I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

by James Webb Narrated by George Newbern

Overview

James Webb's mother grew up in poverty-stricken cotton fields of Eastern Arkansas. She did not finish grade school. His father was the first in many generations of Webbs from the Appalachians of Southwest Virginia and Eastern Kentucky to finish high school. He enlisted in the Air Force the day after Pearl Harbor, flew bombers in the war and later the Berlin Airlift. Jim was an Army brat who attended nine different schools, and who ¿missed his Dad so much that he would hide underneath a table weeping when he came home.¿

Webb's account of his childhood, his stern but kind father, loving mother, granite granny, and assortment of stubborn aunts, siblings, and cousins is a tremendous saga. His four years at Annapolis are bone-chilling and triumphant. His assignment to the jungles of Vietnam as a Marine is dangerous (it is the setting of his much-praised Fields of Fire) and the source, he writes, of ¿feelings that will never go away.¿

He was 24 when he returned to go to work for the Secretary of the Navy. He would go on to law school, reading, learning, writing excellent books, becoming the youngest ever Secretary of the Navy, and then a U.S. Senator, an office he relinquished after one term to write this book.

His father, who was eventually a colonel in the Air Force, earned a college degree in middle-age and worked on some of the most sophisticated weaponry of the Air Force. He resigned when Jim, lieutenant in the Marines, was sent to Vietnam. He was, as Jim writes, now the one left behind to miss his son, as his son had missed him all his life.

In James Webb's words: ¿The child becomes the father. And the father shudders with justifiable fear at the wondrous terror of the very thing his example has encouraged. And so this book is a love story¿love of family, love of country, love of service. It is a story that takes place during a remarkable period in American history. And in its subtext it constantly asks and answers a couple of pervasive questions: What are your obligations to your country, and how does one become a leader? What challenges, physical, emotional and ethical, shape that journey? And most importantly, how does one who lived through that journey in this particular way assimilate those experiences, setting aside the easy seduction of bitterness, and instead passing down their lessons to the generations who follow?¿

Editorial Reviews

Wall Street Journal

The sweep of this wonderful book makes it the alpha and omega of the Cold War’s truest children. It begins with pride and patriotism that comes from living with warrior fathers and ends with illusion dispelled by a bloody little war in Vietnam. It’s a brilliant personal recollection that also brings alive a forgotten period of American history.

U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings Magazine

A fascinating account of [Webb’s] early life. . . . anintensely personal narrative that traces his development from sometime-studentto Naval Academy Midshipman, Marine officer, novelist, and political figure. .. . Fellow military brats will take particular delight in his description oftaking to the road with an impatient father and three siblings jammed into an automobile’sback seat . . . Webb’s wonderfully written book is more than a personalaccount; it is the story of a patriotic American who “heard his country calling.

TIME

Webb is a terrific writer, a great war novelist…a compelling book.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

Webb writes not only of his life but also, of course, the forces and people who shaped him. He describes his memoir as “a love story — love of family, love of country, love of service” — and he supports those words with the candor and grace of this readable and revealing memoir.

Military Review

Deeply moving . . . a delightful, mentally therapeutic, and engulfing book.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

I Heard My Country Calling is emblematic of many other Americans’ life stories, reflecting a sense of honor and patriotism that thankfully knows no generational bounds.

Washington Independent Review of Books

I Heard My Country Calling rings with unvarnished dictums . . . Without flinching, he tells us of the grisliness and heroism he witnessed as a Marine in Vietnam. . . . his narrative offers an inside, no-punches-held look at the life of a man to whom independence was more important than money or power. . . . riveting.

Wall Street Journal

The sweep of this wonderful book makes it the alpha and omega of the Cold War’s truest children. It begins with pride and patriotism that comes from living with warrior fathers and ends with illusion dispelled by a bloody little war in Vietnam. It’s a brilliant personal recollection that also brings alive a forgotten period of American history.

Kirkus Reviews

2014-04-08
Former Virginia senator Webb (A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, 2008, etc.) employs hard lessons from his own life to explain his reasons for not seeking re-election in 2012.The author, who also served as the secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, initially parlayed his Marine experience in Vietnam into a first-class war novel, Fields of Fire (1978), among other thoughtful works. In this memoir, he sandwiches his life as a baby boomer military brat (born 1946) between scenes of his leaving the Capitol office, where he served as a one-term senator between 2006 and 2012. Refusing any longer to be part of "an institution with a 6 percent approval rating," he writes, he is nonetheless sadly cognizant of how distraught his own World War II veteran father, now deceased, would be for his son's walking away from what his father considered "the top of [his] game." Having moved around during his youth among a variety Air Force bases, largely under the care of his Arkansas-born mother and gritty, devoted grandmother, Webb had a spotty early education but was duly indoctrinated to patriotic values of hard work, physical toughness and self-reliance. Raised within a vigorous peacetime Army, Webb knew he was "born to be a soldier"—and what a solider he was, winning the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. From his acceptance to the Naval Academy's class of 1968 to his time in the Marine Corps and shipping out to Vietnam at the height of the war's unpopularity, Webb conveys the intensity of his training and single-minded pursuit. He has made peace with the "emotional tangle" of the war and is, overall, gracious toward his family and others humbly born and hard-striving who deserve a "system that guarantees true fairness."An eloquent military memoir in which the author seems to be grooming for his next move: What will it be?

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171032203
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	05/20/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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