American Enterprise Institute
News Articles
Tradition and the Military, an Interview with James Webb
March/April 1997
James Webb isn't likely to forget military tradition as he
works in his Arlington office overlooking the Iwo Jima Memorial. The
walls, shelves, and tables bristle with mementos of his varied life:
military honors; a model of the three-soldiers statue from the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial (he served on its planning committee), an
Emmy won covering the 1983 Marine barracks bombing for the "Mac
Neil-Lehrer News Hour," and bullets from the Civil War.
A 1968 graduate of the Naval Academy, Webb served in
Vietnam as a Marine rifle platoon commander, earned high honors for
valor, and was evacuated after he suffered serious injuries
protecting a subordinate from a grenade blast. Upon leaving the
Corps, he earned a law degree at Georgetown University before
writing the first of his four novels, Fields of Fire, a Vietnam tale
that sold a million copies and was nominated for a Pulitzer. In
1987, James Webb was appointed Secretary of the Navy.
Webb is currently working on another novel. He was interviewed by Scott Walter, Keith Hutcheson, and David Broome:
AE: How important is tradition for the military?
MR. WEBB: It's the foundation of the military. The thing that
sustained me in combat was the notion that I was accountable to the
people whom I was leading and to the traditions of the Marine Corps.
That's the bedrock.
AE: The central military tradition is the warrior. How is he
made?
MR. WEBB: In any battlefield scenario, maybe 10 percent of the
people are at the tip of the sword. I wouldn't say that the central
tradition of the military is to become a warrior. I would say that
the most respected tradition in the military is the warrior
tradition.
I grew up in the Air Force. My father was a career Air
Force officer who had not been a college graduate; he flew bombers
in World War II and worked his way up. I was able to watch the whole
Air Force thing as a young kid—family dislocations, the bomber
thing, the fighter thing, the missile thing.
Then I went to the Naval Academy. I served as a Marine
officer. People generally agree that the Marine Corps has held on to
its traditions the strongest and has flourished because of it. From
the very first day in the Marine Corps, you are told about its
battle history and traditions, although frankly some of this is
embellished.
Marines know little things such as that the markings on
their uniforms tie into the history of the Corps. The officer cap,
for instance, has a quatrefoil because when the Marines used to be
snipers up in the masts of sailing vessels they would tie ropes on
top of their hats so they could be identified by the friendlies and
not be shot. The trousers on the dress blues have a red stripe,
which only NCOs and officers wear, because at the Battle of
Chapultepec in the Mexican War the NCOs and officers stood and
fought. This is for the blood that was shed at Chapultepec.
Marines carry the acts of those who went before them as a
conscious burden. There were so many times when I was completely
miserable in Vietnam—I remember making night combat moves through
miles of rice paddies and hating it but finally saying, hey, I'm
doing this, but somebody else did something just as hard or worse.
You earn the respect of the uniform by what has happened through
other people who breathed the dignity into it, and you feel it's
part of your obligation to pass that on.
AE: What did you learn from your father?
MR. WEBB: In this country today, we are very hesitant to talk about
white ethnic culture. In 1974 the National Opinion Research Center
broke white Americans down into 17 different ethnic strata, and
there was more variation within those 17 strata in terms of
educational attainment and family income than there was between
whites as a whole and blacks.
The historic strengths of those cultures produce different kinds of
talent. For example, 40 percent of the partners in major law firms
in this country are Jewish. The Jews come from a tradition of
Talmudic law. It is passed down from father to son, at the dinner
table. In my culture, which is Scottish and Irish, the Celtic
culture, although we were at the bottom of that NORC scale in
education and income, we have been soldiers for 2,000 years. The
military virtues have been passed down at the dinner table. More
than half of America's foreign-born Medal of Honor winners were born
in Ireland. A big part of that was the Civil War and the
potato-famine Irish, but it extends far beyond that, and it doesn't
even include what happened on the Southern side in the Civil War.
The southern culture is of course very heavily Scottish-Irish.
My family has been involved at some level in every war this
country has fought except for World War I, which we somehow missed
by virtue of age, although my dad was the only career military
person our family ever had. The discussions at the dinner table when
I was a kid were, who were the great generals? Which were the
important battles? How do you lead people? How do you motivate them?
