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The Price of Glory
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20463 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
2,097 Words |
| Author
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Martin Sieff
Martin Sieff is a Soviet and Eastern European affairs
correspondent for the Washington Times. |
SOMETHING TO DIE FOR
James Webb
New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991
333 pp., $19.95
James Webb is still under the age of fifty, yet already he can boast three extraordinary careers in the spheres of war, politics, and literature. This remarkable novel is the first of his literary efforts--one hopes it will not be the last--to splice these remarkably disparate--one might even say "trizophrenic"--experiences together. In making such a bold venture, he offers tantalizing hints of becoming a significant political novelist.
Webb, forty-five, was a combat Marine officer in Vietnam and a genuine hero. His many decorations include two Purple Hearts. He went on to transmute his combat experience into the acclaimed novel Fields of Fire, published in 1978 and widely accepted as one of the finest fictional works on the Vietnam conflict.
Two more acclaimed novels followed, confirming his position as a potential American successor to Rudyard Kipling, bard and champion of his nation's warrior caste. A Sense of Honor, published in 1981, was a fine evocation of cadet life at Annapolis Naval Academy. A Country Such as This bears comparison with Kipling's searing poem "Mesopotamia" as a lament for the gallant warriors needlessly sacrificed to expedient, self-serving micromanaging by their political overlords.
Warrior and politician
In between, as if by afterthought, Webb also won a 1983 broadcasting Emmy for his prescient television reporting from Beirut the previous year for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour. Webb enraged senior Reagan administration officials and Pentagon top brass alike by his claims that the U.S. Marines--his former comrades in arms--deployed in the Lebanese capital as part of an international peacekeeping force were enough to attract terrorist attacks and too few and too politically constrained to adequately defend themselves. His warnings proved eerily, prophetically, and tragically true when 241 of them died, killed in their sleep when a suicide truck-bomber slammed into the side of their barracks.
Nor was this all. Webb served a brief but forceful term as secretary of the Navy in the second Reagan administration before resigning on a point of principle. He had previously served his time in the
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