In August 2005, a 21-year-old Marine named James David Hamel arrived at Al-Asad Airbase in western Iraq. Hamel was a combat correspondent, and he had been deployed to Al-Asad as part of a public affairs team from the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. His job for the next six months was to embed with soldiers at the base, documenting their missions in short articles for military publications and local papers back in the U.S. During assignments that took him “outside the wire,” as the troops called the areas beyond the boundaries of the base, he would carry a notebook, a camera and a rifle, just in case.
A few years earlier, this assignment would have thrilled Hamel, a bookish teenager from southwestern Ohio who had enlisted in the Marines with dreams of “heading to the Middle East to kill terrorists,” as he would later write. But now, two years into his enlistment, his faith in the American mission was flagging. During a stopover at a military base in Kuwait en route to Iraq, Hamel and a fellow public affairs Marine had overheard a conversation in the base’s chow hall between a group of lieutenants. After two and a half years of fighting in Iraq, one of the lieutenants said, the mission on the ground was stalling out. As soon as American troops cleared Iraqi insurgents from one region, those same insurgents would retake the same area.
Hamel completed his deployment in March 2006 and returned to the U.S., where he finished his enlistment at an airbase in North Carolina. But the feeling of disillusionment that took hold during his time in Iraq stayed with him. Fourteen years later, after graduating from the Ohio State University, earning a law degree at Yale Law School, publishing a best-selling memoir and landing a lucrative job at a private equity firm, Hamel — who by then had taken his grandmother’s last name of Vance — described the change that his six months in Iraq had wrought on his political outlook: “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 the Catholic literary journal The Lamp in 2020, just months before launching a bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio. “I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.”
Vance is the first veteran of the post-9/11 wars to serve as vice president, and the first veteran of any sort to occupy the office since Al Gore. But Vance has only sparingly discussed his time in the military since emerging onto the national political stage in 2021. “It’s not a political talking point,” he said during an appearance on the conservative TV network Newsmax in 2022, when asked why he hadn’t made his military service a more prominent part of his campaign. “I’m a proud Marine, … but at the end of the day, I don’t think that people should wear the Marine Corps on their sleeve to try to get political points.” (Through a spokesperson, Vance declined to be interviewed for this piece.)
Yet Vance’s four years in the Marines stand as one of the most formative periods of his young-adult life. The experience was intensely personal: As Vance recounted in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, his stint in the military marked a psychological turning point in his life, curing him of what he later identified as a crushing case of “learned helplessness” that he had acquired during his tumultuous childhood in postindustrial Ohio. “When I joined the Marine Corps, I did so in part because I wasn’t ready for adulthood,” Vance wrote. “Now I knew exactly what I wanted out of my life and how to get there.”
Yet Vance’s military service also had a profound effect on his politics. On the rare occasions that he has publicly mentioned his time in the armed forces, he has done so to describe its influence on his foreign policy thinking. In a speech arguing against additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine delivered on the Senate floor in April 2024, Vance pointed to his service in Iraq as the impetus for his anti-interventionist foreign policy. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” he said, singling out the “propaganda” suggesting that America was fighting “a war for freedom and democracy.” His critique of the war was tinged with the same disdain for America’s ruling elite that has become a hallmark of his populist rhetoric: “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”
Now as vice president, Vance is bringing that criticism to bear on the execution of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. As the de facto leader of the GOP’s anti-interventionist faction, Vance has tried — with mixed results — to dissuade Trump from intervening directly in conflicts overseas. In March, he privately counseled against the air strikes that Trump eventually authorized against the Houthi in Yemen, and in July, he sought to limit the scope of the United State’s attack on Iran — a move that he had previously opposed, before publicly embracing it as a model of the emergent “Trump Doctrine.” As the administration seeks to end conflicts in Ukraine, where Vance has long called for a negotiated settlement, as well as in Gaza, Vance has another chance to press the anti-interventionsts’ case on the international stage.
Yet the ideological aftershocks of Vance’s military service extend far beyond foreign policy. In the Marine Corps, Vance began to form many of the ideas and inclinations that have come to define his broader political philosophy: his skepticism of political elites, his antagonism toward the news media, his ambivalent view of liberal democracy and even his restrictive ideas about immigration and American citizenship. As Vance put it in a speech in 2023, “My entire life has been influenced and affected by the decisions we made a month before I enlisted in the Marine Corps.”
In April 2003, a month after U.S. tanks trundled into the Iraqi desert, an 18-year-old Vance walked into a military recruiter’s office in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, accompanied by his older cousin, Rachael.