When somebody tells you you are in charge, what are your obligations
to those people? My dad would say there are two ways: you can make
somebody do something, or you can make somebody want to do
something.
Many of the discussions that I have with my son are the
same way. I don't push-it just happens. His mother's father was on
Iwo Jima. I did this stuff in Vietnam, and my father did this stuff
in World War II. When you see other cultures having strengths that
don't require you to go out and get your butt shot off, this
particular cultural strength seems thankless and kind of a curse,
but it's there.
AE: Commandant Gray of the Marine Corps had a
reading list which included your novel Fields of Fire. He said
officers should read these things.
MR. WEBB: It was great that Al Gray did that. Al wanted to move the
Marine Corps away from feeling like the only way you can define
yourself as a Marine is if you run three miles a day and do
pull-ups.
The great military leaders have had a streak of poetry in
them. I think of a guy named Dutch Schultz, a Marine Corps two-star
general who wrote some of the most beautiful war poetry I've ever
read. MacArthur was absolutely poetic in the way that he spoke. The
best article I've ever read on success in combat was written by
George Patton in 1931, when he was a major. If you really want to
understand and pass on the traditions of the service, you need to be
able to articulate them.
AE: What are the best American novels and movies
about war?
MR. WEBB: A book that is often overlooked, partly because of the
timing of its publication, is Once An Eagle, by Anton Myrer. Myrer
was a Marine in World War II, and in this novel he followed one
character from 1916 all the way into Vietnam. That book had a very
profound effect on me because I read it right when I got back from
Vietnam. It was published in 1968, right after the Tet offensive,
when everyone was burned out on that stuff.
I'm still waiting to see a good film about Vietnam. My
dad's favorite on leadership, one he made me watch, was Twelve
O’clock High, which is a great movie about having to command people
under great duress. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a wonderful
movie. This British commander went through an enormous amount of
punishment that he could have avoided in order to make the point to
his Japanese captors that this was a military unit, and not a random
collection of soldiers, that he was delivering to the prisoner of
war camp.
There are two non-American books I would recommend. One is
The Forgotten Soldier, which is non-fiction, by Guy Sajer. It is the
most overwhelming book about war I have ever read. The other is C.S.
Forester's The General, a novel about how the unimaginative officers
who could endure the horrendous World War I battles and still
persevere were the ones who floated to the top.
AE: A recent article in The New Yorker quotes
former Congresswoman and Armed Forces Committee member Patricia
Schroeder saying, without discernible remorse, that in the wake of
Tailhook, women and gays in the military, and so forth, "what you've
got in the Navy is a culture cracking." Would this be something you
agree with her on?
MR. WEBB: Where is an old naval saying that it takes 300 years to
build a tradition and three days to destroy one. Today's problems go
back a ways.
I've recently been spending two or three months a year in
Vietnam, and I can tell you they know who won on the battlefield. I
didn't say that 10 years ago, but it's very clear now. We defeated
the North Vietnamese. They now admit they lost 1.4 million combat
soldiers. But the failure of this nation to conclude the Vietnam War
satisfactorily left the military under question from the outside,
frequently from people who had no military experience and who were
elected to Congress on virulently anti-military themes.
The real watershed event was the Watergate Congress. When
Nixon resigned in August 1974, a lot of Democrats won in safe
Republican districts simply on anti-war issues, because no one else
was going to run. Tom Downey is a classic example of that. He was
around 26 years old, living at home with his mother, never had a job
in his life, and all of a sudden, he's a congressman.
In the summer of 1975, the House passed the amendment
opening up the service academies to females. This was a watershed
event, but it was done without substantive hearings. It was done
without asking for the input of the military leadership. They
narrowed the issue down to simply a matter of equality. It was not a
matter of military performance. That didn't matter. I can't think of
another issue passed by the Congress in such a cavalier way that had
such a long-term impact in that it diminished the military's ability
to defend its own culture.
