What JD Vance did in Iraq, as told by the friend who served with him

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JD Vance sparked a firestorm this week when he accused fellow veteran and Democratic vice presidential nominee, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, of abandoning his unit before it deployed to Iraq.

“When the United States Marine Corps … asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it,” Vance told reporters.  “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq … he dropped out of the army and allowed his unit to go without him.”

Democrats were quick to hit back at the claim, pointing out that Walz filed to run for Congress and officially retired from the Minnesota National Guard months before his unit was alerted about deployment. But Vance’s criticism of his opponent’s record has drawn greater scrutiny of his own time as a “combat correspondent” in the Marine Corps, a role that involves gathering news and writing articles for internal Marine Corps publications and facilitating interviews and access for civilian media.

Following his attacks on Walz, some Democratic critics gave him the disparaging nickname “Sergeant Scribbles” because of the clerical nature of his assignment.

But Cullen Tiernan, who served alongside JD Vance in Iraq as a fellow combat correspondent, told The Independent the role was not without danger.

“When we first landed, we got mortar and rockets from Baghdadi, the neighboring town. That was definitely a shock,” he said. “It’s odd to me that people would try to negate or put down what combat correspondents do. When you’re walking in patrol, or when you’re flying in a helicopter that goes into the sandstorm, or when you come upon an IED, and see people who have been blown up, you’re having the same exact experience. You just also have a camera and an obligation to document it.”

Vance enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating from high school in 2003. He went by the name James D. Hamel at the time, having taken the last name of his stepfather.

He served for four years with the 2nd Marine Aircraft In Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, and was deployed to Iraq for six months from August 2005 and into 2006, based at Al Asad air base in western Iraq.

Vance would occasionally go out beyond the wire of the base on missions to Al Qaim and other towns further up the Euphrates River to document the work of the Marine Corps. Tiernan said they would carry M16 rifles and 9mm pistols as they did so.

Writing in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance said he was “lucky to escape any real fighting.” But the period in which he was deployed was by no means quiet. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq had been raging for three years by the time Vance arrived in the country. In 2005, Iraqis voted in national elections and some 844 American service members were killed across the country.

The next year, a sectarian civil war brought extreme violence between Sunni and Shia communities and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq, which would later become Isis.

Movie fans might be familiar with one of the few representations of combat correspondents on the big screen in the character of Private James T. “Joker“ Davis, from the 1987 Vietnam War epic by Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket.

But Tiernan said the combat correspondent’s primary role was “telling the Marine Corps’ story.”

“These people don’t toot their own horn, so it’s about making their family and their friends and the people that love them understand what they’re doing and what their sacrifice entails,” he added.

Vance wrote at least 11 articles for the official website of the Marine Corps while he was deployed. His first, published on September 11, 2005, was about the Marine engineers building bases for the Iraq security forces. In another, he wrote about a daring rescue by Marines of a sniper who was injured and pinned down in a gun battle in northwestern Iraq.

“Luckily, the sniper was still alive, but he needed immediate medical attention. But, there was a problem. The closest casualty evacuation helicopters were miles away, and were still on the ground.  If the Marine’s life was going to be saved, he needed to be evacuated right then,” Vance wrote in the article, which included interviews with the people involved.

Tiernan said Vance’s time writing about the Marine Corps was where he “learned the art” of storytelling, which enabled to tell his family story in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. The book propelled Vance to fame and set him on a path to the halls of Congress as Senator of Ohio, and later to the Republican ticket as candidate for vice president.

Tiernan, a progressive activist who disagrees with Vance politically, was there for the entire deployment and they remain friends to this day.

“I love JD still. Pretty much everyone I served with — but especially those I went to Iraq with and have those deep 20-year relationships [with] — I really do my best not to let politics get in the middle of it,” he said. “That is not to say that I don’t try to influence the man, and he certainly tries to influence me in our friendship over the years.”

Tiernan added that one thing they do agree on is “trying to end wars.”

“I think that he’s in a unique position to try to de-escalate conflicts because he knows what it’s like to be a person sent to the front lines, be[ing] away from their family and their friends and everything that they know that’s familiar. Him not wanting that to happen to other people — it’s a real important voice to have in politics,” he said.

Both Vance and Tiernan returned from their deployment disillusioned with the war, and the projection of American military power.

“I left for Iraq in 2005, a young idealist committed to spreading democracy and liberalism to the backward nations of the world,” Vance wrote in 2020. “I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.”

In a statement, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson strongly pushed back against Vance’s claim that Walz had “dropped out” rather than deploy with the men he led, instead accurately describing the governor’s separation from service as a normal retirement after nearly a quarter-century in uniform.

“After 24 years of military service, Governor Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he chaired Veterans Affairs and was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform — and as Vice President of the United States he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families,” they said.