He's never run for office before, but former Marine Capt. Zach Iscol, 42, said his experience trying to bring peace to an Iraqi town east of Fallujah "could translate well" in his effort to be the next mayor of New York City.
He said his experience working with a unit of about 35 Marines and 350 Iraqi soldiers in the town of al-Nasr wal-Salam beginning in June 2004 applies to how he would approach taking charge of the nation's largest and most famously fractious city.
"The number one thing that I learned from that experience is that you've got to find the thing that you have in common -- what's the objective, the goal or the outcome that you're all looking forward to achieving," Iscol said in an interview earlier this month.
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"Working with the tribes, working with the religious leaders, we had a shared goal of keeping the peace" that tended to get past their personal differences, he explained.
Iscol said he brought home another grim lesson learned from the second battle of Fallujah, which lasted from early November to late December 2004 and has often been described as the heaviest urban fighting seen by Marines since the battle of Hue City in Vietnam in 1968.
He took about 35 Marines and another 30 Iraqis from al-Nasr wal-Salam into Fallujah, about 40 miles west of Baghdad in Anbar province, as a combined action platoon serving as a fourth-line platoon with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines.
The battalion lost 33 Marines in the door-to-door fighting, but the war never ended for many, said Iscol, who served in the Marine Corps from 2001 to 2007.
"When I came home from that war, I started to lose more Marines to suicide than I did in combat, and I couldn't get them into the [Department of Veterans Affairs]," he said. "I was struggling to get them to navigate the bureaucracy."
Working with Weill Cornell Medicine, he founded the Headstrong Project in 2012 to provide free mental health services to veterans and their families. "We're now in 30-plus cities. We're treating 800 to 1,000 veterans every week," he said.
The mental health crisis that took its toll on the veteran community is now being mirrored in a city hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.
"One of the things I keep hearing from New Yorkers all over the city is that they can't sleep at night, whether it's business owners about to lose everything, [or the unemployed or] homeless parents trying to struggle to get by," he said. "They can't sleep at night. I know that we're already in the middle of a mental health pandemic that's going to last longer than COVID. I think I am the one best situated to deal with that next emergency the city is going to be facing."
Iscol acknowledges having a daunting challenge ahead to gain traction in an already crowded field for the June 22 Democratic mayoral primary. It seems to grow more crowded by the week with candidates seeking to replace Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is term limited.
The last mayor with a military background was the late David Dinkins, the city's first Black mayor and a Marine veteran who was in office from 1990 to 1993 before losing his reelection race to Rudy Giuliani.
Iscol is not the only veteran in the field.
Loree Sutton, a former Army brigadier general and head of the city's Department of Veterans Services, has announced her candidacy.
Rep. Max Rose, D-N.Y., an Army National Guard captain and Afghanistan veteran, has not officially declared but registered with the city's Campaign Finance Board last week. Rose lost his reelection bid last month in a Staten Island district that includes part of South Brooklyn.
Dog Tags in a Drawer
In explaining why he's running, Iscol kept returning to what he learned from serving in the Marines and coming under fire in Iraq.
As a kid growing up in Westchester, the affluent county north of the city, Iscol said he once opened one of his parents' drawers and came across a chain of dog tags from relatives who had served. "And I remember thinking at that young age that I wanted to add my dog tag to that chain," he said.
While playing lightweight football at Cornell University, he also was influenced by coach Terry Cullen, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who was awarded the Silver Star.
Iscol was commissioned in August 2001 with a contract for flight school but switched to the infantry after the 9/11 terror attacks. "I knew at that point I wanted to be in the infantry -- wanted to lead Marines," he said.
Since leaving the Marine Corps, he also has founded Hirepurpose, a jobs search firm for veterans and family members, and Task & Purpose, an online media company focused on military and veterans issues. (Military.com shares content with Task & Purpose.)
To separate himself from the other candidates, Iscol appears to be relying on a well-worn message that he is an outsider, laser-focused on solutions rather than political gamesmanship.
"We have a broken political system. We have politicians who are not incentivized to work together. They're not incentivized to create better outcomes for the people who are electing them," he said. "New York has resources unlike any other place in the world, in terms of the ingenuity of New Yorkers, in terms of the private sector, in terms of public-private partnerships."
Turning the city around "starts with new types of leadership. We need a mayor who cares more about real outcomes and how they affect people's lives than just the political outcomes of winning an election," Iscol added. "And so that sort of opportunity, combined with that frustration, is the reason I decided to run."
-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
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