calling it "one [of] the most courageous books of the decade". The book received the Colby Award for military writers in 2000. It is believed to have contributed to Congressional passage of the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made it a crime for an individual to falsely claim to have been awarded military medals. In 1999, Mackubin Thomas Owens, a Marine infantry veteran of Vietnam, praised the book and Burkett, saying, concluding, "Mr. Burkett has done an immense service to his fellow veterans, and by extension to his country". In 2004, Dave Curry from Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) responded to the criticism of VVAW in the book. In a scathing review, he said the book displayed political partisanship, made "errors in research methodology" and misleading statements about Winter Soldier Investigation participants, and denigrated the experiences and motives of veterans who subsequently opposed the war. In 2008, psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh listed Stolen Valor as one of the five best books on "the factions and follies of psychiatry." He cited Burkett's efforts to uncover fraudulent PTSD claims. A 2009 article in Columbia Journalism Review discussed how Stolen Valor'' exposed the media's gullibility in failing to fact-check people who claimed military service and awards. It concluded that "no reporter who reads it will ever again crank out a Veterans Day feature without making an effort to verify the subject’s claims first". References External links Glenna Whitley & B.G. Burkett: Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Vietnam War books 1998 non-fiction books Self-published books