I first heard about James Webb..................

..............in 1978.  Not sure why, but I picked up and read a copy of his first novel, Fields of Fire.  As a matter of timing, I missed serving in our armed forces.  Born in 1952, I was seventeen when I graduated from high school, and did not turn eighteen until my second semester in college, safely possessing a II-S deferment from the draft.  By the time college was over, so was the draft.  For better or worse, having watched the Vietnam War play out on TV, I had almost no interest in volunteering for military service.  Webb's book was my real first exposure to the reality of war (my father, who spent three years overseas during the Second World War, still refused to talk about it;  no one I knew well had served in Vietnam).  Raw and gritty only begin to describe his writing.  Coming from a decorated Marine lieutenant, it just seemed real, like he knew for certain what he was talking about.  Here is a sample:

     Three artillery rounds impacted casually in the treeline.  H and Is.  Behind him, the 60-millimeter mortar sections fired five more in the vicinity of the high dike.  Then there quiet, elongated moments spent sitting under total blackness, as if he were locked in some strangely odorous, mosquito-infested closet.  So alone, so lonely like this.
     And at night like this they visited him, those old ghosts who had come alive each Sunday in his grandma's kitchen.  He had joined them.  He was one of them.  They descended from the heavens, or maybe from the hollows of his memory, and they were real.  He commiserated with them.  Sometimes they were so close he felt the swishes of their passing.  They tickled his neck.  They brushed his arms.  They ached inside his own misery.
     He stared into the blackness, dragging on his cigarette, communicating with them.  All my life I've waited for this, he mused.  Now I've joined you and your losses are a strength to me.  I ache and yet I know that Alec retched with pain on the road to Corinth.  I breathe the dust and yet I know that grandpa breathed the gas that made a hero out of Pershing.  I flinch when bullets tear the air in angry rents  and yet I know that Father, and three farmer boys at Pickett's Charge, felt a cutting edge that dropped them dead.  How can I be bitter?  You are my strength, you ghosts.
     And I have learned those things, those esoteric skills and knowledges, that mark me as one of you.  That loose-boweled piles of shit, too much shit from overeating, plopped randomly around the outer dikes of a ville, mean trouble.  Catching the aroma, seeing the groupings, watching the flies dance lazily, rejoicing in their latest fetid morsel that bends the low grass in a muddy glob like a bomb of cow dung.  Trouble.
     I can tell from the crack of a rifle shot the type of weapon fired and what direction the bullet is traveling.  I can listen to a mortar pop and know its size, how far away it is.  I know instinctively when I should prep a treeline with artillery before I move into it.  I know which draws and fields should be crossed on line, which should be assaulted, and which are safe to cross in column.  I know where to place my men when we stop and form a perimeter.  I can shoot a rifle and throw a grenade and direct air and artillery onto any target, under any circumstance.  I can dress any type of wound.  I have dressed all types of wounds, watered protruding intestines with my canteen to keep them from cracking under sunbake, patched sucking chests with plastic, tied off stumps with field-expedited tourniquets.  I can call in medevac helicopters, talk them, cajole them, dare them into any zone.
     I do these things, experience these things, repeatedly, daily.  Their terrors and miseries are so compelling, and yet so regular, that I have ascended to a high emotion that is nonetheless a crusted numbness.   I am an automaton, bent on survival, agent and prisoner of my misery.  How terribly exciting.
     And how, to what purpose, will these skills serve me when this madness ends?  What lies on the other side of all this?  It frightens me.  I haven't thought about it.  I haven't prepared for it.  I am so good and ready for these things that were my birthright.  I do not enjoy them.  I know that they have warped me.  But it will be so hard to deal with a life empty of them.
     And there were the daily sufferings.  You ghosts have known them, but who else?  I can sleep in the rain, wrapped inside my poncho, listening to the drops beat on the rubber like small explosions,  then feeling the water pour in rivulets inside my poncho, soaking me as I lie in the mud.  I can live in the dirt, sit and lie and sleep in the dirt, it is my chair and my bed, my floor and my walls, this clay.  And like all of you, I have endured diarrhea as only an animal should endure it, squatting a yard off a trail and relieving myself unceremoniously, naturally, animally.  Deprivations of food.  Festering, open sores.  Worms. Heat.  Aching crotch that nags for fulfillment, any emptying hole that will relieve it.
     Who appreciates my sufferings?  Who do I suffer for?
     The mortar fired behind him, five more rounds at the high dike, and the ghosts were gone.  Hodges stood slowly and dusted off his trousers, carrying the radio with him as he began to check the lines.
     He hoped that Snake would be awake.  He felt like shooting the shit.

-James Webb, as excerpted from Fields of Fire