A few months earlier, Vance, who still went by his adoptive father’s last name of Hamel, had resolved to enroll at the Ohio State University after graduating from Middletown High School later that summer. But as the enrollment deadline approached, he was having second thoughts. His high school marks were mediocre, and he found the financial aid paperwork for OSU to be convoluted and confusing. Sensing her younger cousin’s indecision, Rachael, who had left the Marines a few years earlier, suggested that he enlist. Most of his family was vehemently opposed, but Vance was enticed. “There was college, or nothing, or the Marines,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, “and I didn’t like either of the first two options.”
Later that summer, Vance reported to Parris Island, South Carolina, for 13 weeks of boot camp, followed by Combat Training School in North Carolina and public affairs training at the Defense Information School at Maryland’s Fort Meade. He had scored high enough on the military’s aptitude test to become a public affairs Marine, and in July 2004, he was assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in eastern North Carolina.
At Cherry Point, he fell in with a small group of Marines from the public affairs office. The cohort worked out of a narrow building on the airfield, writing articles and pulling together material for the base’s official newpaper, The Windsock. Among the other public affairs Marines, Vance immediately stood out for his budding adolescent intellectualism and intense interest in politics. A fellow public affairs Marine at Cherry Point, who is still one of the vice president’s close friends and was granted anonymity to discuss their relationship, recalled that Vance would devour copies of The Economist that an officer would bring into the office and then engage other members of the team in lengthy debates about the articles — much to the bemused admiration of the higher-ups.
“I would chuckle a little bit, but I also admired how intelligent they all were,” said Shawn Haney, Vance’s supervisor in the public affairs office at Cherry Point. “I’ve heard young Marines conversing my whole life, but I never heard such intellectual policy debates happening.”
Before his deployment, Vance often assumed the role of the conventional conservative Republican in these intra-office debates, defending the Bush administration’s decision to go to war and its goal of delivering democracy to the Iraqis. His partisan sympathies were clear to his comrades — “He was nerding out over John McCain more than a normal person would,” the friend from Cherry Point recalled — but he was also interested in the ideas that animated conservative politics. At the time, he was dabbling with atheism and libertarianism, and he was particularly taken by the writings of “New Atheist” writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who argued that religion in general — and radical Islam in particular — served as a divisive and degrading force in the world. (Of the three, only Hitchens offered a broad defense of the war effort.) More than one of Vance’s comrades recalled, with good-natured bitterness, that he encouraged them to read novels by the libertarian writer Ayn Rand.
It was clear to Vance’s comrades that he had a future in politics, even if he never admitted to harboring such aspirations. His potential as a public figure became something of a running gag in the office: At one point, a fellow Marine named Adam Testagrossa superimposed Vance’s face over an image of George W. Bush and printed out copies of the resulting face-smash for the other Marines to hang over their desks. “We kind of jokingly knew he had that potential in him — like, ‘He’ll be president someday,’ Testagrossa recalled. “You could just tell by looking at him that he always had a plan.”
Vance arrived at Al-Asad Airbase in August of 2005, just over two years into his enlistment. By the standards of military bases in Iraq, Al-Asad was a relatively plush assignment. The base was removed from the worst of the fighting, and enlisted soldiers lived in converted shipping containers with access to hot water, air conditioning, recreational facilities and fast-food joints like Burger King and Pizza Hut. Among the enlisted troops at the base, the relatively luxe accommodations earned it the not-entirely-endearing nickname “Camp Cupcake.”
Yet there was no forgetting that “Camp Cupcake” was still in the middle of a war zone. On the day Vance arrived at Al-Asad, he was greeted by a shelter-in-place warning announcing incoming mortar fire. Even during periods of relative calm, the base — which had been built by Saddam Hussein’s government during its war with Iran in the 1980s — retained a certain dystopian air. The grounds were littered with broken-down shells of Russian fighter jets, which earlier waves of American troops had covered with graffiti, and Marines spent their free time exploring the cavernous concrete bunkers that Saddam’s troops had abandoned after the U.S. invasion. Occasionally, troops at the base would encounter packs of wild dogs that had ingested toxic chemicals in the groundwater, requiring them to call military police to shoot the animals. The experience left a particularly sour impression on the dog-loving Vance, recalled the friend from Cherry Point who had deployed to Al-Asad at the same time and was present at the stop-over in Kuwait.
