Their friendship was forged under rocket fire.
When J.D. Vance and Cullen Tiernan first landed in Iraq as baby-faced US Marine combat correspondents in August 2005, they immediately came under attack.
“Welcome to the neighborhood,” Tiernan recalled of the mortar rounds blasted at Al-Asad Airbase upon their arrival. “We were all inside and the alarm went off, and we had to shelter in place.”
The pair spent nearly the next year living in a small shack, affectionally known as “the can,” with another reporter and three photographers.
When they weren’t out on assignment, Tiernan recalled long hours of conversation with Vance about everything from the fall of the Roman Empire to religion, philosophy and more — giving the shed a vibe closer to a college dorm room.
“I’ve always had interesting, long conversations with him,” Tiernan said, remembering the authors who dominated their conversations. “I think it was a lot of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris,” adding Vance also made him read Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
The two had met a year earlier at the Defense Information School in Fort Meade, Maryland, where they trained.
“Boot camp had a lot of moments that were similar to Full Metal Jacket,” Tiernan mused, recalling “body hardening” training he and Vance underwent which required them to be kicked repeatedly by fellow recruits.
The Marines dropped the practice in 2011 due to “limited effectiveness” and a “tendency to cause injury when improperly conducted.”
The two became close. Tiernan would keep Vance’s family informed when Vance went into dangerous combat zones. They celebrated July 4 together and Tiernan attended Vance’s wedding to Usha Chilukuri in 2014.
“They have always treated me like family, and I’m very thankful for their friendship. Seeing everyone at JD’s senate swearing in ceremony felt like a big Ohio family reunion,” Tiernan said.
Vance’s mother, Bev Vance, a former heroin addict immortalized in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, made an emotional political debut at the Republican convention in Milwaukee last week and popped up on the campaign trail at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday. She declined to comment.
After the war, both men came back disillusioned about the conflict and the value of American interventionism.
“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 a 2020 essay. “I returned in 2006, skeptical of the war and the ideology that underpinned it.”
While Vance went on to become a Republican venture capitalist and senator, Tiernan moved left. In 2020 he was communications director for US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign, and currently serves as the political director of a large New Hampshire union.
When he talks to Vance today, it’s often about union issues.
“J.D. is a friend of labor,” Tiernan said. “That’s honestly where I’m most excited about him being where he is and what he’s doing, because labor is my number one issue.”
Tiernan noted approvingly how Vance had visited a picket line when auto workers went on strike in Toledo, Ohio in October 2023 and his support of a railway safety act after a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which imposed stiff new penalties on rail companies for wrongdoing.
Tiernan, who said Democrats were increasingly out of touch with blue-collar Americans, said Vance would likely help Trump pick up union and labor voters.
“Their campaign strategy is — to use a Marine term — to deploy J.D. to the rust belt, get him out there in front of people, have real conversations and figure out what’s going on,” Tiernan said. “It’s going to work in the long run.”
