JD Vance is a Bootlicker
I Did the Same Job as the Vice President
JD Vance and I were trained to do the same thing: watch how the military packages reality for public consumption. I used that training to write the truth. He used it to become the package.
We were both Marine combat correspondents. MOS 4341. We were both in Iraq. We both carried rifles, pistols, and notebooks into places where the distinction between journalist and target didn’t matter to the people shooting at us. We were both taught to find the story the brass wanted told, and then — if we were any good — to notice the story they didn’t.
Military public affairs is about positivity and lying. You learn how narratives get built. You learn which facts get foregrounded and which ones get buried in the fifteenth paragraph where nobody reads. You learn that the distance between what happened and what gets reported is where power lives. If you have the right ingredients you get away with selling bullshit. We didn’t invade and occupy a country based on lies. We came to liberate the people and build infrastructure for them. That’s what the press release said, anyway.
A combat correspondent who doesn’t understand the gap between the release and the reality isn’t paying attention.
I paid attention.
So did Vance. He just drew different conclusions about what to do with the knowledge.
Here’s what I know about his service because it’s public record and because I know the job. He enlisted in 2003, got assigned to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Cherry Point, and deployed to Al Asad Airbase in western Iraq for six months starting in late 2005. He wrote articles about KC-130J maintenance crews. He escorted civilian press. He went outside the wire a few times with civil affairs units. He came home and wrote in his memoir that he was lucky to escape any real fighting. Then he went to Yale, wrote a bestseller about being poor, and started looking for the next rung.
I did the same job. I was a combat correspondent and press chief in the Marines. Then the Army sent me to Baghdad as a public affairs journalist with the 125th MPAD at MNFI CPIC — the Combined Press Information Center in the Green Zone. I wrote stories, shot photographs, built and ran the Multi-National Force Iraq website, briefed PA command elements, and went outside the wire. I got mortared and nearly blown up.
In July of 2006, I was watching a movie in my trailer when a rocket shrieked overhead. Heads popped out of doors. We stood around in various states of combat readiness discussing how many, where from, where they landed. Helicopters zipped around the perimeter seeking targets. I finished my movie and went to sleep. A few weeks later, a car bomb detonated across the river from my quarters. Twelve Iraqis dead, eighteen wounded. AK-47 fire cracked in the nearby area. I suited up in full battle rattle and headed for my vehicle while Apache attack helicopters swarmed the scene. I’d been through so many indirect fire attacks by then that I’d lost count. The body’s reaction was always the same: a huge rush of adrenaline, a few minutes of shaky hands, and then exultation at being alive.
In May of that year, incoming hit my living area while I was at work. I couldn’t return to my quarters until nearly midnight because of unexploded ordnance right next to where I slept. I lay in bed that night thinking about what if — what if I’d been home on time, what if the trajectory had been fifty feet different.
I came home disabled. I came home progressive. I came home honest about what I saw. I came home with an unwillingness to put up with bootlickers like Vance. Fuck you, JD.
As hard-headed and stubborn as I am, I had to admit that I helped invade and pacify people who were trying to live their lives and had no ill will towards me or my nation. That admission cost me something. It costs everyone who makes it something. You don’t get to look at the gap between the story and the truth and walk away comfortable.
Unless comfort is the point.
I wrote something during that deployment that I think about now. “I live in a world of information overload,” I wrote from Baghdad. “I absorb the day’s events — good and bad. I regurgitate them. I swim in tales of men with guns, men with bombs, men with souls and men who have abandoned their humanity.” I described living behind “a secured perimeter which isn’t really secure at all” and concluded: “Physically I have been touched little by this war. No shrapnel has found its home in my body... Mentally, I am frayed around the edges.”
That’s what the combat correspondent job does to you if you’re doing it honestly. You take in everything — the car bombs, the mortars, the crippled Iraqi man under a tree who needs a wheelchair and calls you “Mister” when you hand him what’s in your wallet — and you process it into narrative. You build the boxes that the truth gets shipped in. And if you’re paying attention, you notice that the truth doesn’t always survive the packaging.
