Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance Attend the United States Marine Corps Ball

Good evening, Marines. Nice to introduce our guest of honor. But first, I get to say a couple of words to us Marines, U.S. Marines, us Marines. I've got a prepared script, and I'm going to deviate from it, which is going to make my staff very uncomfortable, but I'm going to wing it here in front of the Vice President. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to tell one story, and it's a story that I've told before but not too many times because, frankly, it's kind of hard to get through. But it boils down the essence of being a Marine. I was the battalion commander for 1st Battalion, 5th Marines in 2005 in a city called Ramadi. And, you know, 1-5 was in the heart of the Sunni insurgency, and we were taking daily casualties, and it was a day-on, stay-on gunfight. And I had two twin brothers in my battalion, the Jaime brothers, Jesse and Joel. And they were both assigned to Alpha Company. And one night I was at the government center in the center of Ramadi, and I heard a very large explosion. And one of our Humvees had been hit by an IED, and a couple Marines had been killed. Actually, all five Marines in the vehicle were killed. One of them was Corporal Jaime, Joel Jaime, or Jesse Jaime. And so I told his brother, after we got the bodies off the battlefield, I went down to the government center and picked up his brother, Joel, and I brought him back to Camp Ramadi. And I was kind of choking up. I was a young battalion commander. Again, we were taking daily casualties. And as the body was taken on to the helicopter that was going to fly him back to Camp Fallujah, I took his brother out there in my Humvee, and I said, Corporal Jaime, I don't know what to say to you right now. And he looked me dead in the eye, and he said, Sir, it's been my privilege to serve in this battalion. And he boarded a helicopter, and he flew his dead brother's body home to Las Vegas. Now, I don't know where we get the likes of Corporal Jaime. I don't think we deserve him. But the truth is, for our adversaries, we got lots of them. We got lots of them. And they're all willing to kill you. They're all willing to bring the fight to you. So if you mess with America, you're going to get a bunch of Corporal Jaime's coming after you. And again, I've committed the ultimate foul because I haven't said all of our VIPs tonight, but everyone here is a VIP. And so we have U.S. senators here tonight. We have distinguished visitors, distinguished guests. We've got too many to name. We've got the former ACMAC, now the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Christopher Mo Mahoney. We have senators from the states of Montana. We got Senator Ernst from the great state of Indiana. We've got the Honorable Stephen Daines. We've got the Honorable Dan Sullivan, U.S. senator from the great state of Alaska and a veteran Marine himself. Again, the list goes on. We've got Ambassador Sean O'Neill, ambassador-designate to Thailand. The Honorable Hung Kao, undersecretary of the Navy. General Dave Berger, former commandant of the Marine Corps. And I'll end with this one. We got Sergeant Dakota Meyer, Medal of Honor recipient. We're all honored by your presence here today. So again, I'm going to skip my prepared remarks because I think when I tell the Corporal Jaime story, that epitomizes everything you need to know about our Marine Corps. And it epitomizes everything that is good about our Marine Corps. And it epitomizes everything that our adversaries need to understand about our Marine Corps. Because if you mess with the bull, you get the horns. And there's a saying, again, that nobody likes to fight. Somebody has to know how. But Marines do know how and they do like to fight. They do like to fight. So Marines, on this, your 250th birthday, I wish you a happy birthday. I wish you 250 more. And I hope that we don't have to deal with any more Corporal Jaime's. But I'm afraid that we're going to. And I'm going to depend upon all of you, the leaders of this Corps, to have the mental, moral, and physical courage to do what is required when the time comes. When the time comes to stick a bayonet in our adversary's chest, I'm going to depend upon you to do it. And I know you will. And I know you can. Because we've been doing it for 250 years. And we're going to keep doing it for another X thousand years. Because there's no end in sight to this Marine Corps. It is the biggest, baddest, most warfighting organization on the face of the planet. It is all about lethality. It's all about warfighting. That's all we do. That's who we are. That's what we do. We warfight. We're Marines. That's all we do. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to get off the stage, and I am going to simply introduce our guest of honor tonight, the Vice President of the United States, the Honorable J.D. Vance, a veteran Marine. Thank you, Marines. It's great to be with you tonight. I want to thank our great Commandant, General Smith. Thank you so much for everything that you do for our Marine Corps. Let me ask you all, how are we doing, Marines? That was pretty good. How are we doing, Marines? That was better. That was better. Well, I figured I'd just stand up here and tell a lot of stories about the Marine Corps, because what else should we do when we're among friends on the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps than talk about the incredible stories that make our Corps great? And I'm so proud to be here. I'm so proud to be the first Vice President of the United States to have been a United States Marine. I'm proud to have so many of my dear friends from my own time in the United States Marine