In a book and in his campaign for the U.S. Senate in Montana, Tim Sheehy has talked about a bullet lodged in his forearm — an injury he says he suffered as a Navy SEAL during a firefight in Afghanistan.
The bullet wound stands at the center of a story of bravery and honor that has boosted his credibility among voters in Montana, where Mr. Sheehy appears to be on the verge of ousting a longtime incumbent, Senator Jon Tester, and perhaps flipping the Senate chamber to Republican control. But the tale grew murky this year when it emerged that Mr. Sheehy had reported to the police that he had accidentally shot himself in the arm at Glacier National Park in Montana, three years after his military deployment.
In a campaign that is one of the most closely watched in the country this year, Mr. Sheehy has stuck by his war story.
Now, in interviews, two people who had close interactions with Mr. Sheehy during key moments in the story have come forward, raising new questions about whether the bullet wound had come during his military service.
A former SEAL colleague, Dave Madden, who had what he described as a close relationship with Mr. Sheehy before they deployed to Afghanistan, said that Mr. Sheehy never mentioned a gunshot wound to him, and almost certainly would have done so in a conversation they had during their deployment if he had indeed been wounded.
On the issue of the later injury in Montana, Kim Peach, a park ranger who spoke with Mr. Sheehy that day at the hospital, said Mr. Sheehy personally told him that he had accidentally shot himself in the arm, and handed over a revolver with a spent round.
“I am 100 percent sure he shot himself that day,” Mr. Peach said in an interview.
The accounts provide additional evidence on an issue of truthfulness that has dogged the Sheehy campaign, after The Washington Post first reported about the injury in Montana and the various accounts that Mr. Sheehy has provided, one of which he has admitted was a lie.
Mr. Sheehy and his lawyers have insisted that he was indeed shot in Afghanistan and that suggesting otherwise was “tantamount to falsely accusing him of stolen valor.” They disputed the accounts of Mr. Madden and Mr. Peach, and said that Mr. Sheehy did not initially report his war wound because he suspected that it may have occurred as a result of friendly fire, which might have caused problems for his platoonmates.
That initial effort to protect his peers, the lawyers said, continued for years, after Mr. Sheehy left active duty. They said that when Mr. Sheehy suffered what they said was an injury on a hike in the national park and sought help at a hospital emergency room, the medical staff told him they needed to report the bullet in his arm to law enforcement. He decided to lie about it, the lawyers said, by telling both the medical staff and Mr. Peach that the bullet had come from an accidental shooting that day.
“Mr. Sheehy’s account is the only plausible one,” the lawyers said.
The questions over the bullet wound have become an issue in the campaign. Democrats have seized on Mr. Sheehy’s conflicting stories about his injury and run an ad that questioned his truthfulness.
Since the initial news reports on the issue appeared in April, Mr. Sheehy has largely stopped talking about his wound in his stump speeches. The controversy appears to have done little to dampen his chances of winning the race; a recent poll showed him leading Mr. Tester by seven percentage points.
Mr. Madden, who served as a Navy SEAL for nearly a decade, now works as a software engineer in the Pacific Northwest, and recalled in an interview how much he admired Mr. Sheehy during their preparations for war. A registered Democrat who has frequently criticized Mr. Sheehy’s politics and character online in recent months, Mr. Madden said he agreed to speak publicly about his recollections because he had grown increasingly concerned about Mr. Sheehy’s truthfulness.
He said he and Mr. Sheehy had grown close during the 18 months of shoulder-to-shoulder training they underwent before their unit was deployed to Afghanistan in early 2012. In Afghanistan, the two men were assigned to separate platoons, working to stabilize different villages. Mr. Madden showed a series of emails indicating that they had remained in contact during the spring of 2012, and he said they got together again that July.
Mr. Sheehy told The Post that he was shot in the forearm during a firefight in late April or early May of that year. But Mr. Madden said that Mr. Sheehy never spoke about it to him, either in emails or when they reconnected in July 2012.
During that in-person meeting, Mr. Madden said, the two men swapped war stories about the various close conflicts with enemy fighters that they had endured. But through the entire conversation that day, he said, Mr. Sheehy never mentioned any sort of bullet wound. He said he remembers that Mr. Sheehy had his sleeves rolled up during the conversation, and there was no visible evidence of any injury to his arm.
