Ian Ward
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.”
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