Corps, and I was joking with some of them earlier this evening. We were at a reception with generals and colonels and magistrates and noblemen, and I thought to myself that when we were at our last Marine Corps ball, we were drinking Jim Beam Eight Stars with a bunch of corporals and lance corporals and sergeants, and now we're drinking fine wine with the Commandant of the Marine Corps. We've come pretty far, my friends. It's good to see you all. But the thing I love about the Marine Corps is that for 41 years, for the entire time that I have had the Marine Corps in the back of my mind, since I stepped foot on those yellow footprints in Parris Island, I was a 19-year-old kid. That entire time, the Marine Corps has kept me honest, and even tonight, the Marine Corps has kept me honest because you saw our guest of honor, that incredible Iwo Jima veteran corporal. It's such an honor to be with you. And I was shaking his hand earlier and spending some time with him, and I said, sir, if you need to lean on me, if you need to grab onto me, please feel free to do so. And he said, if you need to grab onto me, feel free to do so. And then I took the hand of his fellow Iwo Jima veteran, because we have a corpsman here who served in Iwo Jima, and how much Marines do we love our corpsman who keep us safe? We know that to our corpsman, there is no illness so severe, no malady, so significant that it cannot be cleared by two Motrin and a fresh pair of socks. But I shook the hand of this corpsman who's probably close to 100 years old, and he said, you know, we talked for a little bit, we chatted for a little bit. He said, you know, you have a very nice personality, and I'm a vain politician just like all the rest of them, and I really appreciated that. And then he said, what the hell is up with that beard? And I thought to myself, I'm the vice president of the United States, and this guy is busting my balls for having a beard. But that, my friends, is what the Marine Corps does, whether we're a young Marine or an old Marine, whether we're a Lance Corporal born in 2006 or a veteran of Iwo Jima, the Marine Corps keeps us honest because it is the proudest organization of warfighters in the world, and we are proud to celebrate its 250th birthday. Now, I got this great big speech here. I could talk about Dan Daly. I could talk about Chesty Puller. I could talk about John Bassaloni. I could talk about all of the incredible Marines. I could talk about my friends, some of whom came home from Iraq or Afghanistan and a couple of whom didn't. We know that the reason why this organization is so special is fundamentally because we take the very best young Americans, we turn them into something even better, which is United States Marines, and we go and ask them, even when they're teenagers, even when they're not even old enough, some of them, to drink, we go and ask them to do the hardest thing in the world, which is to fight our nation's battles and to represent the United States all over the world in the proudest and most profound way possible. And I'm proud to tell you this evening that tonight, as we celebrate at the Commandant's Birthday Ball, from the young Marines to the old Marines, I, as your vice president, am proud of you, and we're going to keep on winning America's wars for the next 250 years after this. Now, I remember when my cousin Rachel, she's my older cousin, my grandmother's eldest grandchild, when she encouraged me to enlist in the United States Marine Corps, and at the time, it sounded like the craziest idea I had ever heard. I couldn't run a mile, much less three miles, and I never thought to myself that I could join the military, but I'm telling you that the confidence the Marine Corps gave me, the trajectory that it set me on has started, again, from those yellow footprints in Parris Island, led me directly from where I was then to where I stand today. And it wasn't always an easy journey. Of course, these things never are, but I remember, for example, my very first Marine Corps birthday as a young recruit in Parris Island. I went to boot camp in September of 2003, and so, of course, my first Marine Corps birthday was in Parris Island. Now, I'll tell you a little story. At the time, I thought that I was deathly allergic to shellfish. And the reason I thought I was deathly allergic to shellfish is because when I was 16 or 17, I had some terrible allergic reaction. I assumed it was because of shellfish, and for two years, I had not touched shellfish. I thought it was the thing that was going to kill me. And so, on November the 10th, in Parris Island, South Carolina, I was sitting there, and they served steak and lobster. And you all know, you all are recruits. You know how hungry young recruits get? And I thought to myself, well, on the one hand, I could be hungry and maybe save my life. On the other hand, I could roll the die with this lobster, and the very worst thing that's probably going to happen to me is the corpsman is going to take care of me. I'll get to sleep in tomorrow. And so, what did my dumb ass do? I ate the lobster, and I was fine, and I haven't been allergic to shellfish ever since. So, one of the great things the Marine Corps can do is it can apparently cure a shellfish allergy. There are so many things I'm proud of about this corps. One of the things I'm proud of is that the attitude and the life of service continues from the people who become generals in our Marine Corps to sergeant majors in our Marine Corps to the people who get out and lead in the civilian world. My dear friend Dave Warrington is here, the White House Counsel. I'm going to embarrass Dave a little bit because though he's one of the most important people in our White House team, a