Military veterans, have you ever busted some blowhard who was trying to pretend to have served yet their knowledge of the service is faulty?

Back in the late 1980s, my wife met a woman who was the friend of a friend. About a month later, the lady and her husband were having a get-together at their home and we were invited. There were about four or five couples there, and I was the only active-duty servicemember among the crowd.
  After dinner, when I mentioned that I was a Marine, the hostess piped up that she was a Marine veteran herself.
  “Really? How interesting,” I said, finding a kindred spirit. “What was your MOS?”
  She was like a deer in the headlights, claimed that she wasn’t familiar with the acronym.
  “You know, your Military Occupational Specialty? What did you do in the Corps?” I asked her.
  “Oh, we didn’t call it that back then, maybe that’s new since I got out,” she explained.  She was only about ten years older than I was, and the MOS system had been in place for about twenty to thirty years at that point, so I asked her when she had served. She said it was right after the Vietnam War. I know that April 1975 was when US military involvement ended there, so she would have been about ten to fifteen years off of active duty.
  “All enlisted Marines have an MOS, some of us even have more than one. How is it that you . . . ?”
  “Oh, I was an officer, not enlisted,” she said. 
  That’s different, I thought, and said, “I see, that’s why you didn’t have an enlisted MOS. So what did you do as an officer?”
  She doubled down. “I was a nurse.” she said.
  “Oh, so you were in the Navy.” I said.
  “No, I was in the Marine Corps.” she answered.
  Whoa, Nelly, I thought. “The Marine Corps doesn’t have nurses. Were you a Navy corpsman* who was assigned to a Marine base or to a Marine unit? Even so, that would have made you an enlisted sailor, not a Marine.”
  “No,” she insisted, “I was a nurse in the Marine Corps.”
  I replied, “The Marine Corps doesn’t have nurses and never has.  It’s never had doctors or dentists or any other medical personnel or chaplains.  The Marine Corps gets all of those people from the Navy, they’re assigned to the Marine Corps for temporary duty from a few weeks or months all the way up to three-year stints.” I told her.
  She shrugged, “All I know is that I was never in the Navy, I was in the Marines.”
  I looked toward her husband, who shrugged his shoulders. “I’m a civilian,” he said, “I don’t know anything about all that stuff. It was before I met her, and she’s always told me that’s what she did, so that’s all I know.”
  I looked back at her and asked in what unit she had been. “I don’t remember, all I know is that I was a nurse in the Marine Corps,” she said defiantly.
  I thought maybe she had been in an ROTC unit in school or college, or perhaps in the Young Marines Program, which is similar to Scouting for youngsters who are interested in joining the armed forces after they turn eighteen years old.  Nope, she insisted, she had been an active duty Marine, and a nurse at that. She couldn’t name any unit she had been in, where she had trained, which base or bases she was on, her rank, how long she had served or how she left active duty, nothing. [No military person is completely unable to answer those basics unless age or mental capacity prevents them from doing so.]
  By that time, my wife was pinching me under the table, so I let it go and the topic of conversation changed to something else. The entire exchange had only lasted a minute or two, it wasn’t brought up again that night, and nothing else ever came of it. The evening went on, and it wasn’t until after we left and were in our car driving home that I said to my wife that there was absolutely no way the story had a word of truth to it. My wife, also a civilian with zero military experience, acknowledged that even to her, the story seemed fishy, but mostly because of the flaky way the woman told it, not because my wife could or could not find credibility based on knowing about the Marine Corps. Just by being married to me, she had cursory knowledge, but would have been fooled if no other source challenged a claim like that one. We chalked it up to some kind of boastfulness the woman must have had and that was that.

*In the US Navy after World War II, “hospitalman”, “hospital corpsman”, and “corpsman” were the official names of the rates (jobs) of enlisted people in the medical field. It was further broken down by medical corpsman, dental corpsman, etc. During and prior to World War II, the official name for the Navy’s medical personnel was “pharmacist’s mate”.
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