Quotes from James Webb

If they didn't want to know, they shouldn't have asked.

My war is not as simple as yours was, Father. People seem to question their obligation to serve on other than their own terms. But enough of that. I fight because we have always fought. It doesn't matter who.

Self-discipline is never simple.

They have become spoilers because in their view America's political elites, both Republican and Democrat, have grown together into an almost indiscernible "hybrid royalty" that offers them little to choose from in terms of how the nation is actually being governed.

They came with nothing, and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing. The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks . Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.

The consequence of this reality was that in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give theirs up.

But to tar the sacrifices of the Confederate soldier as simple acts of racism, and reduce the battle flag under which he fought to nothing more than the symbol of a racist heritage, is one of the great blasphemies of our modern age.

The Northern army was most often run like a business, solving a problem. The Southern army was run like a family, confronting a human crisis.

He could understand, condone the massive use of force, but the terrors of its particularizations horrified him.

They stared fondly at each other, remembering simpler days of unclouded idealism. Goodrich shook his head. "Solomon, you son of a bitch! What are you doing here?" Mark smiled exasperatedly, almost defensively. "I've been lonely for my family. Then I heard you were back. That did it. I came down.

I look at you and feel so old, Will. It's been a hundred years of misery, all this. I feel ancient." Goodrich sought to brighten him, falling back on their old pattern of challenge and retort as naturally as if it were two years before. "You are ancient, Mark. The suffering Jew." He laughed, chiding his old roommate. "Duty-bound to suffer over wrongs. Perceived or otherwise.

You know what makes me the maddest?" Mark seemed confused and somewhat sullen. He took out his pipe and began to pack it from a leather pouch. "That I have to act like a criminal.

Mark had obviously contemplated it and rejected it. He was livid. "And why should I go to jail? Am I a criminal? Have I hurt anyone

Am I bad?" He puffed angrily on his pipe. "Why does the law create such absurdities?" He snorted. "The law. The law is an ass. Someone famous said that, once. Dickens, I think." He looked up to Goodrich. "And it is. It doesn't respond anymore. It's a straitjacket. What kind of coercion is it when your alternatives are to kill or to go to jail?

In the living room Goodrich's father sat in a large chair across from the sofa, motionless. He appeared very tired. His mother stood nervously behind the chair, obviously dreading his entrance into the room.

She had clothed herself, even at near-midnight, and brushed her platinum hair. "Where's Mark?" His father eyed him tiredly. "He's gone." His mother kneaded the fabric of the chair in both her hands. "Oh, you have to tell him, Peter. You can't just say that." "All right." His father stared straight ahead for another long moment, precisely into nothing

Goodrich eyed his parents with growing awareness. "How did the police find him?" "I called them." They peered into each other's faces for a long, mute moment, Goodrich pondering absently that he was looking into a mirror that reflected how he himself would appear in another forty years, if he somehow managed to survive the insanity that Vietnam had brought him and live that long.

the common good is defined by who wins at the polls, and the policies they make. Like it or lump it.

What about the duty to protest? What Mark was doing is as old as Thoreau. Civil disobedience is as American as—killing Indians!" His father smiled, just the smallest curving of his mouth. "That answers itself, Son.

Thoreau went to jail, not to Canada. That's civil disobedience. The other is self-interest, cloaked with morality.

He sensed that it was all here, everything, and there was none of it there. All of life's compelling throbs, condensed and honed each time a bullet flew: the pain, the brother-love, the sacrifice. Nobility discovered by those who'd never even contemplated sacrifice, never felt an emotion worth their own blood on someone else's altar.

Within weeks I would deploy to Vietnam, that endlessly debated but little-understood war that for the Marine Corps would bring three times the number of dead as were killed in Korea and more total killed and wounded than in any other war, including World War II.

I just look at you and say, 'that used to be me. But it isn't anymore.

There was serious reason to pay attention. Those of us who would be leading rifle platoons in the infantry had frequently been reminded that the odds of our being killed or wounded were better than 50 percent.