I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir
James Webb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 400 pp. Illus. Index. $27.
Reviewed by Colonel Dick Camp, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
In I Heard My Country Calling, Jim Webb has provided a fascinating account of his early life. Interestingly, the book focuses primarily on his family and the historical events that shaped his character and beliefs
rather than his many notable achievements later in life. It is an intensely personal narrative that traces his development from sometime-student to Naval Academy Midshipman, Marine officer, novelist, and political figure. Along this path of success he achieved honors and recognition that marked him as a heroic, blunt-spoken patriot, one who never forgot his roots or the admonition of his beloved great-aunt Lena. “I’m watching you,” she said, “Make me proud.”
A self-professed “military brat,” Webb ascribes his love of country to his early years growing up in a military family. His “tough-love” father taught him the value of self-reliance and restraint, although his approach was somewhat heavy-handed. Webb wrote, “So somewhere in the middle of all this fist-hitting and butt-spanking and despite my periodic resentment, there was a teaching lesson, although I’m not sure that Dr. Spock would have approved of the methodology.” The lesson, as explained by Webb, was “measured by the timeless standards of whether or not I could meet the demands of manhood.” Webb’s march toward manhood is skillfully recounted in a plain-spoken manner in I Heard My Country Calling that leaves no doubt as to whether he met life’s challenges.
Born into a military family at the end of World War II, Webb describes the hardships experienced by a generation of children raised during the military’s “dramatic, historic change to the size, structure, and so-called peacetime deployments . . . these changes shaped every element of our daily lives,” none more so than the frequent moves so familiar to military families. Webb describes the difficulties of attending new schools and making new friends. “Whether we liked it or not,” he wrote, “we would always be different from the local population.” Fellow military brats will take particular delight in his description of taking to the road with an impatient father and three siblings jammed into an automobile’s back seat—the mind-numbing boredom that brought on the inevitable squabbling, punctuated by the “three shut-ups rule” from his father before a swift backhand.
The constant uprooting taught him to become self-reliant and resilient. He developed an ability to read a room and get along with strangers, as well as a toughness that led him to the boxing ring. “I loved to fight,” Webb wrote. “Win or lose, there was a majesty in being in the ring, something akin to serving in the infantry in combat.” He was infatuated with the sport. “I won far more fights than I lost, but win or lose, we were small-time gladiators, with nothing really to gain or prove except for the esteem and self-respect that came from the fight itself.” This simple credo served him well in later life—whether he was engaged in Vietnam’s deadly combat or Washington’s political infighting.
Webb’s love for the military led him to attend the University of Southern California on an NROTC scholarship. While there he made the decision to apply to the Naval Academy and pursue his goal of becoming a Marine officer. In June 1964 he took the oath of office as a Midshipman in the Class of 1968. Webb’s vivid account of his four years at the academy is brutally honest. He detested the pettiness of the system, but he swore that he would never quit. In fact he rose to be one of the top leaders in the Brigade of Midshipmen. Following graduation, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps and, after attending officer training at The Basic School at Quantico, was sent off to war.
Vietnam in 1969 was a small-unit leader’s war, and Lieutenant Webb excelled. His chapter titled “Hell in a Very Small Place” is a compellingly descriptive narrative about his experience as an infantry unit leader in combat. Shortly after taking command of a rifle company, Webb was wounded for the second time and forced to leave his men. Eventually he was medically retired from the Marine Corps because of the wound. Webb received the Navy Cross—the service’s second-highest award for bravery in action—the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts.
In the last chapters of the book, Webb describes his decision to attend law school at Georgetown University; his writing a critically acclaimed novel, Fields of Fire; his strong support of veterans’ issues; and his government service—Assistant Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy, the first Naval Academy graduate to do so. And finally Webb addresses his time as a U.S. senator, which he described as “having the honor of serving . . . but the sense of pride is mingled with regret that I was unable to do enough.” Jim Webb’s wonderfully written book is more than a personal account; it is the story of a patriotic American who “heard his country calling.”
Reconsidering the American Way of War: U.S. Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan
Antulio J. Echevarria II. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. 219 pp. Notes. Biblio. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brian L. Steed, U.S. Army
In 1973, Russell Weigley’s An American Way of War laid out a theory of U.S. strategic thought and action, which would be used by several generations of military professionals and national-security strategists. Most of the writing on this topic since has elaborated on the theory and pointed out where the United States has been wrong. It is in this last respect that Antulio Echevarria differs from those writers. In Reconsidering the American Way of War, Echevarria does not criticize U.S. policy or strategy or the American way of war. Instead he thoughtfully lays out the historical context of the argument. The primary difference between this work and Weigley’s is that Echevarria tries to include the many small wars or lesser-known conflicts waged by the United States in the analysis of why and how America fights. He contends that Weigley bases his arguments on a limited pool of sources and that by including a greater variety the argument in Reconsidering the American Way of War carries more weight.
Reconsidering is divided into two parts—“Prelude,” where the author lays out the theories associated with the argument, and “American Military Practice,” where he identifies the history of that practice. The book begins with discussion of the historiographical debates swirling around Weigley’s thesis, which is useful for any scholar of strategy, national security policy, or military science. Echevarria goes on to identify the challenges, errors, and overreaching associated with describing American strategic culture or military art. The author breaks the discussion of the history of U.S. military conflicts into four parts: the Revolutionary War to the Mexican War, the Civil War to the Boxer Rebellion, the Caribbean wars to the Korean War, and the Guatemalan coup to the war on terrorism. In this historical presentation, the “major wars” get limited treatment, and more space is dedicated to the smaller conflicts to create a broader understanding of the palette of American behavior in those engagements. For those not well versed in these smaller wars the book can be a concise and beneficial survey of American military history or a primer for focusing further study.
The real value of the book is found in the debate about the idea of a way of war. Echevarria lays out three misconceptions about American strategic culture—that wars are crusades and too technocentric and that the United States is overly sensitive to casualties—and uses the historical record to point out the fault in each. The author also focuses on the type of conflict, a valuable emphasis. Weigley and others tend to present a binary argument that the American way of war prefers annihilation (or decisive battle) over attrition. Alternatively, Echevarria offers a nuanced historical explanation that includes annihilation, attrition or exhaustion, decapitation, coercive diplomacy, terrorism and intimidation, and deterrence. Throughout the historical portion of the book he explains which type of strategy was used to emphasize that an American way of war is not as simple as it is often described.
The book is not perfect. For example, the argument against the astrategic nature of the American way of war is lacking, as Echevarria essentially equates the fact that the conflict was able to be conducted to the existence of a strategy. Part of the problem here is that he loosely defines strategy earlier in the book as the art of the general. This makes no qualitative judgment on a strategy, implying that no strategy is good or bad, it just is the way generals fight the war. The fact that many of the conflicts in American history have been bumbling messes would suggest that the strategy was bad and thus astrategic.
The most profound point made in the book is in the conclusion, where Echevarria writes, “the fact that the character of a war can change when a president is assassinated or is otherwise succeeded suggests the center of gravity lies more with the individual than with the office.” The changes between administrations with regard to recent national-security decisions add weight to this statement. While the primary argument in the book can seem too academic at times, it provides a valuable counterpoint to a topic relevant to current debates about American strategy and policy. It is always beneficial to understand clearly from whence one comes before determining where one ought to go.
Men At War: What Fiction Tells Us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22
Christopher Coker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 325pp. Biblio. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Christopher D. Nelson, U.S. Navy
A few years ago, I had a disconcerting conversation with a senior officer. It was about fiction. He doubted its use in the profession of arms. Fiction, he said, really can’t tell us about the past like nonfiction can. I struggled to come to fiction’s defense and argue for its place on the warrior’s shelf. But the moment had passed. What I wish I had those years ago was a copy of Christopher Coker’s enjoyable book Men At War: What Fiction Tells Us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22.
Coker, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, looks at 24 works of literature and one film, from the ancient to the modern. From those 25 works of art, he focuses on the main character and themes of each, dividing the book into five groups of “character types”: warriors, heroes, villains, survivors, and victims. His choices—from Homer’s The Iliad to postmodern writer Don DeLillo’s Human Moments in World War III—are not arbitrary. The selections are personal. Coker explains that the works he decided to discuss were for him “the ones that best illustrate the phenomenon of war.”
Indeed, Coker has an eclectic mix. When you hear Leo Tolstoy made the list you might assume War and Peace is up for discussion. Well, not so fast. Coker turns to the lesser-known but powerful Tolstoy novella Hadji Murat. Hadji Murat, a Chechen fighter, is cast as warrior—a man that Coker says, “is always at war with whatever makes him weak.” Coker resurrects Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Complete Brigadier Gerard, whose protagonist, Gerard, is a French Hussar, who Coker writes is “typical of a breed of solider who has now died out—the romantic, the storyteller, the entertainer who knows war for what it is.”
One of the better-known series that Coker chooses to discuss—particularly for a naval audience—is Patrick O’Brian’s famous Aubrey-Maturin naval series. Coker casts “Lucky Jack” Aubrey as a character in fiction firmly planted in the “warrior” category. Captain Aubrey, the author says, is “far from the perfect commander, but what he lacks in human perfection he makes up for as commander of men. He is the archetypal ‘born leader.’”
Through the book’s 25 characters, Coker succeeds in emphasizing fiction’s importance in war. Fiction, he argues, can do something history cannot. It can show us the individual, our innerself, while history, with few exceptions, does not, as it is often a series of dates and armies and navies—masses of men and machines.
Readers may be wary when deciding if they should spend their money and time on a book that talks about books. Literary criticism is not a best seller. Coker, however, spares us from inflated, obtuse writing that often accompanies this genre. And words like “archetype” make a rare appearance, as his writing is largely free of jargon that lives in a college English department. What he does bring is a depth and breadth of reading that adds to his insights. After 300 pages you’ll realize you’ve been exposed to some of the biggest names in science and the humanities, including Kant, Hume, Emerson, Freud, Hardy, Nietzsche, Melville, Dostoevsky, Dickens, and Darwin. Plenty of modern writers get their due as well. Coker quotes Sebastian Junger’s fantastic book War when talking about the “survivor” and war: “Men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than flee on their own and perhaps, survive.”
Men At War, to my knowledge, joins a small and exclusive shelf space. Books that do talk about war and fiction, like literary historian Paul Fussell’s classic The Great War and Modern Memory, or Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, do so narrowly, looking at fiction only in one war. Fiction and war has rarely been given to such a wide study. Thus it is a credit to Coker that he is able to expand the discussion and keep his work to a manageable size.
After reading Coker’s book, I now have a better response to someone who asks me, “What can fiction really tell us about war?” To that, I would say this: Great fiction can show us a character’s struggles, their loss, their compassion, their pain, and might, just might, help us make sense of our humanity in a way that no work of nonfiction can.