American Enterprise Institute
News Articles
July/August 1999
James Webb graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1968.
For his service in Vietnam as a
Marine lieutenant he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star,
two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. He went on to earn a
law degree from Georgetown, then wrote several novels of war and
military life, including one set at the Academy (A Sense of Honor).
During the Reagan administration he served as Secretary of the Navy.
His latest novel, The Emperor’s General, takes place in Douglas
MacArthur’s Japan.
Below he offers the man who presided over his military education a
few thoughts on what those hard days at Annapolis in the mid ’60s
taught him.
MEMORANDUM
To: Rear Admiral
C. S. Minter, USN (Ret’d),
Former Superintendent, U.S. Naval Academy
From: Captain James H. Webb, Jr., USMC (Ret’d)
U.S. Naval Academy class of 1968
Subj: After-action report
Sir:
This is in response to your letter of 12 May 1964,
congratulating me on my acceptance to the Naval Academy and
outlining my education and training should I report for duty as a
midshipman. Please excuse the 35-year delay, but I did in fact
report for duty, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I
have had a busy time of it ever since.
As you instructed, when I received your letter I gave it my
close personal attention (italics yours), so that I might fully
understand what would be required for me to commence a career in the
United States Naval Services (italics yours), with the understanding
that the Naval Academy exists for this purpose only (italics, you
guessed it, yours).
That was a great letter, Admiral. It was honest,
unapologetic, and immensely challenging. You might imagine the
impact on a young man just past his eighteenth birthday to receive
such a message, written by an admiral in the most powerful and
well-led navy in the world, who like so many of his peers had cut
his teeth in the dramatic and punishing arena of World War II.
Reading about the struggles of that war had formed the template of
my childhood. The theme song from Victory at Sea coursed through my
brain as I opened the envelope. Film footage from great naval
battles danced before my consciousness, as familiar to me as MTV
music videos are to the children of today. I knew that you and
others whom I might soon meet—and better yet, serve under—were at
the forefront of the greatest battles in history.
And here arrived your letter, outlining the conditions
under which I might be allowed to join you. I want you to know, even
though you are long‑retired, that your blunt warnings motivated the
living hell out of me. To be perfectly honest, they also scared the
living hell out of me (italics mine). I doubt you had some Deputy
Assistant Secretary of How To Make Nice peering over your shoulder
as you wrote about what would be expected of me and my future
classmates once we were “sworn in to the Naval Service and commenced
a career.” If there had been such a Make Nice person in the
Department of Defense in 1964, his or her authority would have ended
somewhere between the E Ring of the Pentagon and the Marine guard at
the Academy gate. For what do bow-tied academics and vote-groveling
politicians know or care about the hard, usually thankless, and
often messy task of finding and building combat leaders?
Unfortunately, we learned the answer to that question just
a few years after you wrote your letter, when Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara turned loose his systems analysis Whiz Kids inside
the Pentagon, treating the Vietnam War as if it were an Edsel to be
conceived, designed, and marketed by Management (them and their
bow-tied friends), while Labor (that means us) were supposed to
remain quiet and do the dying and just keep those cars coming off
the assembly line. But that is the subject of another memorandum.
Your letter. I love that letter. Even now, some 35 years
having passed, I take it out and read it from time to time. It was
not some cheering, recruiting-slogan attaboy for my having passed
through the wickets of anonymity to try my hand at the elite Trade
School that my non-Academy military father had always praised for
the quality product it delivered to the operating forces. In fact,
the only reference you made to the Academy instead of the Navy at
large was to point out that “since the founding of the Naval Academy
in 1845 its graduates have served their country with distinction in
war and peace.” That was it. No loud ring‑knocking. No recitation of
the long list of accolades. No need to parade out Nimitz, Halsey,
Lejeune, and Rickover. The Academy existed to produce leaders, and
everyone knew that.
Your focus was on the serious task of taking the raw
material the nation sent forth every year and finding and developing
leaders therein, for the good of the Naval Service and of the
country. There were no euphemisms. Your ultimate goal was “to
produce an educated leader of character, physically sound, and
dedicated to the service of his country.” There were no apologies
when you warned that the plebe system was “traditionally tough; not
by accident but by design.” You explained that “This is a period of
testing—a time to separate the performers from the non‑performers.
It requires midshipmen to produce under pressure, to stand on their
own two feet, to respond instantly and reflexively to orders, and
finally to meet the highest standards of conduct, honor, character,
and morality.”
“The highest standards”—a severe and unforgiving gauntlet
thrown at my young feet. And there were no promises of touchy-feely
counseling sessions if we from time to time failed to meet those
standards. You put the onus right back on us by warning that plebe
year was “fully within the capabilities of those young men who
possess proper motivation.” (Italics...well, you know. You wrote
it). And there were no seductive be-all-that-you-can-be invitations
to come to the Navy to find the inner me. If I lacked this “proper
motivation,” you suggested, I should withdraw my application and
pursue another career.
In retrospect it’s almost surprising that I showed up after
reading your letter. I was already doing quite well on an academic
scholarship at one of the country’s best universities, located not
far from some of California’s nicest beaches. I spent many a bleak
and nostalgic night over the next four years looking back at what I
had given up in order to answer your challenge. I had no desire to
have your mandatory engineering degree shoved down my throat. I
hated the exhausting viciousness of the plebe system, a regimen so
punishing that more than one classmate told me years later he had
come through Vietnam fine but was still having nightmares about
plebe year. I considered it absurd to be losing even the most normal
of college freedoms—no radio in my room for a year, no dating for a
year, no riding in a car for nearly three years, no television
privileges for three years, having exactly 40 seconds to be out of
my bed when the reveille bells went off in the morning, suffering
the unbroken, 24-hours-a-day scrutiny of every part of my conduct by
those above me—the list, as you know, goes on and on.
