you’ve mitigated the threats and firefight and achieved the mission” – as if medics are just like every other soldier on the frontline except they double as health care providers if they don’t die on the battlefield.

In fact, to the contrary of his many breathlessly narrated fairytales, Mills never came face-to-face with death at any point when he was overseas with the Army, or with private contractors for that matter, including in either of the twin roadside bombings in Baghdad, the story he has milked more frequently and with greater success than any of his other creations.

Roadside IED attacks did take place on the two days Mills cites, but neither unfolded the way the congressman tells the story. Both occured in 2006 when Mills worked for DynCorp, where his primary title was medic just as it was in the Army, but he was a security specialist assigned to protect diplomatic personnel as well. The latter position provided him with the raw material for his fraudulent stories about running the counter-sniper team that kept Laura Bush and Joe Biden alive when they visited Kabul and Erbil, respectively.

On March 15, 2006, the date of the first strike and right around the time Mills transferred to Iraq after his short stint in Afghanistan, a US “embassy motorcade was [struck] by a roadside bomb,” according to a report prepared by a State Department agency. However, one vehicle was disabled by the attack, but it caused “no injuries,” said the report, which itemized all strikes against US diplomatic facilities and personnel during the period, and Mills wasn’t at the scene that day, according to multiple witnesses who were.

The second attack on April 19, was carried out by “unknown individuals” who attacked an embassy motorcade “with an explosive device and small arms fire, injuring two US Army personnel and two security contractors.” Mills was in a second motorcade that day that was in close contact with the one that was targeted, but he wasn’t in the immediate vicinity. Ergo, he didn’t miraculously “stabilize himself and other members on his team” before they were evacuated, wasn’t one of the four casualties of the attack, and didn’t suffer a single scratch as an injury.

Take a look at that picture in the above tweet, which Mills posted on January 3, 2021, the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Iranian General and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qasim Soleimani, in a drone strike ordered by President Trump during the final year of his first term in the White House. The caption was clearly meant to suggest that during his actual military service, the soon-to-be congressman had become such a potent threat to Iran’s allies in the Middle East that Soleimani issued an APB to all terrorists within 1,000 miles of Baghdad, ordering them to put everything else aside until Mills was eliminated.

Does it look like Mills, seen with his back to the camera with blood at the bottom of his right pants leg, narrowly escaped death just an hour or two earlier? No, it doesn’t, and as a matter of fact it’s not even the congressman’s blood.

The true story and the aftermath – as told in the words of three of Mills’ colleagues at DynCorp – Vietnam veteran and retired law enforcement officer Jesse Parks, Brian Simpson, who served in the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq before he was hired by DynCorp in early-2005, and former Army Sergeant Scott Kempkens, who in actual fact narrowly escaped death in the April 19 attack – appears below. I’d love to get Mills’ input, but since he hasn’t responded to requests for comments sent to his congressional office, I’ll have to include his take in the unlikely event he ever decides to share it.

Parks: I was the chief of operations in Baghdad and was reading reports in real time. Scotty almost had his head blown off, if he’d been leaning the other way he would’ve been shot in the head, not the shoulder. The other person who was seriously wounded was an Army National Guard sergeant who took a hot piece of metal in his ass.

Kempkens: The injured sergeant was with a reserve unit from Kansas that was stationed near the embassy and was working with the contractors to protect diplomats. He was pissed because it was the second time he’d taken shrapnel in the ass. There were two motorcades, three vehicles in each, I was in a military vehicle, a Hummer, it was the only vehicle that was hit. Corey was assigned as a team medic and was in a Suburban that was already around the corner when our vehicle was hit. A big chunk of my shoulder was taken off, I had burns on my neck and shrapnel in my left leg. Me and the sergeant hopped into Corey‘s vehicle after our vehicle got around the corner. We were treated at an aid station near the Interior Ministry; the sergeant’s blood got on Cory’s leg there or on the way there after we got into the Suburban.

Simpson: I was in Baghdad on April 19 and I visited Scotty in the hospital. I didn’t know him well then and I didn’t know Mills until we worked together in Erbil later, but he’s a liar. If he lied about getting injured to impress a girl or get a free beer at Hooters on Veterans Day it wouldn’t bother me, but he lied when he was running for Congress. It didn’t sit well with any of us.

Kempkens: If Mills had nearly died in the attack, he would have been awarded a Purple Heart if he’d still been in the Army, but since he wasn’t he could have won a Defense of Freedom Medal as a civilian working for a contractor. I have a certificate that shows I won the Defense of Freedom Medal; Cory doesn’t because he wasn’t wounded that day or any time during his time in Iraq with DynCorp. I know that because I was in Baghdad when he arrived there in 2006 and I was working for the company in northern Iraq when he left in 2009. Cory’s a lying sack of shit...If he was wounded at any time when he was in Iraq, it happened when he cut himself shaving.

Parks: When Cory was hired in 2005, DynCorp was desperate to hire people to work in Iraq on a contract it won from the State Department. A lot of people lied on their job applications back then, DynCorp hired anybody who wanted a job without bothering to confirm if their resume was true or not.

Simpson: Jesse ran Team Seven in Erbil, but when he was promoted I took over. We all had assumed Cory was telling the truth at the beginning because we thought he would’ve been vetted before he was hired, but his stories didn’t add up so people started asking around, and it became clear to everybody he was full of shit. Cory was a regular army medic assigned to headquarters when he was in the Army, if you got the sniffles, you went to see him at the clinic. At DynCorp, Cory got very lazy and bitched and moaned about everything. Every time we had a long ride ahead of us on a mission he came down sick beforehand. One of those times I heard he was running around as soon as the rest of us left, he was faking being sick like a little kid.

Parks: After the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, everybody had to basically reapply for their fucking job and resend their DD 21 fours and all of their awards and certificates. My wife scanned all of my certificates and sent them to me, I think there were about 33 of them. When Cory applied for the shift leader job [in 2009], I recommended he shouldn’t be hired for the new position and shouldn’t be retained in the old one, but he never submitted the verification paperwork.

Simpson: I kept telling him if you don’t supply the paperwork you’re gonna have to go home. After that, he left his weapons and gear laying on his bed, walked off the compound in the middle of the night, and was gone in the morning. He just disappeared and that was the last we heard from him.

Coming in Part IV: The true story about Mills’ fake Bronze Star, which was awarded by the Army two decades ex post facto on the basis of fictitious claims, apparently dictated by the congressman himself. Plus: The conclusion to Mills’ shameless tale of Stolen Valor, which never fails to become more nauseating just when it seems he’s finally hit rock bottom.