Defiant Iraq War Foe Defined by Vietnam

James Sr. never pushed the armed forces on his children, but Webb's sister Patricia married into the Air Force. Another sister, Tama, married Webb's Naval Academy roommate. His younger brother, Gary L. Webb, became a Marine helicopter pilot.

Their father, who died in 1997 at age 79, also taught his children not to run from trouble. Forever new kids on another new base, they learned to scrap when they were young.

"That's just growing up on a military base," Gary Webb said. "It was a rough experience."

Jim Webb did better with his fists than his schoolbooks, but he also wrote poetry and short stories. Although Webb later embraced such 20th-century masters as Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene, the writers who spoke to him early on were journalistic observers such as John Steinbeck and James A. Michener. The latter's "Hawaii," in particular, captured his imagination as a teenager.

"I was living in Nebraska, working in a grocery store, freezing my tail off, and I started reading this book," Webb said. "And, you know, the first hundred pages is lava forming an island, and bugs landing on it. But after that, you started getting into all the different ethnic cultures. It was just fascinating. I read that book, and I said, 'I'm going there.' "

One day he saw a mango at the grocery like the ones in the book, and he had to have it, even if it did cost a day's pay.

"I got this thing, and I brought it home, and I didn't even know how to peel it," he recalled.

His brother said Webb yearned to be a Marine general like Lt. Gen. Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, the legendary war hero. After a year at the University of Southern California on a Navy ROTC scholarship, he enrolled at Annapolis. Nicknamed "Spike," he had an unyielding reputation, whether in the boxing ring or in the daily trials plebes faced.

Webb graduated in 1968, accepting a commission as a second lieutenant in the Marines at a time when the academy failed to meet its Marine quota because of the carnage in Vietnam. He arrived there in 1969 as a platoon leader with the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment.

Right away, Webb's cool head impressed his company commander, Michael Wyly. As with each new officer from Quantico, Wyly sent Webb on patrol his first night in the bush. Unlike with other green platoon leaders, Webb's eyes showed no hesitation, Wyly said.

Wyly, a retired Marine colonel in Maine, saw a lot of himself in Webb: Both had a reputation as "difficult subordinates." Wyly said, "He had the guts to come and say, 'Skipper, there might be a better way to do that,' " Wyly said.

One day, while hunting for a Viet Cong weapons cache, the company stumbled into a complex of bunkers, Wyly recalled. A grenade flew from a bunker, exploding near Webb. He charged the bunker and killed its two occupants. When another grenade rolled toward him, he shoved a comrade to the ground and shielded him, suffering grievous wounds himself.