I Heard My Country Calling by James Webb

Author:James Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Space does not allow a thorough rendering of that long-ago era’s lonely, sometimes vicious version of hell called plebe year, a subject about which I wrote in detail in my novel A Sense of Honor. There was method in this madness, but at times there also was unconstrained madness, wrongly justified by accepted methods designed, at least in theory, to test one’s ability to function under extreme stress.

It was not uncommon for a plebe being run by an upperclassman to rise before reveille and pull on two or even three pairs of sweat suits, soaking them down in the shower and running a lap or two around Farragut Field, about a mile per lap, before reporting to an upperclass room for the thirty-minute sessions called “Come Arounds.” No matter his starting point the previous June, by fall every member of our class was capable of doing sixty-eight push-ups on command, plus one to Beat Army and, for those of us who were aspiring Marines, one more “for the Corps.” During the three Come Around sessions every day, it became as common as breathing to race against the clock to our rooms, change into any uniform recognized by Academy regulations, and report back to the upperclass room within two minutes.

“White Works Echo, Webb. Go.” Then, two minutes later, “Full Dress Blues. Two minutes. Go.”

We also raced the clock, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups, to see how long it would take us to negotiate the corridors and stairways of Bancroft Hall and then out toward the buildings bordering the Severn River, in order to memorize a historic brass placard or to slap the gonads of the brass sculpture of Bill the Goat, the Naval Academy’s mascot. In the dead of night our class was also charged with the symbolic responsibility of Brasso-ing Bill’s balls, keeping them as shiny and gleaming as the belt buckles of the Working Uniform Blue Alphas that we wore to class each day.

Sometimes the rigors of plebe year veered into reprehensible cruelty. And sometimes the wisdom of the Old Salts who were so brilliant in their shipboard acumen seemed hilariously out of place when it came to the well-intentioned but outdated standards of social behavior that they sought to perpetuate.

Nine years after I came back from Vietnam, shortly after my novel Fields of Fire had been published, I returned to the Academy as a visiting professor, teaching courses on poetry and the novel. Among my colleagues was a soft-spoken, thoughtful classmate, still on active duty in the Navy, who during our first two years at the Academy had been a member of the infamous Fourth Company. During our plebe year the upperclassmen of the Fourth Company, along with the Eleventh Company in my battalion, had physically run out more than half of their plebes, triggering one of the congressional investigations that eventually brought about a revamping of the plebe system.

My classmate and I had both seen combat in Vietnam. Before assuming my position as visiting professor I

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