When on assignment at Al-Asad, Vance wrote up short articles about the goings-on at the base, occasionally spinning off longer profiles of individual Marines. Most of the work was completed from the safety of the base, and the vast majority of the assignments were routine and anodyne. Covering a military concert marking the fourth anniversary of 9/11, Vance recounted a speech by a colonel that “compared the patriots of the past to those serving today” and “applauded the Iraqis and Afghans fighting to establish their own democracy.” A few months later, in November, he wrote up a cake-cutting ceremony to celebrate the 230th anniversary of the Navy Chaplain Corps, which served as “an invaluable tool to inspire courage and maintain morale among service members.”
Depending on the pace of the fighting, Vance and his fellow correspondents would occasionally travel outside the wire, embedding with combat units or visiting forward operating bases in other parts of Iraq. The trips were carefully coordinated but not without their dangers: In May 2005, just before Vance’s deployment began, a combat correspondent named Aaron Mankin was caught in a roadside IED attack in Iraq, resulting in serious burns to his face, body and arms. For the most part, though, these journeys outside the wire were distinguished by a Kafkaesque quality, Vance’s friend from Cherry Point recalled. When on assignment, the public affairs Marines were required to carry their delicate camera equipment in backpacks, but the Marines’ uniform code prohibited backpacks, putting Vance and his comrades in a pickle: Wear the backpacks and get chewed out by one set of officers, or not wear the backpacks and get chewed out by a different set of officers. (They mostly wore the backpacks.)
The short dispatches that resulted from these assignments were published in military publications and occasionally in local papers back in the U.S. They were closely edited to comply with military style and standards, but Vance and his fellow correspondents did what they could to subtly flex their literary muscles, competing to slip little stylistic flourishes into their articles. (“The Huey landed under the watchful eye of the Cobra attack helicopter,” Vance wrote in a November 2005 dispatch about a firefight between Marines and local insurgents.) In private, they drew inspiration from the lineage of past literary-minded war correspondents like Ernest Hemingway, who landed alongside the Allied troops at Normandy, and Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote for an Air Force newspaper in the 1950s. “I was a little bit more Faulkner and he was a little more Hemingway,” recalled his friend from Cherry Point.
If Vance was harboring doubts about the trajectory of the United State’s mission, they didn’t find their way into his work. In a story published in September 2005 about a Marine battalion that was helping build bases for the Iraqi Security Forces, Vance reproduced a line from one of Bush’s recent speeches suggesting that the U.S. military presence in Iraq was coming to a close: “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” In the same piece, Vance quoted a lance corporal praising the base-building effort as “the first step in getting us home and letting the Iraqis take care of their own country.” Meanwhile, the daily expansion of the infrastructure at Al-Asad served as an inescapable reminder that “getting home” remained more of a talking point than a realistic objective.
When off the clock, Vance lived the life of an average 20-something: playing poker in the rec halls, smoking cigars on the roof of the public affairs office and shooting the breeze about books, movies, women and college football in the adapted shipping container — nicknamed “the can” — that he lived in with a half-dozen other Marines. Vance had a knack for solving a Rubik’s Cube, and he would entertain the other Marines by trying to crack it as quickly as possible. On one occasion, Vance’s fellow Marines played a friendly prank on him by convincing him that he had been reassigned to a different unit and was expected to depart Al-Asad imminently.
“We had him pack up all his shit up and drove him out to the tarmac, and he literally went up to check in and the guy was like, ‘What are you talking about? You’re not on this flight,’” recalled Micah Snead, a fellow public affairs Marine who worked with Vance in Iraq.
Yet even the pranks and the poker nights couldn’t distract from the reality that Vance had heard about in the chow hall in Kuwait: The war was not going according to plan. The U.S. body count was rising, yet the mission of pacifying Iraqi insurgents and bringing a stable democracy to the country was going nowhere.
A turning point for Vance came in the final months of 2005, when he was temporarily reassigned to provide security at polling stations for the Iraqi constitutional referendum and subsequent parliamentary elections — the first since the American invasion in 2003. At the time of the elections, Vance recalled on a conservative podcast called Moment of Truth in 2021, he was reading a book called The Case for Democracy by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Sharansky’s book, which won plaudits from prominent Republicans like Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, painted a defiant picture of life under totalitarian dictatorships, arguing that oppressed populations around the world were looking to the U.S. and other Western democracies as models of the sort of liberal political systems that they aspired to claim for themselves. Western nations had both a moral obligation and a geopolitical incentive to meet that expectation whenever it arose, Sharansky argued — beginning in the Middle East.
