Defiant Iraq War Foe Defined by Vietnam

Webb won the Navy Cross, which is second only to the Medal of Honor. He also won a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars and was awarded two Purple Hearts. But the two grenades also sprayed him with steel, inflicting career-ending wounds. Pieces of shrapnel remain in the base of his skull and a kidney.

"Before he went over to Vietnam, he was extremely idealistic," Webb's brother, Gary, said. "When Jim came back, he was much more realistic about people, about issues, about facts."

After Webb's wounds forced him from the Marines, he went to Georgetown University's law school. There he felt the sting of contempt from antiwar classmates and faculty. He also began to write.

His first novel, "Fields of Fire," appeared in 1978, featuring as the protagonist Lt. Robert E. Lee Hodges Jr., who was a Kentuckian like Webb's grandfather and shared his name. The book went against the current of the times, offering a slap at the era of malaise and pacifism that some called the "Vietnam Syndrome." Webb's novel, for all its cautionary asides on bloodshed, teaches that no other experience is as terribly profound as combat.

Women in Combat

Battle was so terrible and so profound that Webb says he believed only a certain temperament could survive there -- and only men had it.

Four years after Congress opened military academies to women, Webb wrote in the Washingtonian that "no benefit to anyone can come from women serving in combat." Female plebes were "poisoning" men's study of war.

Webb hit such a nerve that Navy brass banned him from speaking at his alma mater. Male midshipmen who opposed having women in the Brigade took his article as a manifesto; female classmates saw it as a goad to more torments.

Speeches and writings that followed continued to champion the idea that the military had become the plaything of feminists and politically correct civilian leaders and that many senior officers were too craven to do anything about it.

Five years after the Tailhook episode, which involved sexual assaults against dozens of women during a boozy convention for Navy aviators in 1991, Webb argued that the scandal should have been a "three- or maybe a five-day story." He had also characterized prolonged investigations of it as a "witch hunt."

"He's a symbol of holding women back and not accepting us for our abilities," said Lisa Stolle, 50, of Virginia Beach, who graduated with the second academy class to admit women.

In 1984, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger brought Webb to the Pentagon to fill a new post as assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs. By then, Webb had built a reputation as a conservative pundit, helped lead the fight against Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and worked on veterans affairs on Capitol Hill. In 1984, he won an Emmy with the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour covering the barracks bombing that killed 241 Marines in Lebanon in 1983.

In February 1987, Reagan tapped him to succeed Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr., whose signature achievement had been pushing for a 600-ship Navy. Some wondered whether Webb's temperament fit the job.