In Hillbilly Elegy, the Ohio senator and Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance recounts the time he spent in the US Marine Corps. As a public affairs marine, Vance avoided the pressures of combat during the Iraq war, tasked instead with escorting the media through war zones, embedding himself with combat units to diarize their routines, and snapping photographs. He also liaised with local Iraqi residents, played soccer with school children, and handed out candy, as a show of good will on behalf of an occupying military force. On one occasion, Vance gave a tiny pencil eraser to a child, who received the bauble as if it were some great gift. “His face briefly lit up with joy,” Vance writes, “holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph.”
In Vance’s recounting, that moment constituted something close to an epiphany: a stark lesson in humility, gratefulness and the ability to find profound joy in a pencil eraser. Among more routine lessons (about hard work, grit, respect etc) it was one of Vance’s great takeaways from his military service.
Now he, and other American conservatives, are eager to share – or enforce – such a rare, character-defining privilege. Vance is among a cohort of politicians around the world engaging with the idea of a return to mandatory national service. The senator recently expressed enthusiasm for national service, claiming that it was a way for young Americans to get some “some skin in the game”. (Vance’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
