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I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

 by James Webb, Simon & Schuster, 2014

Vietnam veterans have been churning out a steady stream of memoirs in recent years as baby boomers retire—and the burgeoning self-publishing industry has made it easier than ever to get words between covers. The typical 21st-century memoir by a Vietnam veteran starts with a short recounting of growing up and ends with the veteran’s homecoming. In between is a detailed rendering of a tour of duty in the nation’s most controversial overseas war.

James Webb bucks that trend in his forceful new memoir, I Heard My Country Calling. The retired Marine is the author of six novels (including the classic 1978 Vietnam War novel Fields of Fire) and two nonfiction books. A 1968 Naval Academy graduate, Webb also is a former secretary of the Navy and served one term as the junior U.S. senator from Virginia.

In his new book, Webb doesn’t get to Vietnam until more than 250 pages into the 350-page tome. He then devotes just one relatively short chapter to his 1969- 70 combat-heavy tour, during which he was seriously wounded and received the Navy Cross and the Silver Star.

Rather than dwelling on his intense war experiences and singular postwar life, Webb devotes most of the book to an engaging account of his upbringing as the son of a career Air Force officer.

James H. Webb Sr.—whose photo in uniform graces the cover next to his son’s—is the other main player in this book. A funny, caustic, smart, driven, demanding man, the elder Webb was an Army Air Corps pilot in World War II. A career officer, he was stationed all over the country (and in England) and seemingly loved uprooting his wife and four children whenever the mood struck. The mood struck often.

In one 12-month period the Webbs “not only lived in four different homes,” the son writes, but “with six people jammed in our increasingly confining car, we had also driven from New York to Missouri to Texas to Florida, back to Texas, on to California, back to Texas, off to Florida, up to Alabama (where we moved into and out of our fifth home), from there to Florida, and back twice, then all the way across the country back to California.”

Webb punctuates his narrative with mini Cold War history lessons. They include his takes on the Berlin Airlift (in which his father took part), the Berlin Wall itself, the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and—naturally—the war in Vietnam and antiwar movement at home.

Webb also offers his thoughts on social movements in the 20th century, including race relations in the South, and his generation’s impact on American society and culture.

Jim Webb was a pugnacious midshipman who had no doubt he would enter the Marine Corps, much to the consternation of his father, who had mixed feelings about his son entering the Corps and was dead set against him participating in the Vietnam War.

Father and son were both deeply patriotic, but Jim Webb writes that his father “had made a logical calculation that the danger to our nation was not worth his son’s life on that ever more confusing battlefield.” The two argued fiercely. The son prevailed. The day he shipped out to Vietnam “was the only time I ever saw my father cry,” Webb writes.

 

Originally published in the August 2014 issue of Vietnam. To subscribe, click here.