One day I stumbled onto the shattered camera equipment of two CBS journalists killed by an IED. Their cameras and lenses lay twisted on the floor, pierced by shrapnel, speckled with blood. They were correspondents, like me. They were observers, not combatants. They used tools just like mine to record and report. Their tools survived them, broken and covered in evidence of the violence that the job is supposed to document, not absorb. A reporter from ABC named Kimberly Dozier survived, but her sound and camera people didn’t. Their names were Paul Douglas and James Brolan. I sometimes have nightmares about their bits of body and brains on their gear.
That’s what the MOS costs when you do it for real. It frays you. It breaks your equipment or it breaks you. It teaches you things about narrative and power that you carry for the rest of your life.
Vance carried those lessons too. He just found a more profitable use for them.
In 2016, Vance texted his Yale Law roommate that he went back and forth between thinking Trump was a cynical asshole like Nixon or “America’s Hitler.” He called Trump “cultural heroin” in the Atlantic — wrote that Trump’s promises were the needle in America’s collective vein. Called him “reprehensible.” Called him a “total fraud” who didn’t care about regular people. Said Trump was exploiting the working class. Said Trump made people he cared about — immigrants, Muslims — afraid. Tweeted that God wanted better of us.
Every word of that was the combat correspondent talking. That was a man trained to see through the narrative, doing exactly what the training was supposed to produce. He looked at Trump, recognized the operation for what it was, and called it with the precision of someone who’d spent years learning how operations get run.
Then he deleted the tweets. Apologized. Got on his knees for the endorsement. Won his Senate seat. Became the vice president to the man he’d identified as a potential American Hitler.
His explanation? “I bought into the media’s lies and distortions.”
No. No, you didn’t. You were trained to see through exactly that kind of thing. That’s what combat correspondents do. That’s the whole point of the MOS. You weren’t in Psyops. You don’t get to use the skillset to identify a threat and then pretend the skillset failed you when it’s politically convenient to have been wrong.
You weren’t wrong. You were right and it stopped being useful, so you put it down and licked boots. You are licking boots right now while I type this. You are a disgrace to humanity.
I know what this MOS teaches you because it taught me the same things.
It teaches you that the official story is never the whole story. It teaches you that the people in charge will always try to control the narrative because narrative is how you maintain authority over people who’d otherwise ask uncomfortable questions. It teaches you that language is a weapon — not a metaphor, an actual tool of power — and that the people who wield it carelessly or dishonestly get other people killed.
Vance learned all of this. He demonstrated it in 2016 when he diagnosed Trump with surgical precision. Cultural heroin. America’s Hitler. A fraud exploiting scared people. That wasn’t some hot take from a guy who watched too much CNN. That was analysis from a trained military journalist who understood how propaganda works because he’d been trained to produce it.
And then he saw which way the wind was blowing, and he decided the skillset was more useful for accruing power than for telling the truth.
I want to be specific about what bothers me, because it’s not that Vance is a Republican. I don’t care about party. The two-party system is a rotting architecture and I have no loyalty to either side of it. In the end, that system of power protects a few hundred people and eats the rest of the species.
What bothers me is the betrayal of the training.
We were taught to witness. To document. To get it right even when getting it right was inconvenient for the people signing our paychecks. The whole point of having combat correspondents is that someone inside the machine is supposed to be watching, recording, telling the story that the chain of command can’t be trusted to tell about itself.
Vance took that training and used it to reverse-engineer the con. He didn’t just stop telling the truth — he studied how truth gets packaged and sold, and then he applied that knowledge in service of a man he’d already identified as dangerous. That’s not a change of heart. That’s an application of skill. He saw how the sausage gets made, recognized the sausage was poison, said so publicly, and then opened a sausage shop.
You can watch him do it now. Watch him tell Zelenskyy it’s “disrespectful” to argue for his own country’s survival in the Oval Office. Watch him deliver that line with the calm authority of a man who knows exactly how to frame a narrative so the aggressor sounds reasonable and the victim sounds ungrateful. That’s not politics. That’s craft. That’s a combat correspondent using everything he was taught — not to inform, but to package.
He was willing to kiss people’s asses to become famous. I’m not.
I’m writing this from a trailer parked somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve got a pit bull named Bob and a VA disability rating and a Substack called Dispatches from a Dying Empire. I’m not in the halls of power. I’m not on anyone’s ticket. Nobody’s asking me to speak at a convention or sit behind the Resolute Desk as backup.