But on the ground in Iraq, where the constitutional referendum and elections were beset by sectarian infighting and overt political violence, Vance discovered a very different reality than the one Sharansky described. “I’m reading this book while literally working with these Iraqi poll workers and thinking to myself, ‘Oh, my god, these people don’t give a damn about this,’” Vance recalled on the podcast. “They’re helping us out, and they’re all mostly nice people, but they’re really helping us out because they’re making a decent amount of money.”
Other unusual aspects of the elections caught Vance’s attention as well. At the polling stations, he was struck by the prevalence of sexual relationships between older male poll workers and their younger male coworkers. “It was like, What is going on? Is this rape? Is this some weird cultural practice I don’t understand?” Vance recalled on Moment of Truth, alluding to the tradition of “bacha bazi” in Afghanistan. At the time, humanitarian groups were alleging that a growing number of young Iraqi boys were being forced into the sex trade, often in response to the economic deprivation caused by the war. But Vance interpreted it as another sign that America’s foreign policy elites were deceiving the public — and themselves — about the situation in Iraq. “Elites just don’t talk about this stuff because it’s uncomfortable to accept that there’s some weird stuff going on over there,” he said on the podcast. “But when you’re actually a [soldier] on the ground in Iraq, you’re like, ‘Yeah, there’s some weird stuff going on.’”
Back in the U.S., the Bush administration hailed the elections as “a watershed moment in the story of freedom,” but for Vance, they were a nadir. Reflecting on the experience in interviews and speeches in the years since, Vance has often returned to three major lessons he took away his brush with Iraq’s dysfunctional democracy. The first lesson was that foreign policy experts in the U.S. were deluded by their own ideology. Back in Washington, commentators were interpreting Iraqis’ lack of enthusiasm for Western democracy in political terms: The Iraqis were upset that the U.S. had violated their national sovereignty and were responding with organized political resistance. But on the ground, Vance came to see, most Iraqis were approaching the conflict in more prosaic terms: The arrival of American troops had made the country less safe and less stable, so they wanted the U.S. gone. To grasp the nature of the conflict clearly, you had to understand it not as a clash of civilizations but as a conflict over raw power. “I brought a lot of American political ideas to my time in Iraq, and I got there and realized that a lot of those ideas were very stupid,” Vance said on the 2021 podcast.
The second lesson was that democracy, unlike steel or semiconductors, is not an easily exportable commodity. In his free time, Vance had been reading books about America’s founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who likened the republican form of government to a living organism that had to be cultivated by a specific sort of citizenry and nurtured by particular political virtues. In Iraq, Vance came to see, the U.S. was trying to transplant self-governance into fundamentally inhospitable soil. “That was definitely one of those things [that he learned] — that you can’t force democracy onto people,” said his friend from Cherry Point.
The final lesson was more sobering. At a time of great social uncertainty, Vance saw that the Iraqis were motivated less by the abstract benefits of political self-determination than they were by the immediate need for safety and stability. “They don’t really care about democracy that much, they don’t care about being able to choose their leaders — they just want a safe country,” Vance recalled on the podcast. “That is, like, all they want.”
In late December 2005, the troops at Al-Asad were expecting a visit from a special guest. Rumors circulated around the base that it would be pop star Jessica Simpson, who was making regular stops at overseas bases for the U.S.O. The mysterious guest turned out to be Vice President Dick Cheney, much to the disappointment of many of the Marines — but not Vance. His zeal as a political junkie was, apparently, undiminished by his deepening skepticism of the war. According to his friend from Cherry Point, he was one of the few Marines who was more excited to see Cheney speak than to see Simpson sing.
During his trip to Al-Asad, Cheney sat down for roundtable discussion with a few dozen Marines. One of them was Vance. At one point in the discussion, a Marine corporal pressed Cheney on the apparent military stalemate. “From our perspective, we don’t see much as far as gains,” the corporal said. “We’re looking at small-picture stuff, [but] not many gains.”
"Well, Iraq’s looking good,” Cheney replied. Any suggestion to the contrary, he added, was media distortion.
Vance took in Cheney’s assurances about the progress of the war, but in private, he had started to seriously doubt them. His late-night conversations with his bunkmates in “the can” increasingly turned to the futility of the mission and the lack of a clearly stated objective for the war. “At an intellectual level, he saw the lies, the hypocrisy, the media spin of it all,” said Snead.
