Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs Jim Webb might have seemed like a weird candidate to give the keynote speech to a roomful of antiwar activists, journalists, creative writers, and academics in New York City. Remembered today as a rigid one-term Democratic Virginia senator who rode an anti-Bush wave to Capitol Hill during the worst years of the Iraq War, Webb had taken a wall of shrapnel in Vietnam, shielding his Marine Corps platoon mates from a fragmentation grenade. But by the opening of the Asia Society’s May 1985 conference on literature of the Vietnam War, he’d also become well known for the bombs he lobbed.
In 1979, Webb had penned a 7,000-word essay in The Washingtonian titled “Why Women Can’t Fight,” which got him briefly shadow-banned from the Naval Academy, his beloved alma mater. The year before that, when a California radio interviewer had joshingly asked Webb if he’d be catching a local appearance by antiwar actress Jane Fonda that weekend, Webb turned silent for a long time. “Jane Fonda can kiss my ass,” he replied, eventually. “I wouldn’t go across the street to watch her slit her own wrist.” (Among those listening were future Reagan White House personnel chief John Herrington, who would later enthusiastically recruit Webb into the administration.)
Webb was also a triple novelist, best known for the visceral 1978 Fields of Fire, the saga of a motley Marine platoon in Vietnam that he’d penned in law school, after being angered by his classmates’ reflexive antiwar politics. Now, a decade after the war had ended, Webb had been gifted an opportunity to blast the other war novelists, poets, memoirists, and critics—many of them veterans of the conflict, like him—that he thought had glutted the national conversation with anti-government narratives and leftist navel-gazing. “American society is too often narcissistic and riddled with vicious domestic debate,” he argued. “At the same time, during the war it was romantic about the Vietnamese Communists and completely ignorant, for the most part, about the implications of a North Vietnamese victory.”
He continued, decrying what he called the “Academic-Intellectual Complex.” Literary and journalistic awards, he insisted, “are lavished on those who discover new ways to question or attack government policy, to tell us where our government is failing us,” but “sometimes it takes more courage to confront the hostility of one’s peers than it does to attack that amorphous dragon called government policy.”
The gauntlet had been thrown down. Webb’s speech hit the conference like a “lightning bolt,” one attendee wrote. John Del Vecchio—a self-described “token conservative” on war literature panels, whose debut Vietnam novel, The 13th Valley, had been nominated for a National Book Award two years before—got stuck in Manhattan traffic on his way to the conference and showed up late. He walked in and “found the room already divided … leftist writers bunched over there, conservative writers bunched over here. It was quite a scene.”