This tutorial will teach you how to get veteran status in Battlefield Bad Company 2 for free and unlock the M1 Garand. Usually you have to own multiple other Battlefield games in order to attain veteran status, but this will show you how to do it without owning any other games.

You can do this by chatting with EA support, tell them you're having issues getting the veteran status to register on the game and they will manually add the games on to your account. The whole process took me about three minutes but I had to wait in a chat queue for about 20 minutes.

Go to http://support.ea.com/app/chat/chat_landing to get in touch with EA support. It's a live chat, like instant messenger.

Tell them you're having issues with getting the veteran status to work, they may ask you how many other Battlefield games you have, and what games they are. I told them I had three, Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142. The games you choose to tell them don't matter, and if you want to tell them that you have four or five games instead, that will work too.. just be prepared to name them in case they ask.

The support person will ask for your EA account ID (email address). Then they will add the games to your account manually and ask you to verify that you have the veteran status. An easy way to check is to open Battlefield 2 Bad Company, go to the Weapons and Gadgets screen, and see if the M1 Garand is now available.

Last updated: 4/17/2011