brilliant lawyer, a very proud Marine, I didn't know until tonight that young David, his son, is a captain of Marines, and he's here with us tonight. So, let's give it up for a family of service. There he is. Going to embarrass my friend a little bit. And, of course, you all know that, you know, when you get around soldiers and sailors and airmen, we like to poke fun at each other. And I was talking to an Army colonel in the White House not too long ago, and I said, Colonel, you know what they call a soldier with an IQ of 80? And he said, What, sir? And I said, They call him a colonel. And he chuckled. And then he said, You know what they call a Marine with an IQ of 60? I said, What's that, colonel? He said, The Vice President of the United States. And guess what, colonel, I've got the last laugh because your ass is going to Siberia on diplomatic duty. So, I hope you had your fun in the West Wing. But, unfortunately, I get the final say. That's one of the good things about this job. But let me just say, first of all, from our Department of War secretary, Pete Hegseth, a great soldier, but a person I know who loves the Marines deeply, and, of course, from the President of the United States, they are proud of you. They know that the United States Marine Corps is the greatest weapon the political leadership of this country has. And when you hear this phrase, peace through strength, we are fighting for peace every single day in the White House, every single day in the Oval Office. We achieve peace because you, the Marine Corps, are our strength, and we won't forget it, and we never have. Thank you, Marines. And I know we're going to do a little toast with a comment on here, but I just want to say something else because there are two things that your political leadership cares a great deal about. I have to put on my Vice President hat and tell you about it because one of the mistakes that I think we made over the past 40 years, over my entire life, and let's be honest, it was Democrats and Republicans, this is not even a partisan point, is that we were too willing to send our Marines and our soldiers and everybody else off to war without giving you clear guidance about what you needed to do and clear guidelines for when you would come home. And that is one thing the President of the United States and everybody in the White House, we promise we will never do. When we send you off to fight our nation's battles, we will do it with full confidence, we will give you the knowledge and the tools you need to win, and we will make it clear that your job is to kick the enemy's ass and come back home safely. That is our sacred promise from the President of the United States on down. That's what we owe every single one of you, is a clear mission and a clear promise that when you do that mission, you're going to come home safely. That's the first point that I want to make, and I want to make a second point, because we live in an era of technology. You saw it in that incredible video. I forget who even said it, but he said, you know, in World War II, we had planes, we had boats, we had tanks, and we had Marines, and here we are in 2025, 80 years later, and we still got tanks, we got boats, we got airplanes, and we got United States Marines. But let's be honest, we all know the battlefield has changed in an incredible and profound way. We've got technology that would have been inconceivable, even when I was a little kid, is now driving the face of the modern battlefield. We've got cybersecurity, we've got satellites in space, we've got artificial intelligence, we've got all this incredible technology, and, of course, the United States is the most significant leader of technology in the world. But I happen to believe that the most important warfighting technology is not a new airplane, the most important warfighting technology is not artificial intelligence or anything on a computer. The most important warfighting technology is a well-trained and well-armed United States Marine, and we won't forget it. So let me say, Marines, at the age of 250, not a single one of you looks older than 249. You look pretty good out there. This is a good-looking crowd. But I just want to say that everything the Marine Corps has done for me, the Marine Corps gave me great training, it gave me a sense of purpose, it gave me lifelong friends that across the political spectrum, just in the table of people that were dear friends of mine during the United States, my own Marine Corps service. We've got radical leftists and radical right-wingers, and we're all dear friends because we all bleed the same Marine Corps green. The Marine Corps has done a lot for me. The Marine Corps has done more for me than I can possibly repay. But the thing that I promise, so long as I have the honor of being your vice president, is that I will continue to honor the United States Marine Corps. I will continue to remember that you are the most profound warfighting technology that exists on the planet Earth, and I will fight every single day on this 250th birthday of the United States Marines to make sure that the next 250 years is just as damn proud as the first 250. Happy birthday, Marines. It's an honor to be with you. Ladies and gentlemen, please join Vice President J.D. Vance as he offers a toast in honor of the 250th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. All right, Marines, I'm going to keep this simple and keep this sweet because I'm the last thing standing between you and a very delicious glass of champagne. But let's raise our glass from Chesty Pooler to everybody else, for every Marine who came home and every Marine who didn't. Here's to 250 more years of our glorious Marine Corps. God bless you.