I Heard My Country Calling Quotes

“the cotton fields and strawberry patches of a much harsher world whose tragedies and daily burdens had blunted her temperament and quelled her emotions. But its most immediate impact on this teenage girl was not the lack of a demure coquettishness that otherwise might have defined her had she grown up in better circumstances; it was the visible evidence of the hardship of her journey. This was not a pom-pom-waving homecoming queen or a varsity athlete who had toned her body in a local gym. My mother never complained, but it was her struggles that had visibly shaped her shoulders, grown her biceps, and crusted her palms—while in a less visible way narrowing her view of her own long-term horizons. Decades later, when I was in my forties, I suppressed a defensive anger as I watched my mother sit quietly in an expansive waterfront Florida living room while a well-bred woman her age described the supposedly difficult impact of the Great Depression on her family. As the woman told it, the crash on Wall Street and the failed economy had made it necessary for them to ship their car by rail from New York to Florida when they headed south for the winter. Who could predict, she reasoned, whether there would be food or gasoline if their driver had to refuel and dine in the remote and hostile environs of small-town Georgia? My mother merely smiled and nodded, as”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“As we slowly made our way toward the front door of the farmhouse, the radio in the dining room began playing “Danny Boy,” sung by Johnny Cash. I am not sure that anyone other than God himself could have arranged the sweet sorrow of that moment. Johnny Cash was my favorite singer. “Danny Boy,” emblematic of our long-held Scots-Irish heritage of military service, is perhaps the greatest song ever written about the painful anguish of a father watching helplessly as his son marches off to war. Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen and down the mountain side The summer’s gone and all the roses falling ’Tis you, ’tis you, must go and I must bide. But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow ’Tis I’ll be here, in sunshine or in shadow Oh, Danny Boy, oh, Danny Boy I love you so. It was the only time I ever saw my father cry.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“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.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“This ever-expanding war had now consumed my personal and professional preparations for more than three years. As the country struggled to resolve what had originally been considered nothing more than a “dirty little war,” its impact on those of us who were serving, and on our loved ones, was persistent and overwhelming. The lieutenant who had been our next-door neighbor when we first moved into quarters at Quantico had deployed to Vietnam only two months before. I now owned his dog. And he was already dead.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“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.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“And there was another memorable lesson. Such is the power of the written word that the works of a single thoughtful writer—and indeed sometimes just one powerful book—might focus the direction of a young person’s life.”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“My father’s graduation ceremony at the University of Omaha’s gymnasium was one of the most memorable moments of my young life. We sat in the front row of the bleachers as the Old Man walked proudly to the podium in the midst of wrinkle-free fellow graduates with not one grey hair on their twenty-something heads. Degree in hand, he then strode across the basketball court, explosively happy after his decades of effort, and waved the diploma in my face. “You can get anything you want in this country, and don’t you ever forget it!”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir

“My dad loved to drive, but more than that he hated to stop. This made him at best a questionable tour guide. The hours would drone on as we crisscrossed the country in the dank and ever more malodorous car. The four of us would grow restless and cramped in the backseat, perennially arguing with each other and inventing games to fight off the monotony. My dad would press forward relentlessly, trying to make six hundred miles a day, every now and then invoking the three shut-ups rule and lashing out into the noise and cramped restlessness of the backseat. In the front seat my mom would patiently act as his navigator, reading the map, periodically making Wonder Bread and lunchmeat sandwiches, and now and then twisting the dial on the radio to try to find some music and local news. I finally figured it out. My dad’s mind had been shaped by flying a B-29 bomber on long-range missions. As he drove, my mother became the navigator, and we were the crew, although it wasn’t clear whom he wanted to bomb. You could see the business in his eyes. He smoked constantly, the strong odors of his Camel or self-rolled cigarettes or of his weird metal-stemmed pipe piercing our nostrils and often bringing the rear windows down, even in the most brutal heat of the day. His eyes were intent, never leaving the road in front of us. But every now and then an alert for a coming historical marker would pop up along the side of the road, causing my dad to suddenly snap out of his trance and remember that this was not actually his air crew sitting in the backseat. A teachable moment had arrived, giving him a quick opportunity to exercise his parenting skills and a chance to shower us with some much-needed cultural immersion. “Okay, guys, historical marker coming up on the right. I’m going to slow down to forty-five miles an hour. There it is, here it comes! Jim, read the SIGN!” I”
― James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir