A Vet Runs in New Jersey

East Rutherford, N.J.

This scruffy New Jersey town in Bergen County is home to Giants Stadium and one of the boroughs that inspired HBO's The Sopranos. It's where I met with Vince Micco, the East Coast's only Iraq veteran on the GOP's 2006 congressional ticket.

Nationwide, there are three Republican Iraq veterans in the running this year, the other two are in Texas and Hawaii. None of them has very good shot of winning. They also haven't attracted much attention. For comparison's sake there are five Democratic Iraq vets, prized figures among the so-called "Fightin' Dems," and most of them feted generously by the media and their party. Micco--an Army reservist of nine years who spent a year in Iraq--has gotten a few mentions in local papers but not much interest otherwise. His campaign war chest: A few thousand dollars.

Barring a meltdown by Democratic incumbent Steve Rothman, a five-term representative who sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee, Micco will lose in this Democrat-friendly district. He has kept his day job as a mortgage banker for Fairfield, N.J.-based Kearny Federal Savings, opting to run a homestyle, all-volunteer campaign in his off hours. His campaign signs still hadn't shown up yet when we met last week. In that respect, he reflects the reality of being Republican in this hard-to-crack district just outside Manhattan: It's just not worth it to spend much money here. But Micco also reflects the indifference with which the Republican party has viewed Iraq-vet congressional hopefuls this year.

I met Vince at Caffe Capri, his father's cozy, family-style Italian restaurant across the tracks from downtown Rutherford. Over healthy portions he tells me the story of his time in Iraq, how he ended up running for Congress, and what he thinks of the war on terror. He's tall, broad-shouldered, unmistakably Italian, a born-again Christian, and, it quickly emerges, unabashedly pro-Bush and hawkish in his political outlook. His wife's best friend is a widow whose husband was murdered in the World Trade Center attacks.

Micco spent 2003 and part of 2004 in Iraq as a counterintelligence agent managing informants with the aid of a translator and funneling the information to commanders in the field. He was tasked out to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion's Tactical HUMINT Operations Section, which meant he functioned as a consultant of sorts in Tikrit. While in Iraq, he also spent time in Baghdad, Ramadi, and other areas of terrorist activity. In civilian life he's a husband and father of four.

"What we're doing in Iraq, it's not only necessary, it's visionary," he says. "The worst thing we could do would be to abandon Iraq right now. After World War II, we didn't cut and run from Germany or Japan. We nurtured those nascent democracies for--for decades with troops there. We still have troops--in Germany, Okinawa, Japan. And, the fact is, our presence there has paid dividends to international security for decades." The same applies to Iraq, he says. The country is not going to change over night. We can't give up so soon.

He starts to lay into the media coverage, keeping even in tone but caustic in words. "For every bad story that we're force-fed every night, there's 99 heartwarming stories that so many people would cry tears of joy, and they'd be like, 'Wow! What a great thing American troops are doing in Iraq!' And that's why when I got home, finally I felt the moral imperative to step up and run." The bad news was literally keeping him up at night.

He singles out a "God-awful" speech by New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg referring to President Bush and his advisers as "chicken hawks" and another by Rothman as the reasons it all began to gel. "I shot him a very angry letter, and I sent it to the press," he says. He says the president's political adversaries "did a 180," and "people like Jack Murtha" whipped up opposition to prevent another victory like Afghanistan.

But it wasn't until Republican senatorial hopeful Tom Kean, Jr. urged Micco to run that he decided to throw his hat in. "I had been courted in the past to run," he says, "by the county chairman, by other people running for office this year." And then Kean called.

"He called me at work, and said, 'Hey Vince, I need you to run, man. You're gonna help me in that district, in South Bergen, you're an Iraq war veteran, you have an Italian last name, which is gonna help me a lot in that district. Come on, I need you to run.'" So Kean came over for dinner to convince Micco's wife. "He ate three bowls of my wife's penne vodka, and he kept filling her wine glass, and by the end of the night, I was the Republican nominee if I wanted it."