Iraq War

The Iraq War enters J.D. Vance’s memoir as both a national conflict and a personal reckoning. It helps prompt his decision to enlist in the United States Marine Corps, separates him from a family he fears leaving behind, and gives him experiences in Iraq that complicate his earlier resentment and later shape his response to civilian judgments about the war. The account does not attempt to recount the conflict’s full military history; its focus is how the war intersects with family obligation, service, education, and the hard work of change.

Enlistment and the Decision to Leave

In late March, Vance walked into a military recruiter’s office to ask about the Marine Corps. The recruiter did not promise an easy life: he warned that the pay would be low and that Vance might go to war, while also describing the leadership and discipline the service could provide. That prospect appealed to a young man who did not yet see himself as disciplined. He was pudgy and long-haired, had never developed the habit of getting up before six in the morning, and would walk through at least half of a mile run at school. The contrast between his current habits and the military’s demands made enlistment seem less like a natural fit than a chance to become someone different.

After returning home, Vance weighed the alternatives. He thought his country needed him and that he would regret missing the chance to take part in America’s newest war. The GI Bill also offered a way to exchange future indebtedness for greater financial freedom. He regarded college, doing nothing, and military service as the available choices, and believed four years in the Marines could help him become the person he wanted to be. His decision was therefore driven by more than patriotism or financial calculation: he also felt he had no appealing alternative and wanted the discipline to make adulthood manageable.

The decision carried a personal cost. Lindsay Leigh Lewis had recently had her second child, was expecting a third, and had a toddler at home; other young children in the extended family were still babies. Vance did not want to leave them, and the more he considered enlistment, the less willing he felt to go. But he also feared that delay would give him time to abandon the decision. Two weeks after first considering his options, as the Iraq crisis became the Iraq War, he signed a commitment to give the Marine Corps the first four years of his adult life.

His family initially doubted that the Marines suited him. Mamaw tried to dissuade him, warning that the service would overwhelm him and asking who would look after her. The objections reflected the same family ties that made departure difficult, but they did not change his mind. Eventually the family accepted his decision, though Mamaw remained particularly troubled by the possibility of war.

Deployment and the Family Left at Home

After boot camp, Vance left for a permanent Marine Corps assignment and returned home whenever leave and long weekends allowed, usually every few months. The family continued its life in his absence: Mom moved in with Mamaw, Mamaw’s health seemed to improve, and Lindsay Leigh Lewis and Aunt Wee and their families appeared healthy and happy. Vance had feared that a crisis would strike while he was away and that he would be unable to help. For a time, the feared calamity did not arrive.

In January 2005, he learned that his unit would go to Iraq a few months later. He felt both excitement and nervousness. When he told Mamaw, she fell silent and said she hoped the war would end before he had to leave. Although they spoke by phone every few days, neither of them spoke about Iraq as winter turned to spring. Vance understood that Mamaw did not want to discuss or think about the deployment, and he let the subject remain unspoken.

The impending deployment made their practical obligations more immediate. Mamaw was frail and ill, took a dozen medications, and made regular hospital visits. When her health coverage became more expensive, she needed an additional three hundred dollars each month to afford it. Vance volunteered to pay that amount from his own earnings. He estimated that the Marines paid him about a thousand dollars a month after taxes, with housing and meals provided; he also earned extra money playing online poker. Mamaw had not previously accepted money from him, including earnings from his earlier work or boot camp, so her acceptance told him how serious the financial strain had become. His departure for war thus coexisted with a continuing responsibility to help sustain the household he had left.

Work in Iraq and a Small Encounter

Vance served as a public affairs Marine. He attached to different units to observe their routines, sometimes escorted civilian journalists, and otherwise took photographs or wrote short accounts of Marines and their work. Early in his deployment, he joined a civil affairs unit conducting community outreach. Such missions were considered more dangerous because small groups of Marines went into Iraqi territory that was not under their protection. On one mission, senior Marines met with local school officials while the rest of the group provided security or spent time with the schoolchildren, playing soccer and distributing candy and supplies.

One shy boy approached Vance with an outstretched hand. Vance gave him a small eraser, and the boy’s face briefly brightened before he ran back to his family holding it up. The object was worth only two cents, but Vance had never seen a child display such excitement over so little. He later came close to treating the encounter as transformative, while insisting that real change takes longer than a single moment. Its significance lay less in an instant conversion than in the challenge it posed to a lifetime of resentment: the war had put him in contact with people whose immediate circumstances could not be reduced to the grievances he had carried from home.

Return, Memory, and the War’s Meaning

The deployment also became part of Vance’s later arguments about how civilians understand military service. In an undergraduate foreign-policy seminar, he heard a nineteen-year-old classmate claim that soldiers were generally less intelligent than students who went straight to college and that Marines killed and disrespected Iraqi civilians indiscriminately. Vance considered the student’s judgment baseless. His own Marine friends had held a wide range of political views, including strong opposition to George W. Bush and doubts that the war’s sacrifices had brought sufficient gains. Their differences made the classmate’s generalization seem especially careless to him.

Vance recalled the instruction Marines received on respecting Iraqi culture, including rules about gestures and how to address women in traditional dress. He remembered providing security for Iraqi poll workers and explaining the importance of their work without pressing American political opinions on them. He also remembered an Iraqi youth who could not speak English but performed every word of a 50 Cent song, and Marine friends who survived an improvised explosive device attack in the Al-Qaim region with severe burns. These experiences did not make his account a claim that the war was simple or uniformly well conducted; they made the accusation that Marines killed for sport impossible for him to accept as an adequate description of the people he knew and the work he had witnessed.

By the end of his four years in the Marines, Vance had also seen extreme poverty in Haiti, witnessed the aftermath of an airplane crash in a residential neighborhood, and lost Mamaw before going to war. He returned to Ohio with his discharge papers and an old Honda Civic, and with a clearer idea of what he wanted from life and how to pursue it. Three weeks later, he was due to begin classes at Ohio State University. The Iraq War is therefore one part of a larger passage from dependence and uncertainty toward deliberate action: military service gave Vance discipline and a widened frame of reference, but the memoir presents that change as something formed through accumulated experience rather than delivered by war alone.