Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the Trump-Vance campaign called into question claims he previously made about his military service, opening a broadside against the U.S. Navy veteran that some Republicans now liken to “sort of a Swift Boat 2.0 attack.”

It is a reference to the highly contentious playbook the GOP used against Sen. John Kerry when the Massachusetts Democrat ran for the White House in 2004, in large part on his record as a junior naval officer in Vietnam. Those character attacks, widely panned at the time, called into question whether Kerry really deserved his combat medals, notably the three Purple Hearts he was awarded while commanding Swift Boats in the Mekong Delta. For better or worse, this line of criticism has now been rebooted for Walz in the 2024 election.

Walz likely remembers the history well. His first foray into politics was as a volunteer for the Kerry campaign in Minnesota, and later, as the district coordinator of an organization called “Vets for Kerry.” So does Chris LaCivita, a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, who worked as the chief strategist for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a veteran’s group that worked to scuttle the 2004 Kerry campaign.

LaCivita made the comparison explicit in an interview with RealClearPolitics. “Birds of a feather,” he said of Walz and Kerry, “will be tarred together.”

The battle to define the vice-presidential candidate was joined the moment Harris brought him on stage in Philadelphia Tuesday evening. Her running mate was “more than a governor,” she told an at-capacity crowd in Philadelphia Tuesday. To his constituents, he was “Congressman.” To his high school football players, “Coach.” And, she added, “to his fellow veterans, he is Sergeant Major Walz.”

Walz retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005, ending a 24-year career shortly before his unit, the National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, deployed to Iraq.

“When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him – a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with,” said Trump running mate Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. A Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, Vance added, “I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through, and then to drop out right........

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