B. G. Burkett

B.G. Burkett is a retired Army officer and financial advisor. He is best known as co-author of the self-published book Stolen Valor, written with journalist Glenna Whitley. It received the Colby Award for military writers in 2000.

Early life Burkett was the son of an air force colonel and his wife, and grew up on military bases. As a child, he felt 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". Burkett states that life on a military base imbued in him "an understanding that the military was the guardian of the freedoms enjoyed by the civilian population."

Career As a young man, Burkett enlisted in the U.S. Army in June 1966. He joined the 199th Infantry Brigade and fought in the Vietnam War. After returning from the war, he started a career in finance. Burkett has a Master of Business Administration.

Burkett says he checked over 3,500 people's claims to have served in Vietnam,

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the self-published Stolen Valor gained a "cult status" among military members. It has been credited for inspiring the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 passed by Congress, making it a crime for an individual to falsely claim to have been awarded military medals.

In 2005, Burkett co-authored a paper with B.C. Frueh, J.D. Elhai, and J.D. Monnier that was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. It focused on concerns "regarding the validity of combat exposure reports of veterans seeking treatment for combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder".