We've all heard them in the local pub, i'm sure you may have seen one or two on internet forums , yes it's those Walter Mitty's, the armchair warriors who were in the SAS, SBS, Delta and Seal Team Six all by the time they were in high school.

I swear that balcony on the Iranian Embassy should be the size of London what with the amount of people who were on it or had a mate on it.

The reason i write this thread is to share a recent encounter i had with a walt, and my funniest one ever. To hear about yours too.

How do you deal with them? I know lots of soldiers who call them out on it, sometimes get real arsey over it. I tend not to if it's just some guy talking crap in a pub, but when it crosses the line into getting jobs through lies about service and wearing false medals, thats bang out of order.

It makes me smile even more when they try and bluff you even though you've said that you served yourself!

So without further ado....i was at a show the other day and there was a guy dressed in British Army uniform as he said he was in a reenactment group. Fair enough. I was looking at his table of old grenades, bombs, mortars, all sorts to do with explosives. He asked if i'd served and i said yes, told him i was an MP for a few years.

He then proceeds to tell me how....he joined at 16, then didn't have a regiment because he was singled out two weeks into training as one of the "special ones" (pretty much summed it up actually), and he and three mates were put on regimental police duties around the barracks until needed by the government! Funnily enough when i said "You must have served a while back then...what's your army number?", he said they weren't given one for security reasons.

Well as you can imagine i left extremely impressed....however not as impressed as my last story....

Sat in a local bar, and a guy was talking about being a Sgt Maj in the Royal Marines, he struck me as the type, and seemed like a cool enough guy to chat too. He talked about being in the Falklands, and being medically discharged.....not before though....and i have to hold my sides for this one.....not before he was the personal bodyguard for Prince Charles and Lady Diana, driving down the road in London on the day of the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980.

I told him i was only 8 when that happened, but i was off school ill the day of the rescue and watched the whole thing on telly. He then says, and i quote, "Charles then told me to take a drive past and see what was going on, so i did......and then one of the terrorists stuck his head out of the window, so Charles told me to take a shot....so i did!

I said to him, "Funny that..i can't remember anyone shooting a terrorist from the front of the building...from a car?" He replied, "Yeah well they edited lots out that day."

You gotta love em eh?

Care to share any of your own?

CX.

I've yet to find one that tops this. This was the ultimate state of the art walting

I encounterd a "fake soldier" or Walt as you call it only a twice. thats probably because where I live there is a Airforce base, Navy Seabee base, and a Army base. It would be hard for them to pull it off with real military everywhere.

Its usually a dead giveway they are fake when they start talking about how many they killed. Thats something we dont like talking about, we do talk war stories but its mostly about the funny stuff that happend. If we do start talking about certain things it would be with our buddies in my unit.

Its strange but military can spot other military (retired or active) They just have a certain way they talk, hold themselves and the way they walk.

How does the saying go,

"there were 865 Seal's who saw action in Vietnam, and I've met all 10,000"