A Marine who served with Graham Platner in Iraq and got matching tattoos with him in Croatia pushed back on a new claim, published in the New York Times on Thursday, that they deliberately chose a Nazi-style symbol.

Fifield told the paper that Platner knew his skull-and-crossbones tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol and had called it “my Totenkopf.” Platner has consistently denied this charge, which was first reported by Jewish Insider and CNN in the fall. Fifield appears to have been the source for both of those stories.
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Phil Proschko, who served with Platner in the Marines, dismissed this claim in a brief interview with Zeteo on Friday.

“No, we did not purposely get hateful fucking shit because we’re racist people,” he said. “We got matching tattoos because we were in our 20s, drunk in Croatia, and that’s it. That’s all that fucking happened.”
Proschko, who participated in a Platner veterans town hall several weeks ago, told the story of their tattoos this way: “We went, we got matching tattoos that we pulled off the wall, or it was out of a book, I don’t remember. We thought it looked cool, something to commemorate what happened, all the people we lost in our unit in Ramadi.”