Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, one of the GOP’s top recruits for 2024, has been sharing inconsistent accounts of how he received a gunshot wound to the arm.
The 38-year-old challenger to vulnerable Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) has previously claimed he was wounded in combat, but a Washington Post story on a previously unreported incident has made the claim even more suspect.
Sheehy told the paper he lied to a National Park Service ranger about shooting himself in the arm in 2015, claiming “I guess the only thing I’m guilty of is admitting to doing something I never did.”
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Sheehy said he lied to the ranger about illegally discharging a firearm in order to protect his former platoon members from an investigation into the gunshot wound he maintains occurred in Afghanistan back in 2012, not in Montana’s Glacier National Park.
Sheehy told The Post he’s not sure if the wound came from hostile or friendly fire. However, one of the surgeons The Post consulted about an X-ray the Sheehy campaign provided said he’s “doubtful” the gunshot wound was from a military-level assault rifle, and that it more likely came from a handgun.
Sheehy received both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart over separate incidents in Afghanistan, and neither of those is in dispute or involved any friendly fire, according to the report.
The candidate insisted he did not fire a weapon in the park, telling the paper he fell on a bike and injured himself badly enough to go to an emergency room. The park ranger got involved once he disclosed he had a bullet wound in his arm, Sheehy said.
In Sheehy’s 2023 memoir Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting, he wrote in one passage about being shot multiple times in Afghanistan, yet in another, described only being hit by a bullet once. In the ranger’s written description of the 2015 incident, Sheehy recalled being shot by his Colt .45 revolver in the Logan Pass parking lot after it tumbled down a pile of gear before hitting the ground and firing into his arm.
A firearms expert and former ATF agent, Rick Vasquez, told The Post it would be “very unlikely” for that kind of a weapon to misfire when hitting the ground, as Sheehy described it to the ranger.
The ranger, who spoke with The Post under the condition of anonymity, said Sheehy recounted feeling lucky the bullet didn’t strike his wife or children who were with him that day.
In Sheehy’s telling of events to the paper, he said he fell on his arm after slipping on some ice and told hospital workers, “You know, hurt my arm. You know, there is a gunshot wound in there… I just need to take a look at it and make sure everything’s OK.” This was all surprising to the ranger in his interview with The Post, describing Sheehy having the gun holstered in his vehicle that day with the chamber fully loaded except for one bullet.
A Sheehy campaign spokesperson said in a lengthy statement to The Daily Beast that the candidate “won’t ever let any of this slander stop him from fighting every day as your next U.S. Senator.”
“Tim Sheehy humbly served our nation with honor. He has never called himself a hero, but he served alongside them. Many of them never came home,” the campaign spokesperson said in an email. “It’s no surprise that the Washington Post is working to question his service and the fact that he sustained injuries in the war—let alone need to see an X-ray confirming it. While Montanans respect his selfless sacrifice for our country and commend it, because he is a Republican running for office, the liberal elite misinformation machine is going to great lengths to question and attack it.”
“The bullet in Tim’s arm was a result of his service in Afghanistan,” the statement continued. “Tim never reported it because he didn’t want to trigger an investigation of his team, be pulled from the battlefield, and see a fellow teammate be punished. It was always about protecting a fellow team member of his unit he thought could have been responsible due to friendly fire ricochet in the heat of an engagement with the enemy.”
The Sheehy campaign spokesperson went on to accuse the media of being “in cahoots” with Tester, and described the senator—who’s also the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee—as someone who “doesn’t care about veterans and their sacrifices; he only cares about another term in office.”