Mr. Madden said he was surprised when Mr. Sheehy began talking more recently about having been shot that spring in Afghanistan, and that he became convinced that Mr. Sheehy had invented the story.
“It seems obvious to me and every other operator I’ve talked to about this,” Mr. Madden said, referring to other military veterans.
Mr. Sheehy’s lawyers said the conversation Mr. Madden described having with Mr. Sheehy in July 2012 never happened, and that Mr. Madden was coming forward now for political reasons. “Mr. Madden’s social media and donation history makes clear that he supports Democratic candidates and wants Mr. Sheehy to lose his Senate race,” they said.
The incident at Glacier National Park occurred in October 2015. Mr. Peach, the park ranger, wrote in his incident report that when he interviewed Mr. Sheehy at a hospital outside the park, Mr. Sheehy told him that he had mishandled his revolver, which discharged a round that ended up in his arm.
Mr. Peach had spoken to The Post anonymously for its initial report in April. In an on-the-record interview with The New York Times, Mr. Peach affirmed key details of his incident report, and said that he was certain that Mr. Sheehy had received a gunshot wound to his arm at the park.
He said a visitor had called in a report of a gunshot fired in a parking lot at the park, and that he had started driving toward the lot to check it out. While he was on the way, though, dispatchers heard from a hospital that Mr. Sheehy had arrived there wounded, Mr. Peach said. Health care professionals in the state are required to report gunshot wounds to law enforcement.
Mr. Peach said that when he got to the hospital, he found Mr. Sheehy with a bandage on his arm, preparing to be discharged. With a medical staff member present, Mr. Sheehy reported that he had accidentally shot himself and that a bullet was now lodged in his arm, Mr. Peach said.
Because it is illegal to discharge a firearm in a national park, Mr. Peach said, he and Mr. Sheehy went out to Mr. Sheehy’s vehicle, where Mr. Peach temporarily confiscated the gun and unloaded it, finding five live rounds and the casing of one that had been fired. Mr. Peach, who described himself as someone who generally votes for Democrats, said Mr. Sheehy was embarrassed at what had transpired. He was charged and agreed to pay a $525 fine.
Mr. Sheehy went on to write a statement in which he said that he had just finished a hike and was loading his gear into his vehicle when a firearm he had brought along for bear protection “fell out and discharged into my right forearm.” He requested leniency, expressing “my deepest apologies for any inconvenience this incident caused.”
Lawyers for Mr. Sheehy said in a letter to The Times this week that the bullet had actually came from an apparent ricochet during a firefight in Afghanistan, and that Mr. Sheehy had not wanted to spark an official investigation that could create problems for his fellow SEALs.
Three years later in Montana, they said, he slipped on a patch of ice and fell to the ground, re-aggravating the bullet injury. When he got to the hospital, they said, he informed medical workers of his past gunshot wound. He explained that the gunshot was not fresh, the lawyers said, but when hospital officials said they would still have to contact law enforcement, Mr. Sheehy changed his story to say that he accidentally shot himself in the national park, still fearing that revealing the ricochet bullet could result in problems for his former SEAL teammates.
The lawyers said that Mr. Sheehy did not have gunshot residue on his body when he went to the hospital for treatment, but they did not produce any medical records of the examination.
The lawyers also said that Mr. Sheehy could not have accidentally shot himself by dropping the weapon out of his car, because the firing mechanism on the Colt .45 revolver requires that someone pull the trigger. Manuals for some versions of the gun, however, include a warning that the weapon can fire when dropped.
Mr. Madden said the claim that Mr. Sheehy was trying to protect his platoon mates by first concealing and later lying about the bullet in his arm did not make sense to him. From his experience, he said, there would be no reason to cover up a wound in the name of protecting platoon mates because nobody would be investigating the origin of a bullet from a firefight. And in any case, he said, a ricochet during a firefight would be considered a hazard of battle, not a scandal.
As Mr. Madden heard more about Mr. Sheehy’s Senate campaign, he said, he was also surprised at Mr. Sheehy’s reference to parachuting into Glacier National Park as part of his SEAL training before the deployment to Afghanistan. “We’d parachute into Glacier National Park,” Mr. Sheehy said at a campaign speech in July. “We’d climb the mountains. We’d do horseback training right through the Continental Divide here.”
