Fields of Fire; A Novel

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1978. Third printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. [12], 344 pages. Map. Some edge discoloration. DJ has some wear and soiling. Embossed stamp of John Forrest Lyman (noted naval technologist and historian, and academic) on fep! This novel about the Marines during the Vietnam War includes a full page black and white map of the An Hoa Basin, as well as a glossary. James Henry Webb Jr. (born February 9, 1946) is an American politician and author. He has served as a United States Senator from Virginia, Secretary of the Navy, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, Counsel for the United States House Committee on Veterans' Affairs and is a decorated Marine Corps officer. In the private sector he has been an Emmy Award winning journalist, a filmmaker, and the author of ten books. In addition, he taught literature at the United States Naval Academy and was a Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. The author was an Annapolis graduate, and served nine months in the field in Vietnam as a platoon and company commander. He was wounded twice, and was one of the Marine Corps' most highly decorated Marines, receiving the Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, plus unit and campaign awards. With extraordinary skill and realism, the author evokes the peculiar character of America's longest, most costly, and most controversial war. Fields of Fire brilliantly expresses man's basic ambiguity about war: the realization of war's danger and destruction contrasted with the grisly attraction of war as man's ultimate game, the maximum test of survival. They each had their reasons for joining the Marines. They each had their illusions. Goodrich came from Harvard. Snake got the tattoo-"Death Before Dishonor"-before he got the uniform. Hodges was haunted by the ghosts of family heroes. They were three young men from different worlds, plunged into a white-hot, murderous realm of jungle warfare as it was fought by one Marine platoon in the An Hoa Basin, 1969. They had no way of knowing what awaited them. Nothing could have prepared them for the madness to come. And in the heat and horror of battle they took on new identities, took on one another, and were each reborn in fields of fire. Fields of Fire is James Webb's classic novel of the Vietnam War, a novel of poetic power, razor-sharp observation, and agonizing human truths seen through the prism of nonstop combat. Weaving together a cast of vivid characters, Fields of Fire captures the journey of unformed men through a man-made hell-until each man finds his fate. Derived from a Kirkus review: Webb's first novel does that effectively unsettling thing without which a war novel totally wilts: it kills its characters off with suddenness, without warning--and that's it, they're gone, dead, blown away or mutilated or medevac-ed out by helicopter. Webb puts us in the paddies with the grunts and makes us share their overwhelming sense of randomness. Wearing a stiff upper lip politically and downplaying the psychology, Webb sticks to his atmosphere--gory and fearing and solid. There's more real feel of the battleground here than in a far more ambitious books.