Book Review: 'I Heard
My Country Calling' by James Webb
By Robert H. Scales
Too many memoirs are
exercises of self-regard, if not self-aggrandizement. James Webb's "I
Heard My Country Calling" avoids this error by giving the achievements of
his later life—his career as a novelist and a political figure (secretary of
the Navy, U.S. senator from Virginia)—only the briefest framing reference. Mr.
Webb is intent, rather, on telling the story of his formative years as an Air
Force "brat," an Annapolis midshipman and a Marine in Vietnam. The
result is more than personal reminiscence. Mr. Webb's narrative captures the
experience of a generation of children raised during the Cold War and embedded
in the new culture of America's expanded armed forces. "My siblings and I
were," he writes, "quite simply, the children of our country's
military."
Before World War II,
the Army was a somnambulant culture of long-service volunteer soldiers
commanded by a small club of West Pointers. Pearl Harbor changed everything.
Within two years, the Army expanded from a quarter million soldiers to eight
million, and suddenly the old club was forced to accept young men like Mr.
Webb's father, who made up in mechanical skill and wit what he lacked in
education and pedigree.
Mr. Webb's parents
came from the poor South. His father was the first in his family to graduate
from high school. By 1943, he was piloting B-17 and B-29 bombers, having
managed, along the way, to marry and father four children. When the war ended,
he left the military and moved his family to Missouri; James Webb was born
after his dad had returned to civilian life. But in 1947 the Air Force found it
cheaper to bring back former pilots than to train new ones to fight the Cold
War—and so Mr. Webb's father re-entered the Air Force, where he remained
through the 1950s, retiring in the 1960s as a colonel, just as his son was
leaving for war.
The author became a
service "brat" long before the military could make family life
comfortable. His family moved from base to base—from Texas to Nebraska to
California and many places in between. He went to an endless string of bad
schools. Base-to-base travel was always by car, with Mr. Webb's father the
pilot and the family his crew: hundreds of miles a day, endless western vistas
rushing by with only the occasional Burma Shave sign to break the monotony.
The Air Force has long
since torn down the flimsy crackerbox dwellings hastily built in the barren
western deserts after World War II. But at the time these apartments were magic
to an extended family used to being crammed into rented off-base bungalows. Mr.
Webb admits to having few friends during his childhood and adolescence, because
friendships rarely lasted more than a few months: Before long, one family or
the other would be transferred away.
But what Mr. Webb lost
in the loneliness of a Cold War vagabond he gained in his ability to be
self-reliant, to read a room and to get along with strangers. The Scotch-Irish
chip on his shoulder grew as he learned to survive in a kid's world of constant
bullying from "off-base" kids who ridiculed these sons and daughters
of a strange community thrown up abruptly in their midst. Like many of his
generation, Mr. Webb discovered that his immersion in the military subculture
of Cold War America made him want to be an officer like his dad. But his dad
didn't want his son to repeat his anxiety-plagued career by coming from the
ranks.
Instead, he pushed Mr.
Webb to apply to Annapolis as the surest path to a Marine commission. Mr.
Webb's time as a midshipman in the class of 1968 was disagreeable, by his
telling, but the hardships of the Academy prepared him for the war he knew he
was obligated and anxious to fight. Clearly he hated the pettiness of the
place. He rebelled against sadistic seniors who beat him for minor infractions.
He detested upperclassmen who seemed intent on driving certain plebes out of
the academy. Mr. Webb may have hated the place, but he swore that he would
never quit. He grudgingly acknowledges that the ordeals of the class system
gave him a resiliency and stoicism that made him a better officer. In spite of
his cynicism and silent rebellion, he rose to become a "four
striper," one of the top leaders in the brigade of midshipmen. Upon
graduation, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
In 1969, he was sent
to Vietnam. Like most brats, he had spent his school days immersed in the lore
of the big, bloody Pacific battles, like Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But what
he found in Vietnam was the so-called Arizona Valley near Da Nang, a churned,
blackened strip of ground that had witnessed four years of horrific attrition
from ambushes, mortar attacks, booby traps and mad sapper charges, all coming
from a skilled and tenacious enemy.
Mr. Webb joined
"Dying Delta" Company and immediately began to watch his soldiers
suffer and die in a morally debilitating series of deadly tragedies. He
survived through skill and luck to become Delta's commander. A few weeks after
taking command, a festering wound and two Purple Hearts forced him to leave
command and eventually the Corps on a medical discharge. Typically, he devotes
only a single paragraph to the action that won him the Navy Cross, the nation's
second highest award for valor. He doesn't mention the medal. Most of the
paragraph tells of his mother's premonition that her son would be wounded on
that day.
The sweep of this
wonderful book makes it the alpha and omega of the Cold War's truest children.
It begins with pride and patriotism that comes from living with warrior fathers
and ends with illusion dispelled by a bloody little war in Vietnam. It's a
brilliant personal recollection that also brings alive a forgotten period of
American history.
Maj. Gen. Scales, who
retired from active duty in 2000, was the Commandant of the Army War College.
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