Beauchamp Only Enlisted So He Would Have Something To Write About

That's right ... the soldier who penned columns making up stories of cruelty by our troops, hates the military, and only enlisted so he would have something to write about.

He's a fraud ... two-fold.

PJM:

Just as the world was beginning to wonder if The New Republic had been tricked by a fabricator for the third time in the past decade, the magazine’s staff went to a party.

It was a going-away party for a longtime New Republic senior editor Ryan Lizza, but the staff seemed more interested in discussing the magazine’s immediate future. It was July 20 and the avalanche of questions about a first-person “diarist” piece under the pseudonym “Scott Thomas” –a direct threat to the magazine’s credibility—was starting to tumble down.

Later that night, Robert McGee, a then-assistant to The New Republic’s publisher, went looking for the host. He is curious what Foer thinks about the building scandal. He wants the inside dope.

He finds Foer on the front porch and asks as casually as he can: “So, what’s up with this?”

As McGee recalls the conversation, Foer immediately volunteered the standard answer: conservatives have an ideological grudge to settle because they perceive the magazine to be anti-war, anti-military and so on.

“He sounded almost rehearsed,” McGee said.

What bothered McGee about the conversation was that Foer saw the questions from the bloggers as a completely ideological attack. “Foer wasn’t acknowledging that at least some of the attacks on the [Beauchamp’s] ‘Shock Troops’ piece came from active-duty military members whose skepticism was factually grounded, and not just from stateside political pundits.”

Ok, so we are at a party for the New Republic, and an employee is questioning the articles written by the soldier because of the new media and members of the military exposing them as lies.

I've skipped around a bit for this post ... make sure you read the whole thing. I assure you that you won't be disappointed.

I tracked down Beauchamp’s former fiancée in Schweinfurt, a town near a U.S. Army base in Western Germany. Her name is Priscilla. She didn’t give her last name. She describes herself as “half German, half American.”

Reluctantly and indirectly over a string of emails, Priscilla reveals a recurring pattern: Beauchamp was repeatedly willing to deceive those close to him to reach his goals.

By age 23, he had been engaged three times to three different women whom he did not marry.

Or consider his relationship with the Army. Priscilla writes: “He hates the army. The only reason he joined was because he wanted to have more experience to write about.”

Oddly he was secretive about his intentions to serve his country. “He didn’t even tell his mom he joined in the army. One day before basic training he left a note on the table for her…”

It is telling that he did not talk to her face-to-face, but simply made his admission and vanished.

He is manipulative. “He is very charming and he can convince people very good and he tries to make his side very clear.”

He is ambitious. “He always wanted to become a writer and he has a huge imagination,” Pricilla writes, without irony.

In another email, she notes: “He always wanted to write for The New Republic and so he thought the ‘Iraqi Diary’ is a good start and he could keep writing for them after that.”

Beauchamp wrote his first “Baghdad Diarist” for The New Republic, in January 2007, while he was still engaged to Priscilla.

Priscilla believes that one of the reasons that Beauchamp was interested in Reeve (and ultimately married her) was her position at The New Republic.

Indeed, it appears that Beauchamp’s relationship with Reeve shifted into high gear around the time he was first published in the magazine. “He knew Elspeth from college, but they never were a couple. Then she started emailing him in February or so.” That was a few weeks after his first piece appeared in The New Republic. “I really think she supports him with his articles.”

A marriage of convenience perhaps?

There is tons more. It is a real solid account of the whole Beauchamp saga in time line fashion. Well worth the read.