James Webb > Quotes

“You know what we've lost, William? We've lost a sense of responsibility, at least on the individual level. We have too many people like Mark who believe that the government owes them total, undisciplined freedom. If everyone thought that way, there would be no society. We're so big, so strong now, that people seem to have forgotten that a part of our strength comes from each person surrendering a portion of his individual urges to the common good. And the common good is defined by who wins at the polls, and the policies they make. Like it or lump it.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“If they didn't want to know, they shouldn't have asked.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“Before all else, each of us must take a fundamental risk to be true to ourselves.”
― Jim Webb

“In such a wild, uncharted place the book of God was vital, for it nourished their spirit and laid boundaries for their conduct. Other subjects simply had no relevance. Trigonometry and calculus would not help them find their way among the mountain trails. Adam Smith's economics were of no consequence in the matter of planting corn and breeding cattle. Nor did they need the essays of Plato or the plays of Shakespeare to teach them how to shoot a rifle, or to make clothes from animal skins, or to clear away the wilderness with their own bare hands.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Self-discipline is never simple.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“They have become spoilers because in their view America’s political elites, both Republican and Democrat, have grown together into an almost indiscernible “hybrid royalty” that offers them little to choose from in terms of how the nation is actually being governed.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“My war is not as simple as yours was, Father. People seem to question their obligation to serve on other than their own terms. But enough of that. I fight because we have always fought. It doesn't matter who.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“the cotton fields and strawberry patches of a much harsher world whose tragedies and daily burdens had blunted her temperament and quelled her emotions. But its most immediate impact on this teenage girl was not the lack of a demure coquettishness that otherwise might have defined her had she grown up in better circumstances; it was the visible evidence of the hardship of her journey. This was not a pom-pom-waving homecoming queen or a varsity athlete who had toned her body in a local gym. My mother never complained, but it was her struggles that had visibly shaped her shoulders, grown her biceps, and crusted her palms—while in a less visible way narrowing her view of her own long-term horizons. Decades later, when I was in my forties, I suppressed a defensive anger as I watched my mother sit quietly in an expansive waterfront Florida living room while a well-bred woman her age described the supposedly difficult impact of the Great Depression on her family. As the woman told it, the crash on Wall Street and the failed economy had made it necessary for them to ship their car by rail from New York to Florida when they headed south for the winter. Who could predict, she reasoned, whether there would be food or gasoline if their driver had to refuel and dine in the remote and hostile environs of small-town Georgia? My mother merely smiled and nodded, as”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“The Northern army was most often run like a business, solving a problem. The Southern army was run like a family, confronting a human crisis.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“As we slowly made our way toward the front door of the farmhouse, the radio in the dining room began playing “Danny Boy,” sung by Johnny Cash. I am not sure that anyone other than God himself could have arranged the sweet sorrow of that moment. Johnny Cash was my favorite singer. “Danny Boy,” emblematic of our long-held Scots-Irish heritage of military service, is perhaps the greatest song ever written about the painful anguish of a father watching helplessly as his son marches off to war. Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen and down the mountain side The summer’s gone and all the roses falling ’Tis you, ’tis you, must go and I must bide. But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow ’Tis I’ll be here, in sunshine or in shadow Oh, Danny Boy, oh, Danny Boy I love you so. It was the only time I ever saw my father cry.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“But to tar the sacrifices of the Confederate soldier as simple acts of racism, and reduce the battle flag under which he fought to nothing more than the symbol of a racist heritage, is one of the great blasphemies of our modern age.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Vietnam War was, to say the obvious, deeply controversial. One of its main dividing lines was whether a young American would step forward to serve or under what conditions he would find a way to stay here at home. It is beyond debate that many who opposed both the war and military service doubled down on their dissent by denigrating the value of serving and the morality of those who did the hardest fighting in the war.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“They came with nothing, and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing. The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks . Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“Courage and honor, respect and even pity, justice and, yes, you may not like for me to say it, but let me use the word - love? Do you know these words, Mahn? A love for your children, so deep that you would die for them? Or maybe a love of justice, so pure that it demands that you speak out? These are the feelings that push the world forward.”
― James Webb, Lost Soldiers

“She had clothed herself, even at near-midnight, and brushed her platinum hair. “Where’s Mark?” His father eyed him tiredly. “He’s gone.” His mother kneaded the fabric of the chair in both her hands. “Oh, you have to tell him, Peter. You can’t just say that.” “All right.” His father stared straight ahead for another long moment, precisely into nothing”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“I can tell from the crack of a rifle shot the type of weapon fired and what direction the bullet is traveling. I can listen to a mortar pop and know its size, how far away it is. I know instinctively when I should prep a tree line with artillery before I move into it. I know which draws and fields should be crossed on line, which should be assaulted, and which are safe to cross in column. ⁣
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I know where to place my men when we stop and form a perimeter. I can shoot a rifle and throw a grenade and direct air and artillery onto any target, under any circumstances. I can dress any type of wound, I have dressed all types of wounds, watered protruding intestines with my canteen to keep them from cracking under sun bake, patched sucking chests with plastic, tied off stumps with field expedient tourniquets. ⁣
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I can call in medevac helicopters, talk them, cajole them, dare them into any zone. I do these things, experience these things, repeatedly, daily. Their terrors and miseries are so compelling, and yet so regular, that I have ascended to a high emotion that is nonetheless a crusted numbness. I am an automaton, bent on survival, agent and prisoner of my misery. How terribly exciting. And how, to what purpose, will these skills serve me when this madness ends? ⁣
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What lies on the other side of all this? It frightens me. I haven't thought about it. I haven't prepared for it. I am so good, so ready for these things that were my birthright. I do not enjoy them. I know they have warped me. But it will be so hard to deal with a life empty of them.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“Within weeks I would deploy to Vietnam, that endlessly debated but little-understood war that for the Marine Corps would bring three times the number of dead as were killed in Korea and more total killed and wounded than in any other war, including World War II.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“In the living room Goodrich’s father sat in a large chair across from the sofa, motionless. He appeared very tired. His mother stood nervously behind the chair, obviously dreading his entrance into the room.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“Mark had obviously contemplated it and rejected it. He was livid. “And why should I go to jail? Am I a criminal? Have I hurt anyone”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“This ever-expanding war had now consumed my personal and professional preparations for more than three years. As the country struggled to resolve what had originally been considered nothing more than a “dirty little war,” its impact on those of us who were serving, and on our loved ones, was persistent and overwhelming. The lieutenant who had been our next-door neighbor when we first moved into quarters at Quantico had deployed to Vietnam only two months before. I now owned his dog. And he was already dead.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“His father peered solemnly at him. “It doesn’t take a martinet. You act like the boy did nothing more than steal a stick of bubble gum from some department store. To my mind, he committed the ultimate crime, Son. He rejected the society that nourished him.” He softened a bit, eyeing his son. “It wasn’t an easy thing for me to do, Will. I like Mark. But I can’t forget what he’s done and I can’t ignore it. He did it willingly, with his eyes open,”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“They stared fondly at each other, remembering simpler days of unclouded idealism. Goodrich shook his head. “Solomon, you son of a bitch! What are you doing here?” Mark smiled exasperatedly, almost defensively. “I’ve been lonely for my family. Then I heard you were back. That did it. I came down.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“Goodrich eyed his parents with growing awareness. “How did the police find him?” “I called them.” They peered into each other’s faces for a long, mute moment, Goodrich pondering absently that he was looking into a mirror that reflected how he himself would appear in another forty years, if he somehow managed to survive the insanity that Vietnam had brought him and live that long.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“Am I bad?” He puffed angrily on his pipe. “Why does the law create such absurdities?” He snorted. “The law. The law is an ass. Someone famous said that, once. Dickens, I think.” He looked up to Goodrich. “And it is. It doesn’t respond anymore. It’s a straitjacket. What kind of coercion is it when your alternatives are to kill or to go to jail?”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“They fought the Indians and then they fought the British, comprising 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army. They were the great pioneers— Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and Davy Crockett among them— blazing the westward trails into Kentucky , Ohio, Tennessee, and beyond, where other Scots-Irishmen like Kit Carson picked up the slack.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

“And there was another memorable lesson. Such is the power of the written word that the works of a single thoughtful writer—and indeed sometimes just one powerful book—might focus the direction of a young person’s life.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“Fort Ord would be lovely in the autumn, washed by the warm desert winds as an ugly winter descended upon Japan.”
― James Webb, The Emperor's General: A Novel

“We been abandoned, Lieutenant. We been kicked off the edge of the goddamn cliff. They don’t know how to fight it, and they don’t know how to stop fighting it.”
― James Webb, Fields of Fire

“As the American colonies moved toward declaring independence from Great Britain, the Scots -Irish were all but unanimous in their desire to be free of the English government. Although the trained minds of New England’s Puritan culture and Virginia’s Cavalier aristocracy had shaped the finer intellectual points of the argument for political disunion, the true passion for individual rights emanated from the radical individualism of the Presbyterian and, increasingly, Baptist pulpits.”
― James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America