A man who served in Vietnam with now-Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, and who is now a lawyer, has some interesting things to say about the judge's character. The question is, do we want to hear the truth?

“Stop me if you've heard this one before,” writes columnist Paul Mulshine.

“Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore walked into a brothel ...

... and then he walked right back out.”

“That's the account I got from Bill Staehle, a lawyer living in Asbury Park [N.J.] who served in Vietnam with Moore in the early 1970s,” Mulshine continued.

Mulshine spoke to Staehle after the attorney wrote a recent open letter to Alabama voters relating his knowledge of Moore’s character. Staehle, now 70, knew Moore from a base just outside Da Nang. Both men were captains in the 504th Military Police Battalion at the time.

Staehle considers Moore a man of sterling integrity, writing, “I served with Roy Moore in Vietnam in 1971-72, where I knew him to be an altogether honorable, decent, respectable, and patriotic commander and soldier.” One incident in particular, however, stands out in his mind. As he related in his open letter:

While in Vietnam, there came a time when another officer invited Roy and me to go with him into town after duty hours for a couple of beers. That officer had just returned from an assignment in Quang Tri Province north of Danang, and we were interested to learn of his experiences.

I had not met him before, and I don’t believe Roy had either. On other occasions with other officers, we would go to the officers’ club at the air force base, but on this occasion, he told us he knew of another place in town.

When we arrived at the place and went inside, it was clear to Roy and me that he had taken us to a brothel. That officer appeared to know people there, as he was greeted by one or two young women in provocative attire.

The place was plush. There were other American servicemen there. Alcohol was being served. There were plenty of very attractive young women clearly eager for an intimate time.

In less time than it took any of the women to approach us, Roy turned to me and said words to this effect, “We shouldn’t be here. I am leaving.”

Moore and Staehle, just 24 years old at the time, did in fact leave.

Staehle doesn’t believe the allegations against the Senate candidate. And while he hadn’t heard from his old buddy in years since Vietnam, his letter prompted a call from Moore. As Staehle related to Mulshine, “He said to me, ‘Bill, I’m telling you, these allegations are not true.’”

This satisfied Staehle. As he put it, “You don’t lie to a guy you went to war with.”

Nonetheless, Staehle has more informing his opinion than just a brother-in-arms bond. He has his experience, too, having been a lawyer for 42 years and currently supervising 44 attorneys in his position at a major insurance company. And this background causes him to wonder about one of Moore’s accusers, Leigh Corfman, who claimed Moore behaved inappropriately with her when she was 14. Referring to a recent televised interview with her on the Today Show, Staehle told Mulshine, “I know when somebody is meticulously prepared and when the witness is using words that don’t seem to suit where she's coming from…. I prepare witnesses as well as depose witnesses. It was clear she was very well prepared.”

Staehle said that this doesn’t mean Corfman is or isn’t lying. But with “‘the passage of time, the story changes,’ he said. ‘I see that in my litigation all the time. People exaggerate things. They add to the story,’” related Mulshine.

In fact, it seems much has been “added” to the Moore allegations. Last week I reported on how the claims of Moore’s most damning accuser, Beverly Young Nelson, have apparently unraveled; most notably, Nelson and her attorney, Gloria Allred, have refused to allow the third-party analysis of a signed yearbook entry they claimed is Moore’s but that is now widely considered a forgery. In fact, Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks, who lost to Moore in the GOP primary, thus asserts and says that Nelson is “clearly a liar.”

Brooks isn’t the only one making this claim. Nelson’s stepson, Darrel Nelson, said that his stepmother’s allegations are “100 percent a lie.”

Nelson is not the only accuser whose credibility has been called into question, or who may have an axe to grind. Tina Johnson, who claims the judge grabbed her buttocks in 1991, was unable to wrest custody of her 12-year-old son away from her mother, Mary Katherine Cofield, who had hired Moore to help her obtain permanent custody of the boy. Johnson has had drug problems and once pled guilty to felony fraud for check forgery.

Then there’s ex-Gadsden, Alabama, police officer Faye Gary, who claimed she’d been told to watch Moore in the late ’70s and keep him away from “cheerleaders” but then admitted she was just relating “rumor.” Not only did my news-making conversation with her reveal that she’s a staunch anti-Moore ideologue, but she also reportedly has ties to the drug-dealing underworld. Her two sons, who have different last names, both were arrested for distributing illegal drugs; one was shot to death before he could go to trial while the other is currently in a federal penitentiary, reported One America News Network.

Perhaps even more telling, Gary’s brother, Jimmy Wright, was arrested in 1981 for distributing controlled substances — and Roy Moore was the prosecutor in his case.

In fact, with Moore’s senatorial opponent being far-left Democrat Doug Jones, who’s pro-prenatal infanticide, pro-“transgender” agenda and pro-amnesty, it just may be that the judge is one of the only people of integrity in this sorry saga. This would include the politicians, Democrat and Republican, who’ve condemned him. As Mulshine put it, “If elected, Moore will be the first senator in memory to have eyewitness evidence that he exited a brothel without having sex. That may not sound like much. But by Beltway standards, it's a lot.”

For sure. And the only question remaining is whether Alabamans will be stopped from electing a man who stands above the Beltway by a focus on matters originating below the belt.

Photo of Roy Moore: AP Images