I was the first Naval Academy graduate to serve in the
military and become Secretary of the Navy. When I got there I wanted
to give purely military decisions back to the admirals, to give the
uniformed military the same kind of authority that it had in the
past. But the reality was that by then, with the cultural change
that had been happening on the political side, a lot of them were
afraid to take it back.
AE: At one point in the early 1960s, the Army Chief
of Staff went to the White House to resign over policies being made
in Vietnam, but after arriving changed his mind and went back to the
Pentagon. He later said it was the greatest single mistake of his
life. Should our military leadership resign when they think the
services are being misused for social experiments?
MR. WEBB: First, they should vociferously defend their traditions
and culture. In rare cases, a resignation is appropriate. They
really haven't done either for a long while.
One of my great heroes is General Bob Barrow, who was
Commandant of the Marine Corps in the late '70s and early '80s. In
1979, the Carter administration lined the Joint Chiefs up and
ordered them to support eliminating the restrictions on women in
combat. I wrote an article strongly opposing the idea, and Barrow
called me up the day the article came out. All the Joint Chiefs
except for Barrow had said, aye aye, sir, we'll go over to Congress
to testify in favor of eliminating restrictions on women in combat.
Barrow told the administration, "Number one, I don't
believe that's a legal order. You cannot order me to support a
policy that does not yet exist. That is not civilian control of the
military; that is civilian manipulation of the military leadership."
He told the Deputy Secretary of Defense he was having his aides’
research whether it was legal to force him to support a proposal not
yet established as national policy. And he said if it was legal and
he was required to testify with a favorable opinion, he was going to
explain to the Congress the circumstances under which he did so.
They backed off.
General Barrow took over as the Commandant of the Marine
Corps the same way I would take over a rifle company. I'm going to
give you the best job I can, and if you don't like what I'm doing,
fire me. That is what people need to do.
AE: Is that Carter administration incident at all
analogous to Clinton's policy on gays in the military?
MR. WEBB: The issues of privacy and potential favoritism are just as
great in isolated operating units with females as they are with
gays. Loyalty, fairness, accountability—that's what makes the
military work.
When people ask me about gays in the military, my response
is, Why don't you people have the courage to talk about what is
happening in the operating units with women?
AE: When you were Secretary of the Navy, you
tripled the number of seagoing jobs open to women. Why?
MR. WEBB: When Secretary of Defense Carlucci came in, he announced
that he wanted to remove all the restrictions on combat for women.
It was totally contrary to our own administration's policy, but he
said, "I don't have Cap Weinberger's hang-ups on that."
I had been receiving pressure to resolve the issue of what
exactly is a combat assignment. Where is the line drawn? I wanted
the uniformed military to make that decision. So I convened a group
of 28 active-duty people, male and female. I sent them around the
world. They came back and reported to me through the Chief of Naval
Operations, who supported their findings. One of their
recommendations was to define combat vessels by type of ship. My
view had always been that the biggest difficulty of female
assimilation on ships is the length of deployment. Their
recommendation surprised me, but the process was the right process,
and so I accepted it. Now I think we need to look at it again.
AE: Is it still possible to have a strong military
and warrior tradition? Can Beavis and Butt Head be turned into
Marines?
MR. WEBB: They always have been. No democracy can survive without
two things, and we are in danger on both counts. One is a strong
public education system, so that no matter where you start, you
believe you have the opportunity to make something big of yourself.
Second, you cannot have a true democracy if, in times of crisis,
only some people are at risk. Every different part of the country,
culturally, must be at risk if the nation is at risk. Unfortunately,
that risk-sharing has fallen by the wayside since Vietnam. When I
was in Vietnam, I thought we were all over there. Then after I was
wounded and came back to work on Capitol Hill, I started calling
around. I called Harvard and asked how many people graduated from
Harvard College from 1962 to '72 and how many were killed in
Vietnam. The answers were 12,595, and eight. They later said 12. In
World War II, by contrast, Harvard lost 691 killed in action.
If you separate out the governing elites from the people
who are vulnerable to public policy, you get problems. In order to
understand the risks you are putting my nephews or my son through,
you have to feel somewhat at risk yourself. Today for the first time
that I know of, the government's entire national security team is
composed of people who have never worn a uniform-from the President,
to the Secretary of Defense, to the National Security Advisor. Not
only that, but if you look at the people in the administration,
who's got anyone personally at risk?
