Ten-shun!
It's a bit late for that.

What's that you say, soldier?
I'm just saying, maybe we all should have been paying more attention last year, when doubts about STORMWATCH writer Micah Wright's past as a US Army Ranger began to surface.

That sounds like a load of bull from gung-ho right-wing nuts who can't stand the thought of an ex-soldier going peacenik!
Oddly enough, that's just what Wright's fans said when real ex-Rangers came by his Delphi forum to question the claims. The visitors weren't exactly well-treated - in fact, many of them were gagged or banned by the forum moderators, made up of Wright's fans.

And rightly so!
Except they were wrong.

What?
Wright was never in the Airborne Rangers. He was never even in the Army. He didn't parachute into Panama, he didn't kill anyone in the line of duty, and he didn't write for the cartoon show ANGRY BEAVERS.

Now hang on a minute, that last one's definitely true.
Well, OK. But as Wright is rapidly finding out, with the lies about his military career becoming public knowledge, everything else he's said over the last few years is now called into question.

So the whole thing's just one big lie?
Wright prefers the word "hoax".

But he wrote such convincing military fiction!
The clue, as they say, is in the question...

Just what is the truth, then? Has Wright even seen a military base?
Perhaps. He now claims to have been in the US Army's ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps), which mainly takes college students and trains them to be officers alongside their usual college studies, but left after deciding "eight years of military service were not for me". His claims to have served as an Airborne Ranger came about, Wright says, when he began receiving death threats and suspect packages from people strongly opposed to his outspoken political views. He discovered that telling these people he was an ex-soldier got them to shut up and leave him alone.

Is it really that easy to fake this sort of thing?
That's what people said when Prexy Bush first came under fire for alleged draft-dodging, and look how well that's turned out.

Oh, come on. Dubya's the most powerful politican on earth, and Micah Wright works in comic books. He doesn't have the resources to conduct a cover-up! Surely someone must have known he was lying?
Quite a few people, yes. Unsurprisingly, most of them were genuine ex-Rangers. In addition to this site, which catalogues false claims of service in the division, there was at least one thread on a veterans' forum which even posted a picture of the class from which Wright claimed to have graduated, noting that he wasn't on it.

So how come someone didn't point, say, DC at this?
Probably because Wright refuted and ignored such claims, dismissing them as lies by gung-ho right-wing nuts who can't stand... Oh wait, we've done that one.

What about that poster book he had published last year? And the newspapers who interviewed him? They must all have been in on it, right?
Not likely - Wright's second book for Seven Stories press, IF YOU'RE NOT A TERRORIST THEN STOP ASKING QUESTIONS, has just been cancelled. And the Washington Post, which ran this praise-filled interview by Richard Leiby last year - indirectly supporting Wright's assertion that the media are partly to blame, by being astoundingly blasé in their fact-checking - has now made up for their laxity somewhat by running a rather less complimentary exposé, not coincidentally also by Leiby.

Exposé? But I thought he already confessed.
Like everything else involving comics and the Internet, there's only so much fact to go round. Wright says he decided to confess because he couldn't take the guilty pressure any more and did so to Seven Stories Press, who then contacted the Post. Leiby says he made his own enquiries, including requesting official Army records at least a month ago, and demanding evidence of Wright's claim from Seven Stories, which he didn't receive.

So Wright could have heard about the Post's upcoming exposé, and tried to pre-empt it?
You might say that, but I couldn't possibly comment.

Is his career finished?
That depends on how reprehensible you deem his actions. None of these revelations change Wright's ability as a writer, after all, and it's not like he's actually committed any crime. But if the story whips up a media storm - a scenario no more far-fetched than, say, an Airborne Rangers veteran writing comic books - he may yet become too hot a potato for publishers to handle.

So what the hell does he do now?
Deal with the immense and ugly fallout on his Delphi forum, for a start...

Hector Reeder is an expert.

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