In a letter to the board on Aug. 21, Walsh said, “I did not purposefully or knowingly intend to plagiarize.”

Walsh spent the 2006-2007 academic year at the Army War College and called 2007 “a difficult year personally for me.”

He had returned from a one-year deployment to Iraq in November 2005. In Iraq, he said he was in the area of several improvised explosive devices, including one that came close to killing everyone in his vehicle. Four soldiers under his command were killed in Iraq, he said, and then in March 2007, another soldier committed suicide.

Although he was prescribed medication for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while at the War College, Walsh said he was never evaluated for possible post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and never received any treatment beyond medicine.

He added, “Looking back, I now believe my struggles with PTSD and likely PCS during my time at the (Army War College) were a significant detriment to my academic performance. In retrospect, I was not in the best frame of mind to be in an academic setting.”