On Memorial Day, as Americans honored the nation’s war dead, Angelo Otchy bowed his head to accept a medal from officials in Verona for his sacrifice and service. The 35-year-old Army veteran told a reporter that day about his three tours of duty in Iraq. Voice dropping to a near-hush, he spoke, too, about the buried bomb that ripped through his Humvee, injuring him and claiming the lives of three friends, one of them a soldier from Paterson.
“I’m haunted by that day every day of my life,” Otchy told The Star-Ledger.
But Otchy wasn’t in that Humvee. He was at home in New Jersey when the soldiers died. And he didn’t serve three tours of duty in Iraq. He served half of one tour before he was sent back to the States for extended rest and relaxation.
A Star-Ledger examination of Otchy’s claims — including a review of Army records and interviews with military officials, members of his battalion and the blasted Humvee’s lone survivor — show the Verona man fabricated his story. [excerpt end]
Parrot: Otchy's also a Hero of Ground Zero on 9-11,....well,...for a while at least.
excerpt:
Dressed in camouflage fatigues, he said he was a New Jersey Army National Guard soldier who had been conducting search-and-rescue operations atop the ruins of the collapsed Twin Towers.
“I must have come across body parts by the thousands,” Otchy said. His comments, captured by television cameras and picked up in an Associated Press report, were carried in newspapers around the world, translated into German, Japanese and Afrikaans.
A slightly longer account would later be published in the book “America’s Heroes,” about the response of rescue workers on 9/11.
Records show Otchy wasn’t in the National Guard in 2001. In addition, Otchy’s uncle said his nephew told him he didn’t work on the pile at Ground Zero.[end]