But I’m still doing the job. I’m still watching how the story gets told, and I’m still writing down what I see. I’ve been doing it since Baghdad, when I blogged about rockets and car bombs and crippled men under trees while the Army told me to build press releases about liberation.
Vance could have done the same thing. He had the training. He had the eye for it — his 2016 analysis of Trump was sharper than most of what the professional pundit class produced. He understood the threat, named it clearly, and then walked straight into its arms because that’s where the power was. How despicable. How cowardly. How traitorous.
Combat correspondents are trained to go where the action is and report what’s happening. Vance went where the action was and joined the cast of villains.
People change their minds. I get that. I’m not the same person I was at thirty-five, embedding with troops in Mosul, and I’d be worried if I were. My own politics in 2006 were dramatically different from where I am now — I criticized Democrats, defended the occupation, voted libertarian. I evolved because the evidence demanded it. But there’s a difference between evolving and calculating. Evolution is when new information changes your understanding. Calculation is when your understanding stays the same but your ambition outgrows your principles.
Vance didn’t get new information between 2016 and 2022. Trump didn’t become less of what Vance described. He became more of it. January 6th happened. The big lie became party orthodoxy. The authoritarian tendencies Vance identified didn’t soften — they hardened into policy. Everything Vance warned about came true, and he responded by joining the administration.
And Vance looked at all of that and said, “I was wrong about him.”
No. You were right. You said so yourself, in your own words, with the clarity of a man trained to cut through exactly this kind of bullshit. You were right, and then you decided being right wasn’t useful.
Truth fucking matters. It mattered in Iraq when we were writing press releases about liberation while people’s lives burned around us. It matters now. And the fact that a man who was trained to find it chose instead to sell it — that’s not evolution. That’s the oldest story the military ever taught us to recognize.
It’s a man who learned how to spot a con, and decided the con paid better than the truth.
I think about our MOS sometimes. The 4341 pipeline. The training that teaches you to see the machinery behind the story. It’s a strange skill to carry through civilian life. Once you know how narratives get constructed — not in theory, but because you’ve sat in the briefing room and watched a colonel decide which facts make the press release and which ones don’t — you can’t unsee it.
There’s a scene every combat correspondent knows. Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket — the most famous fictional version of our job. He’s got “Born to Kill” written on his helmet and a peace sign pinned to his flak jacket. A colonel asks him what the hell that’s supposed to mean, and Joker says it’s about the duality of man. The Jungian thing.
I wrote about that scene back in 2016 — the same year Vance was texting about America’s Hitler. I was thinking about what it means to be a combat correspondent, what it means to carry a rifle and a notebook into the same place and try to be honest about both. I was raised by pacifists, so naturally I joined the Marines. Duality. We are creatures of our time and place, and we are more than one thing. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s being human.
But here’s the difference between duality and duplicity. Joker wore both sides on his helmet. You could see the contradiction. He didn’t hide the peace sign when he was around the grunts and didn’t scrub “Born to Kill” when he was around the brass. He carried the whole mess out in the open and let people make of it what they would.
Vance doesn’t do that. Vance had the peace sign in 2016 — the clear-eyed analysis, the moral clarity, the willingness to call a dangerous man dangerous. And then he scraped it off and kept the “Born to Kill.” He didn’t carry both. He calculated which one to show and which one to hide, and he made that calculation based on what would get him closer to power.
That’s not duality. That’s a con.
You see it in the news. You see it in politics. You see it in the way people talk about war without ever having smelled the bodies burning. You see the packaging everywhere, and you know what’s inside it because you used to assemble packages for the man.
Most of the time, that knowledge just makes you tired. But sometimes it makes you angry, because you see someone who has the same knowledge using it to build better boxes instead of tearing them open.
That’s JD Vance. A combat correspondent who became a traitor to everything good and wise.
And here I am. A combat correspondent who’s still telling the truth and fighting to make the world a little kinder.
Penfist is a former Marine combat correspondent and press chief, and an Army public affairs journalist and unit NCO. He served in Afghanistan and Iraq. His Iraq war blog is archived at willtoexist.ink. He writes from wherever his trailer is parked. Subscribe to Dispatches from a Dying Empire for more.
Thank you Pen. This is the most insightful article I have read this year. A real eye opener for me. I love a new perspective!
Marty
Well spoken, Pen.