Mr. Madden said he was with Mr. Sheehy during the training in Montana, writing the contracts for the different activities, and none of it included parachuting, let alone jumping into Glacier National Park. The Daily Montanan reported that officials with the National Park Service and the Navy have also questioned the account, saying that parachuting is not permitted in the park, even for the military.
Mr. Sheehy declined requests to provide The Times with military medical records that might show when he received any injuries in Afghanistan, or hospital records that would reflect that the injury in Montana was a result of a fall and not a fresh gunshot wound. He has not given permission the hospital in Montana permission to discuss his treatment.
Mr. Sheehy’s campaign helped The Times connect with some of his other SEAL peers, including Justin Sheehan and Paul Zohorsky. Neither man was present at the firefight where Mr. Sheehy says he was shot. But both of them recalled hearing about Mr. Sheehy suffering injuries. They did not recall discussion of a gunshot, and Mr. Sheehan said that his conversation with Mr. Sheehy focused on injuries from an improvised explosive device.
Both men said they considered Mr. Sheehy trustworthy. “He is 100 percent a credible, do-the-right-thing guy,” Mr. Sheehan said.
Another of Mr. Sheehy’s former SEAL peers, spoke on condition of anonymity because he is working in a sensitive capacity for the government. He said he recalled Mr. Sheehy speaking about an I.E.D. blast and mentioning having been struck in a friendly fire incident. But the SEAL said he did not know any further details about the incident, like whether a bullet had lodged in Mr. Sheehy’s arm, and said he considered the matter “insignificant” in the larger scheme of the war.
Another service member, who was attached to Mr. Sheehy’s platoon in Afghanistan and spoke anonymously because he is still in the military, said he recalled a brief conversation after a firefight in which Mr. Sheehy said he thought he had “caught a ricochet.” Mr. Sheehy did not show a wound or discuss whether a bullet had entered his body, he said, as the conversation was a brief check-in to make sure everyone was OK, and Mr. Sheehy seemed to still be fully functional.
Mr. Sheehy earned some of the military’s highest accolades for his service in Afghanistan, including a Bronze Star for his efforts to rescue one wounded man in a firefight.
In 2015, he was awarded the Purple Heart, a military decoration for service members who have been injured or killed in the line of duty. The public record does not specify the nature of the injury or injuries for which the medal was awarded, and Mr. Sheehy did not respond to requests for further information. A local news account from the 2015 award ceremony said Mr. Sheehy received it for injuries from an improvised explosive device.
Mr. Madden said he suspected that Mr. Sheehy was injured in the same way many troops were at that time, by I.E.D. explosions that can sometimes cause concussive or impact injuries without a direct hit.
“Tim was a good SEAL,” Mr. Madden said. “Tim was a better SEAL than I was. There is no doubt in my mind about that.” But even so, he said, he does not believe Mr. Sheehy’s claim to have been shot in Afghanistan.
Mr. Madden, who has donated over the years to Democratic candidates, has had plenty of issues with Mr. Sheehy’s politics. In online postings referring to Mr. Sheehy’s business career, Mr. Madden has called him “Private Equity’s golden son, ascendant,” and has predicted that if Montanans elected him to the U.S. Senate, Mr. Sheehy would “make ungodly amounts of money selling their public lands and taking bribes.”
Mr. Madden has also referred to a personal falling-out the two men had in Afghanistan, when Mr. Madden said he was going through a personal “breakdown” and asked Mr. Sheehy for help, but Mr. Sheehy “walked away.” That happened during the same 2012 conversation they had about war injuries, Mr. Madden said, and it was one of the reasons that, even years later, he remembered the conversation so well.
Still, Mr. Madden said, he has been reluctant this year to fully tell his story. He said he dislikes both political parties, and felt motivated to come forward not by politics but by a sense of responsibility.
Mr. Sheehy left active duty in 2014. On the campaign trail, he has told voters that his medical troubles, including a heart issue discovered after underwater training, meant that he “couldn’t serve any more as a SEAL, which was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.” However, in his book, Mr. Sheehy said the Navy offered him a “period of recovery and evaluation” before he could return to active duty, and that he chose to leave the SEALs instead.
“I was no longer interested in following that path if I didn’t know I could return to operational status,” he wrote. Mr. Sheehy eventually transitioned to the Navy Reserve. Then, records show, he was discharged with an “involuntary separation” after failing to earn promotion to the next rank.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
