Ambush: Reflections on My Friend Jim Webb

January 3, 2007. Washington, D.C.

The day dawns crisp and shiny, an unseasonably warm 50 degrees and climbing. The cherry blossom trees are barren, awaiting an early spring as the nation anticipates the new Congress. Signs of rebirth are seen all over Washington. Other signs as well: a placard in front of the Russell Senate Office Building reads, "America is Dying.

Bush Be Gone."

My wife Sherry and I have been invited to attend Jim Webb's swearing-in as the new senator from Virginia, the result of an unexpected, come-from behind victory over the Republican incumbent -- and former potential presidential candidate -- George Allen. We've known Jim since 1999 when he wrote an original screenplay called Rules of Engagement, which I directed. We remained friends in spite of numerous "creative differences" -- often heated, sometimes bitter.

I came away from that experience feeling that Jim Webb is the most complex, principled man I've ever known. He came away feeling good about what I had done with the finished film -- though he still refers to me as the only man in the country with a temper worse than his. I accept this as a compliment.

In 1969, at the age of 23, as a First Lieutenant and Company Commander in Vietnam, he led 170 men. When he came home two years later, he had received two Bronze Stars, a Silver Star, a Navy Cross, two Purple Hearts, and numerous other combat medals. Webb's war was as fierce as it got. Along with the medals, he brought home shrapnel in a knee, arm, kidney, and at the back of his head.

I had no idea how idea how difficult it must have been for Jim as we walked for several miles in South Beach, Florida, drenched in sweat in the summer of 1999. We were about to meet with Sylvester Stallone at his palatial estate to try to convince him to do either of the two leading roles in Rules of Engagement. But Sly was more interested in talking about the new Rodin-like sculpture he had just bought. It was our good fortune some weeks later to come up with a dream cast led by Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.

We talked about Vietnam on that long, hot walk in South Beach, passing the house where Gianni Versace lived and, a short distance away, the house where his killer, Andrew Cunanan, hid until he killed himself. It was impossible to talk to Jim about Vietnam without opening old wounds.

James Henry Webb, Jr. returned from Vietnam in 1970 and went to work in the Pentagon on the staff of Navy Secretary John Chafee. By April of '72, his chosen career of leading men in combat was over. He had no idea what he would do next. "I want to serve my country," he said then. "I don't know how civilians do that, but that's what I'd like to do." He enrolled at Georgetown Law School, and though we didn't meet then, I was directing The Exorcist on the Georgetown campus.

Webb's first novel, Fields of Fire, was published in 1978. It dealt eloquently with his combat years and was followed by several more books, picking up two Pulitzer Prize nominations.

Later, as assistant counsel to the House Veteran Affairs Committee, Webb worked to obtain recognition for Vietnam vets. And he opposed the idea of women in combat so strongly that he was banished from the Naval Academy for several years. When he returned to Annapolis in 1987, the female midshipmen threw their underwear in protest onto the trees around Tecumseh Court, where he was to be sworn in as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy.

In February of 1988, Webb resigned as Navy Secretary over budgetary and philosophical differences, and was excoriated by the press as a willful, petulant sorehead.

Two years later, in testimony before Congress, he opposed President George H. W. Bush's involvement in the Persian Gulf War, then led a protest march on the Capitol. In an article for the Wall Street Journal, he wrote: one must go back to the Mexican War "to find a president so avidly desirous of putting the nation at risk when it has not been attacked." He was among the first to denounce Bush 43 for the war in Iraq.

Jan. 3; 12 Noon

Continued