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…