Even as their enthusiasm for the war flagged, his small group of public affairs colleagues took solace in their work telling the stories of average Marines. But it was not lost on the combat correspondents that they were part of a broader propaganda machine, enlisted to present a palatable picture of a war that some of them had privately come to doubt. Vance, who regularly worked with the journalists who traveled to Al-Asad to cover the war, saw firsthand how that rosy picture filtered into the mainstream coverage of the war. “That is something that we would talk about,” recalled his friend from Cherry Point. “He’s certainly cognizant of the fact that people have a narrative that they’re trying to drive.”
Vance’s deployment ended in March 2006, and he returned to Cherry Point. With a little over a year remaining on his enlistment, he was starting to plan for his life after the corps, taking online classes for college credit and musing about eventually attending law school. The public affairs shop was badly short-staffed following an uptick in overseas deployments, and Haney, his commanding officer, selected Vance, then a corporal, for special assignments — first as the air station’s community-relations liaison and then as the media officer, a job normally filled by a captain.
The assignment as media officer was “a big deal,” in Haney’s description. The station was gearing up for a big airshow, and Vance’s new responsibilities put him in near-constant contact with local media. He quickly discovered in his new role that he thrived in the media limelight, even during periods of crisis. During the airshow, in May 2007, a civilian prop plane carrying five passengers crashed into powerlines near the base, setting fire to a 10-acre plot of land. Vance became the airfield’s point person for the incident, interfacing with local media and coordinating the Marines’ response. “He was the guy that was having to jump up and run out to the flight line to escort media, he was taking the queries, he was having to run upstairs to our operations department to figure out what was happening with the aircraft,” Haney recalled. “He just had an innate ability to work with people [on things] that required attention to detail.”
When Vance was discharged from the corps in September 2007, he returned to Ohio to start as a freshman at Ohio State. He kept in touch with a group of Marines from Cherry Point, exchanging email and text messages and occasionally visiting them at their colleges and homes. A handful of his former comrades attended his wedding to his law school sweetheart, Usha, in 2014, and several received thanks in the acknowledgment section of Hillbilly Elegy when it was published in 2016.
Many of the Marines who spoke about their service with Vance said they found the sections of Hillbilly Elegy covering his military career to be an accurate — if partial — account of his time in the corps. The book leaned heavily on the quotidian transformations that Vance underwent during the military: learning to balance a checkbook, eat healthier food, take out a car loan and conduct himself like an adult. In one of the few passages about his deployment to Iraq, he recounted a story of gifting a pencil eraser to a child in an Iraqi village, waxing poetic about the profound sense of gratitude that the episode inspired in him. The abiding sense of political disillusionment that took hold over him during his stay at Al-Asad went unmentioned.
That sense of disillusionment was evident, however, in the the op-eds that Vance began writing for The New York Times in the leadb up to the publication of his memoir in the spring of 2016. The columns were devoted primarily to unpacking then-candidate Donald Trump’s appeal among white working-class Americans, which Vance attributed in large part to Trump’s blunt criticisms of the war in Iraq. Trump may have been “unfit for our nation’s highest office,” Vance wrote in his first colum in April 2016, but at least he was willing to say what other Republicans were not: “That the war was a terrible mistake imposed on the country by an incompetent president.”
Blame for the war didn’t lie with Bush alone. The entire war on terror, Vance argued, had been a class war of sorts, waged by Republicans elites on the white working-class voters who put them in office — and who fought and died in disproportionate number in the arid deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Back home, those same Americans were now flocking to Trump because he understood the ugly truth about the war’s failure; he spoke to their rage at Republican elites whose fantasies of exporting democracy around the world were premised on the very real destruction of white working-class communities at home. And for what? “A feckless and disorganized Iraqi government,” wrote Vance, and “a Middle East that is humiliatingly worse off than the way we found it.”
Vance understood this rage, he wrote, because he shared it. “I am proud of my service and proud of those who served alongside me. But war is about more than service and sacrifice — it’s about winning.” This was the real source of Trump’s real power, the kernel of his nascent foreign policy: “To those humiliated by defeat, he promises we’ll win again.”
Late last year, after Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate, Haney traveled from her home in South Carolina to a rally in Atlanta to watch him stump for the president. Haney describes herself as not particularly political — “I’m not normally one to go to campaign rallies of any kind,” she said — but she wanted to see her former colleague in action on the campaign trail. After the rally, she rode with Vance in his motorcade, exchanging a few friendly words and a hug. On stage, he had seemed slightly different than she remembered him — more formal, more polished — but when she met with him afterward, he seemed like the same JD she had always known.
“That’s my Marine,” she thought. “He’s still my Marine.”
In office, Vance’s service record has become both a political asset and a liability. In February, after Vance’s combative Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Marine combat veteran and Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton attacked Vance as a “POG” — or “Person Other that Grunt,” a derogatory slang term for infantry members who didn’t see combat. Vance’s anti-interventionism has also occasionally put him at odds with Trump’s own foreign policy decisions — mostly notably on Trump’s decision to strike the Houthis in Yemen. In June, Vance sidestepped his past opposition to U.S. strikes in Iran to fall in line with the president’s decision to bomb the country’s nuclear facilities, over the objections of many of his ideological allies. When Vance did step forward to defend the bombings, his comments bore the imprint of his experience in Iraq. “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” he said during a television interview shortly after the U.S. attack. “But the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.”
The lessons of Iraq have resurfaced in Vance’s political program in less intuitive ways as well. During a speech at the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute in July, Vance defended the Trump administration’s border crackdown and mass deportation plans by pointing to the shortcomings of Iraq’s fledgling democracy in 2005. “You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect for America to remain unchanged, in the same way you can’t export the Constitution to some random country and expect the same kind of government to take hold,” Vance said. The underlying principle was the same one he had learned at the Iraqi polls in late 2005: Democracy is a fragile organism that only grows in certain, well-tended climates. If you disrupt the soil, you endanger the whole plant.
Vance’s former comrades from the corps have reacted in various ways to his ascent to the pinnacle of American power. After he was added to the Republican ticket, Haney and others, true to their public affairs training, organized a group chat of Vance’s closest contacts from the corps, in part to coordinate media outreach. (They titled it “The Vice President’s Own,” a play on the Marine Band’s old nickname.) Several traveled to Washington in January for the inauguration, posing for photos with the vice president at an inaugural ball. Others, put off by what they saw as the boosterish bent of their fellow Marines’ public comments about Vance, quietly left the group chat and distanced themselves from the vice president.
Snead, the combat correspondent from Al-Asad, described watching Vance’s ascent with a sense of surreal inevitability. Over a decade ago, Snead recalled, Vance and his wife stopped to visit him in Colorado during a road trip to California, and Vance mentioned that they had been listening to the audiobook of Bill Clinton’s memoir during their drive. “I remember being surprised — like, you’re conservative but you’re listening to Bill Clinton?” Snead said. “At the time, it just seemed like, ‘This guy is studying the path to power.’”
Then, earlier this year, Snead saw a clip of Vance chastising the media during one of Trump’s early Cabinet meetings. He had a flash of recognition, back to days at Al-Asad when Vance would lob sarcastic comments at his colleagues from the back of the public affairs office. “My blood kind of ran cold, because it was like, ‘That’s him,’” Snead said. He had the same feeling in late February when he watched Vance’s tense exchange with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office: “Now he gets to be a smart ass and seemingly there’s no consequences for it.”
At the same time, many of Vance’s former comrades have struggled to reconcile his newly pugnacious political persona with the gentle and bookish teenager they knew in the corps. Several of them still remember this younger Vance with genuine affection. Testagrossa, from Cherry Point, recalled that Vance bought him his first beer on his 21st birthday, even though he and Vance didn’t always get along on the base. Another of Vance’s close friends from Cherry Point, a former Marine named Serena Denson, remembered that when she had shipped her pet dog back to base from a deployment abroad, Vance offered to pick the dog up and drive him to her mother-in-law’s house. “It felt like he was a brother,” Denson said. “Somebody who you could always count on.”
In January, Denson was among the Marines who traveled to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, where she met with Vance briefly at one of the inaugural balls. She had so much to say to him: how proud she was of him, how happy she was that he had achieved his dream, how much she cherished the memories of watching The O.C. on television together during quiet nights in North Carolina. But she was also worried: about his comments disparaging immigrants, and about his newfound chumminess with the richest and most powerful people in the world, which she worried was overshadowing his sense of obligation to everyday Americans like her. She wanted to say it all, but it was too much to put into words. She broke down in tears instead.
Since then, Denson said she’s thought a lot about what she would have told Vance if she had kept her composure at the gala. “I think I would just say to remember who he’s fighting for,” she said. “It’s not for his rich and powerful friends. It’s for people like me — hardworking people in this country who just want a country that supports them.” She wanted him to be the kind of leader she knew he could be, the kind who volunteers to pick up a friend’s dog and drive it to her in-laws.
She harbors no animosity toward her friend, she said, but she wonders if he’s changed in some fundamental way since she knew him. “I know that he was an excellent person, an excellent friend, an excellent Marine,” she added. “I just hope that he’s still in there.”
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