Born Fighting

by James Webb

  No sooner had World War II ended than the Cold War began, and the country was forced to confront an aggressive, competing system of government in a variety of dangerous crisis points around the world. From 1950 to 1953, a war in Korea consumed the country’s emotional and intellectual energies as well as the blood and sacrifice of its citizens. A few years later, in 1957, the Soviet Union was the first to enter the space age, the launch of Sputnik bringing with it all the military dangers inherent in intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons thousands of miles away. And America found itself both bewildered and unprepared.

  After Sputnik was launched, my father, then an air force major, brought our family tradition of pioneering into a new generation. Still lacking a college education, he was nonetheless chosen by the air force to become part of one of the most urgent missions in the nation’s history: to build a missile system capable of protecting the country against the very real Soviet threat. On short notice our family of six traveled from Alabama to the isolated wilderness of California’s central coast, where an old, eighty-five-thousand-acre National Guard training base named Camp Cook was being transformed into Vandenberg Air Force Base.

  In the space of one year the military population at Vandenberg expanded from nearly zero to twelve thousand people. At the beginning, the base had no family housing. We lived for a while crammed into a five-dollar-a-night motel room in Pismo Beach, my father driving more than fifty miles each way every day along narrow, two-lane mountain roads to and from the base, leaving before dawn and coming back well after dark. Later we rented a small home in Santa Maria, cutting his commute in half but seeing him just as seldom, and finally we moved into a base housing project that had been scratched into the rough, vine-covered hillsides of Vandenberg. Having spent the fifth grade in England, the sixth in Texas, and the seventh in Alabama, I went to three different schools in the eighth grade alone, the third school a converted World War II hospital complex on the base. The old, yellow, wooden buildings sagged with age and disrepair. Chalkboards and desks had been erected in the low-ceilinged, dimly lit wards. The original hospital had been built above ground, with crawlspaces under it for ventilation. Snakes, jackrabbits, and skunks often found their way below the creaking floors of the classrooms. Rather than purchasing dead frogs pickled in formaldehyde to dissect in science class, my partner and I would simply crawl underneath the building and catch a few toads.

  It was chaos in the classrooms, kids from military towns and bases across the nation thrown suddenly into this remote, old hospital complex with its long interconnecting hallways and its odd, haunting memories of wounded soldiers who had once suffered in rows of beds where now we sat in lines of desks. Most of us, including me, were unwilling and unruly students, jarred from normality, frequently disruptive, and always cynical. Fights broke out routinely, on the playgrounds and even in the classrooms. It was not unusual for firecrackers to be thrown across the classroom when a teacher turned toward the freestanding blackboard. The shortstop on my Babe Ruth League baseball team left us in midseason, heading off to jail. Two years later my second baseman on that team was shot while trying to rob a store. We were accused by a few teachers of being “military trash,” which, one surmised, must have been somewhere below white trash, because some among us were black and others were brown. But we laughed that off—what kind of teacher would settle for a job in this isolated, intellectually barren region, anyway?

  Vandenberg at its beginnings had all the chaos of an isolated frontier town; a raw but accessible wilderness where I spent much of my time hiking and camping, a social structure that saw air force enlisted men dating high school girls, and a lack of contact with the more sophisticated world. More important, it was serious work that our fathers were doing far away along the fringes of the sea, where they had built block houses and launchpads and were testing scientific concepts that no one in history had ever before put into play. Our fathers were not scientists, although civilian scientists and engineers frequently worked alongside them. But they were doers, fixers, mechanical geniuses, risk-takers, and, more than we even understood, they were on an urgent mission involving national survival, with little time to lose.

  For two years I rarely saw my father except on holidays and on Sundays, even though we were living in the same house. He was gone before I got up. He was usually still gone when I went to bed. He took no leave and had no vacations. Now and then we would be sitting in our hospital ward of a classroom and the ground would shake and the sky would roar and we would rush outside, hundreds of kids emptying out of the buildings within a blink so that we could stand in the school yards and look westward toward the sea where the latest attempt to launch a missile would fill our eyes. The Thor missiles particularly were the world’s greatest firecrackers. More often than not during those first years they went off course and had to be destroyed. Some blew up on the launch pads, some just above them. Sometimes they went sideways instead of following their planned trajectory out into the sea. One of them ended up soaring ever higher, never rolling into its turn toward the sea, and finally exploding just outside the farm town of Santa Maria, where large pieces of metal showered the strawberry fields. We would cheer even when they blew up, for if nothing else we knew that we were watching an attempt to make history somewhere out there in the block houses next to the sea.

  Despite Vandenberg’s remoteness, we knew viscerally of its importance. In 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev made a train journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco during a visit to the United States. The rail route passed through the outer fringes of Vandenberg, near the sea. As the train left the little village of Surf and entered the base’s property, Khrushchev famously folded his arms and turned his back on the facility, staring out into the Pacific Ocean until his railroad car was again on civilian soil.

  Other strangers knew of us as well.

  One summer day as we were playing baseball on a field next to our housing project, we heard that a group of protesters was on its way to Vandenberg, presumably from San Francisco far to the north, in order to march against the Bomb. Stuck as we were in this remote outpost that had no recreational outlets save a base gym, an old movie theater, and a one-room “teen club,” the thought of a group of outsiders traveling to the base in order to protest its activities seemed preposterous. Several friends and I made our way to the main gate, where the base commander had augmented the normal air police contingent with a fire truck. Dozens of military kids gathered at the edge of the base perimeter, looking querulously through the chain-link fence.

  The protesters were standing in the ice plants and sagebrush on the other side of the dusty, lonely highway, a scraggly, rather confused group of no more than a hundred people holding “Ban the Bomb” signs and gathering their courage to try to enter the base. Suddenly—almost resignedly—they began walking across the highway. When they neared the gate, the fire hoses opened up, washing them back to the other side. Their mission somehow accomplished, they took a few pictures, mostly of themselves, and then walked slowly away, as wet and beaten as whipped puppies.

  We laughed and cheered, more at their oddity than at their cause, which from the confines of our lives seemed too ludicrous even to be taken seriously. How could they not comprehend the seriousness of Russia’s missile advantage? And who would even notice that they had come? But less than ten years later, after I returned from a hard year of combat in Vietnam, those protesters and their soul mates would own the streets. Seeing me in my Marine Corps uniform, it was they who would laugh. And it was I who would feel odd.

  The missile program at Vandenberg succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, and over time Vandenberg itself eventually became a stable and thriving community. My father flourished as well, finally working in an area with so many unknowns that his natural intelligence trumped the sophisticated education of many around him. He “wrote the book” on the complicated process of bringing together the many pieces of civilian and military hardware
and technology into the actual assemblage of workable Atlas missiles on their launching pads. He was promoted early to lieutenant colonel and assigned to the Strategic Air Command’s headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Predictably for us, this meant three new homes and two new schools in the next two years.

  When the Cuban missile crisis erupted in October 1962, the nation was fortunate that the officers and airmen at Vandenberg had done their work, for if the United States had not developed a strong deterrent program of its own, Soviet missiles would have remained in Cuba, only ninety miles away from our shores. If this had happened, certainly the politics not only of the Cold War but also of the Americas themselves would have evolved far more dangerously. As that crisis unfolded, my father spent an entire week without sleep other than catnapping on military aircraft as he shuttled endlessly between Vandenberg and Offutt, coordinating the air force’s preparedness to launch missiles at a moment’s notice should the president so decide. Finally he passed out at a conference table at SAC headquarters and had to be hospitalized.

  For this and other such work my father was again promoted early, this time to colonel with only two years as a lieutenant colonel, which was almost unheard-of, even for better-educated and more urbane academy graduates. Just after I graduated from high school, he was chosen to command the only composite missile squadron in the military, taking a unit responsible for launching Thor, Atlas, and Scout Junior missiles from a success rate of 11 percent to a perfect record of thirteen successful launches in a row. One of his tasks was shooting Atlas missiles into the Johnston Atoll while a version of Nike antiaircraft missiles attempted to intercept them from facilities on the island of Kwajalein—the first, embryonic efforts at an antimissile defense program.

  In addition to all this, the old man was steadily sneaking up on his life’s great dream—a college degree. He had been the first to study beyond the eighth grade; the first to finish high school; and for twenty-six years, whenever the chance had presented itself, he had been accumulating college credits. A night school class at some isolated military post; a correspondence course; a military school that might qualify for credit by one college or another; even the electrician’s course he had taken after high school; all were piled together year after year until he crossed the magic threshold. Once assigned to Offutt Air Force Base, he spent three nights a week at the University of Omaha in addition to carrying his sensitive and demanding workload at SAC headquarters. Fats Domino released a song during that time called “Three Nights a Week You’re Gone,” and we joked that it was written especially for him.

  Finally, in the winter of my senior year of high school, James Henry Webb, Sr., bagged his diploma. It was, shall we say, a Great Santini Moment. My father was never given to subtlety or understatement. As my granny used to put it, and not in a complimentary way, “Your daddy likes it loud.”

  I watched him from where I sat in the front row of the expandable bleacher seats at the University of Omaha’s men’s gymnasium, trying to comprehend the depth of his pride. His chin was lifted; he was high on adrenaline. His prematurely gray hair looked almost fluorescent as he walked toward the podium in the midst of a long line of men and women half his age. The presenter put the cherished paper in his hand. And then he broke out of line and walked across the gymnasium floor, drawing immediate attention in front of perhaps a thousand people. He looked like he’d just won the Super Bowl, or maybe the heavyweight championship. And his burning eyes were on me.

  I groaned inwardly, looking at the floor and holding on to the top of my head, stunned that he would really be doing this. In seconds he was standing before me, sticking the diploma into my face as if it were a pointer. He began yelling at me, sky-high with the emotion of a dream that I was already beginning to take for granted. I had just been selected for a scholarship to the University of Southern California, and in a year would be off to the Naval Academy. But this simple piece of paper had been my father’s unreachable fantasy for nearly three decades.

  What was he telling me? What was he screaming in his moment of triumph, as dozens of others watched in amusement and mild puzzlement? “You can get anything you want in this country, and don’t you ever forget it!” Yes, I thought, swallowing back my cynicism in the face of his raw energy. Even if it takes two hundred years.

  There was little that the upperclassmen at the Naval Academy could teach me about military leadership when I reported to that institution in the summer of 1964. Leadership, he had told me time and again, was simple. Forget the textbooks. You can make somebody do something, or you can make him want to do something. Who would you rather work for? I had watched my father for a lifetime, learning both from his example and from the wisdom of his mentorship. And every time I told myself how much I hated the regimen and the numbing routine of Annapolis—which was almost daily for four years—I would also give myself a humility check. For how quickly would he have traded twenty-six years of night school for four years of this?

  But hard times were coming, for him, for myself, and for a lot of others who shared our history and our traditions. The Vietnam War put the brakes on the Scots-Irish ascendancy that had begun with the outbreak of World War II. In the coming two decades, the traditional notions of military service as well as the very foundations of what it meant to be an American would take a terrific beating. The Scots-Irish, whose ethos has always been so closely identified with patriotism and respect for military service, would serve in great numbers during this war and in a historic anomaly would, in many cases, be ostracized from many academic and professional arenas as a direct result of their service.

  During the summer of 1964 the two most glaring issues on which disagreement had been simmering between the Scots-Irish Jacksonians and the emerging radicals erupted into public view concurrently, with the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to a full-scale war in Vietnam. And it was above all the war in Vietnam that allowed the radicalism that had been spawning for two decades in academia and the professorial journals to burst forth as a political movement that would challenge many of the basic presumptions about American society.

  For the Scots-Irish Jacksonians, Vietnam was a real and often brutal war, one in which a high percentage of their sons and brothers fought. As two examples among many, the South had by far the highest casualty rate during the war, a rate 32 percent higher than the Northeast,1 and the Scots-Irish stronghold of West Virginia had the highest casualty rate of any state. This service, and these casualties, were occurring at a time when the draft laws gave liberal exceptions to those who remained in college, and when the more advantaged members of the age group were actively counseled on how to avoid military service. Only 11 percent of the draft-eligible males in the Vietnam age group actually went to Vietnam, and only 33 percent served in the military at all. To have one’s life interrupted for years at an early age, and then to return not only without honor but also shouldering the blame for all the supposed evils of a war that others avoided, is the formula for long-term societal disability. And this is exactly what occurred.

  Contrary to popular mythology, the baby boomer generation was far less liberal than the media images of the day seemed to portray. As Michael Lind documents in his book Vietnam: The Necessary War, “Few American students in the sixties were radical. At the height of the antiwar movement in 1970, only 11 percent of American college students identified themselves as ‘radical or far left.’ ”2 These numbers became magnified in the mind-set of most Americans and over time impacted heavily on the respect shown to those who had served. Small though it was, the radical movement that opposed the war was heavily represented in major academia, where it affected the minds of an entire generation of intellectually gifted students and also had a wide and lasting impact on other institutions, such as major media and the arts, through which Americans historically have gained emotional insights and formed their opinions. And the ever-growing unpopularity of the war allowed the radical movement to expan
d its reach to a large number of well-meaning Americans who simply wanted the war to end, and to develop alliances with an array of political groups whose causes went much farther than the conflict in Vietnam.

  Despite the political misfeasance that characterized the course of the war, it is important to remember that the causes that brought the United States into Vietnam were not unsound. Forty years ago Asia was at a vital crossroads, moving uncertainly into a future that was dominated by three different historical trends. The first involved the aftermath of the carnage and destruction of World War II, which had left its scars on every country in the region and also had dramatically changed the role that Japan played in East Asian affairs. The second was the sudden, regionwide end of European colonialism, which created governmental vacuums in every second-tier country except Thailand and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines. And the third was the emergence of communism as a powerful tool of expansionism by military force, its doctrine and strategies emanating principally from the Soviet Union.3

  The governmental vacuums created by Europe’s withdrawal from the region dramatically played into the hands of communist revolutionary movements, especially in the wake of their takeover of China in 1949, for unlike in Europe, these were countries that had never known Western-style democracy. In 1950 the partitioned country of Korea exploded into war as the communist North invaded South Korea, with the Chinese army joining their effort six months later. Communist insurgencies erupted throughout Indochina. In Malaysia the British led a ten-year antiguerrilla compaign against Chinese-backed revolutionaries. A similar insurgency in Indonesia brought about a communist coup attempt, also sponsored by the Chinese, which was put down in 1965.