Vietnam Veteran Jim Webb Explains What Average Citizen Can Never Understand

To Kill a Man A short story
Politico
By JIM WEBB
July/August 2015

Webb says, that the average civilian can never understand. As he wrote in his 2014 memoir, “I and my fellow combat veterans stand on one side of a great impassable divide, with the rest of the world on the other.”

Long before James Webb became secretary of the Navy or a U.S. senator—or even potentially a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate—he was a 23-year-old Marine fighting in Vietnam’s An Hoa basin, west of the city of Da Nang, as part of the Fifth Marine Regiment.

During his tour as a rifle platoon and company commander, Webb was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Star Medals and two Purple Hearts for his actions in combat.

An enemy grenade left him with shrapnel lodged in his head, arm, leg and back. Recounting his gritty combat tour during some of the war’s darkest days—in one eight-week period, his rifle platoon suffered 51 Purple Hearts among those killed or wounded—he told an interviewer in 1988, “My greatest feeling in Vietnam was that I was a pawn.”

And when he thought of the other things, he could never forget those who had died and those who had suffered more than he had. These were the true moral paragons, whether or not they ever considered it or knew it. Some had taken blasts of shrapnel. Some had been ripped by gut shots from enemy rifles and machine guns. Some had lost limbs. Some had returned with minds pushed so far over the edge by it all that they could not fully come back, even when they were home, and never would.

All these years later, he still regarded them as his people, his friends, indeed his lifelong comrades, but it had not really started out that way.

The bonds that brought them together and kept them close were powerful and permanent and overwhelming, but they were consequential, not intentional. read more here

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