It's easy to say, send a few troops to Somalia. To Bosnia.
Zaire. Rwanda. The order-givers have no comprehension. One culture
pays while another culture moves things around. That's not the way
this country is supposed to be.
AE: The Wall Street Journal ran an article last
year about Beavis and Butt Head-type kids going to Parris Island and
coming out something so different that their own mothers couldn't
recognize their sons. One of the interesting twists was that the
sons were disgusted by their own former lives, their own former
friends, by the society around them.
MR. WEBB: Yeah, that guy hates what he was, and he's not going back
to it because he's risen above it. These guys have found a
camaraderie that will sustain them for the rest of their lives. You
don't get that sitting on the block.
It amazes me, the number of extremely successful former
Marines. You go up on Wall Street and they're everywhere. These
aren't always people who went to really good schools or who have
incredible native talents. They've just learned how to be men.
As for the disdain for weakness in former buddies, it's
always been that way. We used to talk about it when I was a Marine.
If you think you feel alienated from somebody back on the block when
you made a voluntary choice to go into the service and they are
still just screwing around, think about how you feel when you went
overseas and got your butt shot off and came back and they called
you names.
But when you had conscription in place, you had shorter
average enlistment periods, higher personnel turnover, and a lot
more people with military experience going back into the community.
So it was a lot easier to have camaraderie when you went home,
because people there had been through it.
AE: Not all traditions are good. During my time in
the Air Force I noticed the tradition that you're not supposed to
challenge authority. Because decisions are unchallenged from within,
they sometimes go in the wrong direction.
MR. WEBB: Your experiences are probably a product either of poor
leadership or of the end of conscription and the evolution of this
professional military, which encourages less questioning than when
we had a citizen military. The American military was founded on the
right of the soldier to ask why. It drove von Steuben bananas at
Valley Forge. He came from the Prussian experience. He kept saying,
These Americans, they always want to know, "Why?"
AE: You harshly criticized Admiral Boorda, the
Chief of Naval Operations who recently committed suicide after
making controversial decisions on Tailhook and gays and women in the
military, and being investigated for wearing ribbons he hadn't
earned. What do you make of the Boorda affair?
MR. WEBB: The military tradition is, you wear your ribbons right. I
have never in my life seen a senior Marine with his ribbons on
wrong. When I was Secretary of the Navy, I had to personally sign
off on every transfer of an admiral. These packets would include an
eight-by-ten picture of the individual, and I got in the habit of
checking the ribbons they were wearing as one way to get to know who
the admirals were. The ribbons are the roadmap of your career.
I never once questioned whether any individual deserved an
award that he was wearing. What I was doing was looking at the
correctness of how they were wearing their ribbons. When I first
started this, a tremendous percentage of the admirals in the Navy
were wearing their ribbons wrong. The problem is, if the admiral
isn't wearing his ribbons right, then why should the petty officer
care? I announced that I wasn't approving any transfer of any
admiral whose ribbons came up to my office wrong. I don't have any
regrets or apologies to make for the fact that I was attempting to
enforce a tradition in the correct way.
For some time before the Boorda suicide, I had been
criticizing Navy leaders for failing to adequately defend their
service in the wake of Tailhook and so forth. My efforts were not
directed purely at Admiral Boorda but at many senior leaders who had
let the Navy's culture be wrenched by political manipulation. In a
speech to the Naval Institute earlier in the year, I had warned
against sacrificing military principle and loyalty to further one's
personal career, and I criticized the way some great officers had
been stigmatized and pushed out of the service for political
reasons.
I was talking to all the admirals, not just Boorda. I was
saying, “Where are the senior officers who are supposed to step
forward and defend their institution when it's being torn apart?”
When good men were railroaded without a shred of due process, who
was speaking up? The number-one tradition in the military is loyalty
from the top down: Take care of your people.
MR. WEBB: I cannot conjure up an ounce of respect for Bill Clinton when it comes to the military. Every time I see him salute a Marine, it infuriates me. I don't think Bill Clinton cares one iota about what happens in a military unit.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS