Born Fighting

by James Webb

  Underlying these seeming contradictions is an unwritten but historically consistent code of personal honor and individual accountability. For untold centuries this code has required males of the culture to prove through physical challenge that they possess the courage, judgment, loyalty, and survival skills necessary to take their place among the “Celtic kinship.” Modern sociologists may wish to demean this process and call it sexist or outmoded, but it nonetheless persists, through a series of formal and informal rites of passage. The specifics may vary, but as the generations move forward, the end result is strikingly familiar. Through a system of rewards and punishments, honor and shame, and ultimately acceptance or rejection, the Scots-Irish culture shapes its own version of manhood in accordance with the traditions that have sustained it. One is tempted to call this process the Redneck Bar Mitzvah.

  Since the culture is assimilative and also emphasizes collateral kinship, the rites of passage do not always take place inside the family or even the extended family. Group activities such as hunting and athletics often play an important role, as does the proving ground of military service. I like to claim that my two closest lifelong friends are both Scots-Irish, even though one is of Filipino descent and the other is Russian. But the rituals and demands of military service imbued both with the same identifiable traits of courage, personal honor, and loyalty that one would find in the mountain communities of Virginia or Tennessee. While never losing their own ethnic identity, they have also met the test of mine.

  These standards were passed down to me hard and early by my father, and I have done the same thing with my son. In both cases it was automatic, even more the role of a father than checking homework or making sure we went to church. In this culture, if one is to be recognized as a leader, he must know how to fight and be willing to do so, even in the face of certain defeat. He must be willing to compete in games of skill, whether they are something as traditional as organized athletics, as specialized as motorcycle or stock car racing, or as esoteric as billiards or video games. He must know how to use a weapon to defend himself, his family, and his friends. He should know how to hunt and fish and camp, and thus survive. And throughout his young life he should observe and learn from the strong men in his midst, so that he can take their lessons with him into adulthood and pass them on to the next generation. Perhaps, as some claim, the advance of civilization and the sophistication of our society have made many of these lessons irrelevant. But to me, the attitudes they ingrained have been the most consistent sustaining forces in my life.

  I began hunting with my father as a very small boy, following him puppylike through dense woods and acting as his retriever when he shot rabbit and squirrel. He gave me my first rifle at the age of eight, as I did with my son. From age five he took me fishing, cutting a branch off a tree and tying fishing line onto it so that I could pull in sunfish while he went for bass. At about the same age he taught me how to both follow and lay a trail in the woods, and how to make an “Indian fire,” large enough to cook over but small enough not to be noticed at a distance. When I was ten he gave me my first bait-casting rod. To him, bait-casting was an art form. At his direction, I spent untold hours in the backyard casting a dummy lure into an old bicycle tire, putting a handkerchief between my elbow and my side to keep me from “throwing” the rod at my target, so that I would learn to snap a rod using only my wrist.

  When I was six my father bought me my first pair of boxing gloves and taught me how to use them. In the military housing projects when I was growing up and in the public schools of Alabama and the Midwest where I lived, it was common for young boys to form a human ring and take turns inside it, facing off against one another in an endless set of sparring matches. At a very early age my father laid out the eternal ground rules for street-fighting: Never start a fight, but never run away, even if you know you are going to lose. If you run, you’ll still be running tomorrow. And if you fight, win or lose, a bully won’t come back. And whomever you fight, you must make them pay. You must always mark them, so that the next day they have to face the world with a black eye or a cut lip or a bruised cheek, and remember where they got it.

  My most memorable childhood moments were the ones spent at the outer edges of what other cultures might call the tribal circle, listening to my father and his longtime friends swap tales. This ritual is at the heart of the Scots-Irish culture, still replayed in hunting lodges and fishing camps throughout America as the old and young gather ostensibly to hunt or fish but in reality to celebrate their bonds and pass on their way of life. In the cabins and around the campfires the lions sit at center stage, trading false insults and challenging each other, jesting with the emeritus elders who need no longer fight, telling tales of younger days or of those who have gone before. And on the outer edges, ever quiet, the young boys listen, awed and thankful to be in the presence of the drinking and the swearing, absorbing stories that tell them what it means to be a man, and longing for the day that they can finally sit as full members of the tribe.

  I drank my first whiskey straight from the bottle on a cold Missouri night while on a raccoon hunt with my Uncle Dub and two other young cousins. We drove in a column of trucks down dirt roads into the far fields and the half dozen hunters let their dogs go, then gathered at the trucks as the coon dogs yapped along the nearby tree lines, waiting for the telltale baying that would signal they had treed the coon. As always they were fired with the unexplainable excitement of the hunt, telling grown men’s stories as if we were not there. Then in the cold, crisp night the hounds began to bay, and the hunters picked up their weapons and headed toward the dogs. As I grabbed mine, the whiskey unexpectedly came to me. “It’s cold, boy,” an older farmer grinned, nodding at the half-empty bottle. I pulled the burning liquid into my belly and knew that I had moved one step closer to the center of the ring.

  I spent untold hours fishing with my father and my Uncle Bud, who was not blood-related but as my father’s best lifelong friend may as well have been. When I was young, Bud would simply ignore me, making a point never to rig my bait or help me unhook a caught fish. But as I became a full fishing partner, he took to me as if I were his own son. I learned more about my father and his brothers by listening to the two men talk than from lone conversations with my father himself. Bud Colwell and the Webb boys; those stories shaped me. How as a boy in Oklahoma, Bud had killed a rabbit by throwing a rock and hitting it in the head when it was on the run. And Bud running a labor gang in a Missouri gravel pit before the war, where one day he was suddenly attacked by a man he had not hired from the labor pool, and hitting the man so hard in the forehead that when the man woke up and blew his nose his eyeball popped out. And Bud, the toughest young man in Elwood, Kansas, a tiny river town that once had been Elwood, Missouri, until the spring floods receded and they saw they were now on the river’s westward side, holding court in front of the general store the day the Webb boys moved to town. Bud pointing to a puddle in the dirt road, claiming that no man within fifty miles could put him in it. And my Uncle Tommy, inches shorter and rarely given to boasting, walking forward without a word and nonchalantly throwing him into the puddle.

  Even in his fifties, fear and an animal respect would stalk Bud’s eyes when he spoke of Tommy Lee Webb. How Tommy could throw a knockout punch that never moved more than about twelve inches. And how often that punch would be the only one thrown in a fight as Tommy, never given to arguing, would simply knock a man down within seconds after the first insult. How Tommy could fight three grown men at the same time and beat them all. How Tommy, thoroughly drunk, had driven through the main streets of nearby St. Joseph at fifty miles an hour with a cold focus that was unnerving to watch. How even a knife put straight into his chest in a fight over a woman had not slowed Tommy down once the wound had healed. How Tommy had learned to be a highly successful TV repairman not by going to some class but by buying a TV and taking it apart until he knew from his own intellect what every single tube did. And how Tommy had done the s
ame thing with air conditioners, making a second successful business. Tommy was The Man.

  Bud was The Man, too. He had spent almost all of World War II overseas, first in North Africa and then in Italy, serving so little time in this country that he did not even qualify for the American Campaign Medal. When he returned from the war, he began working for Otis Elevator, and a few years later both his retinas had hemorrhaged, destroying his central vision and leaving him legally blind. Taking a settlement from Otis and a small pension from the Veterans Administration, Bud moved to Florida, bought a dilapidated old house, and spent a year redoing it, learning how to use his hands without full vision. With the help of my father and two workers, he then built a silica sand plant from the bottom up, and when he was burned out by a competitor he found a new location and built another one, this time processing Fuller’s Earth. Bud then traveled extensively, his wife, Anna, driving and serving as his assistant, selling his product all over America. Few of his buyers even knew he was blind.

  One by one, the great lions of my young life died, and finally there was only my father. My generation had made it to the center of the ring, the favored places around the campfire, the main table in the cabin at the fishing camp. For a couple weeks every summer my father and brother and I, along with our sons and other friends, would gather in one Minnesota fishing camp or another, spending mornings and evenings going for bass and northern pike, drinking far too much, cooking for each other, and rekindling our understanding of who we were and from whence we had come. It was now our sons and nephews who gathered at the outer edges, quietly listening to the tales of those who had gone before them, sneaking a cigar or a beer and wondering at the time when their day would come. And my father became the elder emeritus, to be both constantly ribbed and, ultimately, revered.

  We ribbed him mercilessly because that was the inevitable, final act for the old lions. My father had not been an easy man to grow up with. He did not spare the lash. He was given to making taunts and impossible challenges. When I was very young he would ask me if I was tough, and then hold out his fist and have me hit it again and again, telling me I could stop if I admitted I wasn’t tough. My small fist would crumple against his and I would be unable to stop my tears, but I would never admit I wasn’t tough. And now as he advanced to the far side of seventy, I would sometimes greet him in the morning with a clenched fist and a remembering taunt. “Come on, old man. Hit my fist.” And we both knew without saying it that the mantle had passed, that his lesson had been learned, and that his methods, while frequently harsh, were never viewed as cruel.

  We revered him because, while so many people on this earth had talked the talk, we knew that he had walked the walk. And hey, he was my pa. One summer we decided to name him Camel Six, Camel from a disgustingly funny joke my brother had told, and Six because it was the military designation for a unit commander. He deserved both; Camel because he could be disgustingly funny, drinking too much and talking too loud, never without an opinion; Six because he was indeed the Commander.

  My father was The Main, Main Man.

  In 1984, I was nominated and confirmed as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, responsible for the oversight of all the military’s National Guard and Reserve programs as well as the evaluator of their ability to mobilize if the nation went to war. As the date for the swearing-in ceremony approached, the White House called and suggested that I ask Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to administer the oath of office, reasoning that the gesture might cement my relations with my new boss. Over time I came to admire Cap Weinberger more than any person I ever worked for outside of the Marine Corps. But I had another idea.

  I called the General Counsel’s office and asked if a military officer could legally administer the oath of office to a high-level civilian appointee. They said yes. Well, I asked, how about a retired military officer? They checked, and the next day said that this was indeed legal. And so I called old Camel Six and told him he needed to come up to Washington.

  Hundreds of people were packed inside the Secretary of Defense’s conference room on the day of the ceremony, including a few dozen friends, family members, and Marines who had served with me in Vietnam, plus the service secretaries and most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Caspar Weinberger made a short speech that officially introduced me to the Pentagon’s hierarchy and outlined my professional experience. I made a few remarks about the challenges of the position and my sense of obligation to those who wore the military uniform. Then my mother stepped forward, holding a Bible, and my father administered the oath of office.

  It was a simple moment, over in a minute or so. But as the audience of friends and high-level government officials applauded, my father choked up. I had seen him cry only once in my life, the day I had said good-bye to him as I left for Vietnam, when “Danny Boy” unexpectedly played on the radio. Now, I thought half-humorously, he’s crying over a job. He grabbed my arm and whispered into my ear.

  “I raised a little boy. But a giant just walked across this room.”

  If he were regarding me from the perspective of a former colonel, one who had worked his way up without great education, spending long years deployed and other years struggling from base to base and living in rented homes, I could sense his logic. At age thirty-eight, I now held the civilian equivalent rank of a four-star general. Indeed, three years later, almost to the day, I would be confirmed as Secretary of the Navy, and an official at the Naval Academy Alumni Association would call to tell me I was the first Naval Academy graduate in history to serve in the military and then become Navy Secretary.

  But as a man? My father, proud as he was, could not fool me. I had already spent enough time in Washington to know that one did not become a giant just because someone had selected him for a government job, no matter how many aides he had or how many limos drove him around town.

  I knew who the giants were. They had made this country, mountain after mountain and dream by dream. They had fought the thin soil and the dense woods and the swamps, and the enemies who came to kill them and destroy their way of life. They had endured whole generations of poverty. They knew the certain dread of having nowhere to turn when the cold wind howled against the door, or when an unidentifiable fever raged up inside their children. Some of them had spent entire lifetimes facing that imposter called hopelessness without ever passing on to their children even a hint of the self-defeating monster of despair.

  They had made me, one unbending attitude at a time. And I would never betray either Camel Six or their legacy.

  4

  Kensett, Arkansas

  BIRCH HAYS HODGES and Georgia Frankie Doyle are buried in a small cemetery where the hamlet of Kensett gives way to a patch of still-untamed east Arkansas farmland. The knoll where they lie side by side overlooks an unending repetition of lush cow pastures and smoky tree lines. It brings me no comfort, but at the right time of summer I can stand at my grandparents’ graves and feel my mind drift easily to visions of the thick, torn fields of Vietnam’s Quang Nam Province, where I once patrolled as a Marine. Indeed, eastern Arkansas is heavy into rice these days, and driving along the back roads out of Memphis past wide fields and thin stands of trees always calls up in me an eerie resonance that will not go away. Longtime Vietnam correspondent Michael Herr, author of the often-electric memoir Dispatches, once opined that sometimes out on operations with the Marines it seemed as though it really was a war between their peasants and ours, and that the Marines conversed as if they were all from the same small town in Arkansas. They weren’t, but they may as well have been. And that small town could well have been Kensett.

  My mother’s parents lie side by side below flat stone markers, next to the graves of two of their children who died before the age of ten. Forty years separated their respective burials. For my grandfather, who began in Kentucky and then left the coal mines of Carbondale, Illinois, dreaming that he might find diamonds in Arkansas, this was just where his body gave out. For my grandmother, whose
family crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas from western Tennessee in a covered wagon when she was a small child, this grave in Kensett represents her final returning. Decades of dislocation had called her out to California, then back to Arkansas, on to Illinois and Missouri, and finally out to California again to live near her youngest daughter before her death at the age of eighty-three. But all that was nothing more than meandering. In the end she belonged beside Birch Hays Hodges on this little knoll at the outer edge of Kensett.

  Granny was a strong force in my life. Behind that quick smile and slow, slow drawl was what I’ve come to call an acquiescent toughness that so characterizes the Scots-Irish women whose roots go back into the mountain South. Acquiescent because she knew that it did no good to question fate, and fate had brought her hard living. Toughness because no matter how hard things got, she was harder still. Thinking of how she and others so steadily faced the hardships that life brought them somehow brings to my mind a New Testament passage, from Paul’s letter to the Romans. We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.