The Republican Vice Presidential nominee, JD Vance, generally doesn’t want people to know that when he served in the US Marine Corps as a journalist (called a Combat Correspondent) deployed to Iraq, his name was not JD Vance. He was Corporal James D. Hamel. Corporal Hamel was assigned in the relatively safe, air-conditioned spaces on an al-Assad airbase in Western Iraq, where he put out press releases for the 2ndMarine Air Wing for a year. There was danger. Every US base was rocketed, and the roads were dicing with death, but writing press releases for The Eagle and Crescent base newspaper was his daily job. At the end of four years, he got out without any distinguishing award or the coveted Combat Action Ribbon. No matter, he served honorably. But his attack this week on retired Master Sargent Tim Walz, the homey beloved governor of Minnesota, went about twenty steps too far.
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