But there was something else, not only in your letter but
in the eyes of my father and in the hollows of my own subconscious.
No, it was not simply the matter of a challenge to my pride—whether
I was good enough to endure and triumph in this crucible. It was a
summons, up from the depths of the past, glimmering before me like
an unwelcome but certain promise: Our history showed that during my
adulthood the nation would never be fully at peace, and would most
likely at some point be at war. On my shoulders, should I be
entrusted with the lives of other Americans in such circumstances,
would be the burden of momentous decisions involving life and death.
Would I be prepared to do my duty? As I grew older in this
profession, I would be challenged to anticipate threat and response
to aggression in an ever-changing world. Would I do my part to
ensure we as a nation were strong enough to protect our interests
and our allies?
The best way to prepare myself for these challenges was to
immerse myself in them, both day and night. And so I packed my
trash, said goodbye to my surf board, and headed east.
I will admit my stomach did a quick, queasy turn as I
crossed the Severn River bridge and peered over at the wide, flat
grounds of the Yard. The cold grey buildings and the tall turquoise
poles that marked the outer limits of Dewey Field seemed to
delineate a neatly manicured federal prison. And I did not like it
very much when the crisp-uniformed upperclassman wearing a red
nameplate hit me hard in the chest after I walked out a door and
into the true innards of Academy life. And I was more than a little
bit amazed when in the course of one quick afternoon everything
civilian in my life, from my clothes to my hair to my very speech
patterns, were torn, shorn, and beaten out of my countenance. My
first night in Bancroft Hall I cried away my youth, knowing that it
would be nine years—half as long as I had already lived—before I
could make another full decision about my life.
Through the long, dark winter of that first year, as our
country slid ineluctably into war in Vietnam, I fell just as
irretrievably into your rhythms. Memories visit me even today, mixed
with pride and loss. Posting the watch at zero-five-thirty,
wondering what was happening back at USC as the nearby stairwells
began to fill with plebes jogging up and down the steps as they
prepared for their reveille come‑arounds. Trudging around Farragut
Field and then Hospital Point in three pairs of sweat gear in the
wintry pre‑dawn darkness, watching the lights slowly come on in real
homes just across the ice‑clogged Severn River, desperately missing
my family, then forcing my mind onto the professional questions that
would soon be asked of me. Fighting to stay awake in class, all the
while worrying more about what was going to happen to me at the
hands of upperclassmen back in Bancroft Hall or at the tables in the
mess hall than I did about the remote and seemingly arcane laws of
physics and calculus. Days falling into weeks, never with sufficient
sleep, feeling exhaustion seeping so far inside me that it seemed to
rest like a lead weight inside my bones. Weeks falling into months
without the opportunity even to talk to a member of the opposite
sex. Asking myself over and over, why did I do this, and why did I
not simply walk away and go back to a calmer, more enjoyable
existence. And then remembering the proud and somewhat envious face
of my own father, who would have given anything to have undergone
this misery in order to better prepare him for the demanding task of
a military career.
You did not lie to us, Admiral. You made it tough. You held
the ring up there, always just a bit higher than we could reach. You
held a mirror before all of our faces, daring us to look at
ourselves and claim we saw a man who could compare with the great
leaders of the past.
That lonely and demanding first year fell quickly into a
second, then a third, and finally a fourth. The summers were, as
they liked to say, “real world,” with only a minimal amount of
leave. One was spent cruising with enlisted sailors on two different
ships out of Long Beach, transferring Marines and equipment from
California to Hawaii for their further transplacement to the
burgeoning war in Vietnam. Another was spent working under junior
officers aboard an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean just days
after the 1967 Arab‑Israeli war, chasing the emergent and aggressive
Soviet fleet, and monitoring the tinderbox of the Middle East.
Inside the Yard, I learned many things, not the least of which was
the gut‑wrenching emptiness that comes when one discovers that good
friends have died in battle thousands of miles away. One had to
process this, as the psychologists would put it today. Could it
really be that the hard‑assed, optimistic friend who had lived just
down the corridor and walked alongside me on the way to class and
joked and crabbed about the adolescent rules of Mother B, and
dreamed only of graduation and the future was now dead from a bullet
through the stomach in the jungles of Southeast Asia? Was it really
true that all of this preparation, all of the timeless lessons about
loyalty and courage, could result simply in a quick, unrewarded
death? Where did they tell us that in our books and lectures?
The reality was timeless. Our moment had come. We accepted
it, inured ourselves to it, and finally came to expect it. This was
the world we inherited, those who read your letter and responded to
your call. Our fate was to have all of the responsibilities you
promised us, yet none of the national adulation that had been given
your generation of World War II. But that didn’t matter. Our reward
would be in answering the call to duty. We persisted, and retained
our pride. Duty, always duty, in addition to resilience under
pressure and persistence in the face of loss, that was what your
regimens taught us.
You were gone by then, but the young man who walked out of
your gates on June 5, 1968, at the height of a war that was tearing
our country into shreds, was more than ready. Only some 840 of the
nearly 1,400 who had answered the challenge of your initial letter
had survived to raise their right hands and renew their oath, now as
commissioned officers in the Navy or Marine Corps. By then Your
Correspondent was infused with all the challenges of honor,
leadership, tradition, and courage, hardened, as military people
must always be, against the despair that comes from loneliness and
the pain that derives from separation from one’s loved ones. He was
ready to lead, wishing only for the opportunity to serve. And in the
baking jungles and the blood‑filled rice paddies and the murderous
mountains he was indeed called upon to serve.
And in service of the principles which have made our nation
great, you may be assured, sir, that he is ready still.
Very respectfully,
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS