B. G. Burkett is the author of the book Stolen Valor. The son of an air force colonel, he joined the US Army in June 1966. Growing up his "heroes were not sports figures like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays but the fighter pilots who had blasted the Luftwaffe out of the sky".[1] Life on a military base imbued in him "an understanding that the military was the guardian of the freedoms enjoyed by the civilian population."[2]