The Formative Years of Ex-Senator Jim Webb

choi

Robert H Scales, A Proud Military Brat. At Annapolis, James Webb detested the petty class system but swore he would never quit/ He won Navy Cross in Vietnam. Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2014
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304547704579566262337973716
(book review on James Webb, I Heard My Country Calling; A memoir. Simon & Schuster. 2014)

Quote: “Before World War II, the Army was a somnambulant culture of long-service volunteer soldiers commanded by a small club of West Pointers. Pearl Harbor changed everything. Within two years, the Army expanded from a quarter million soldiers to eight million, and suddenly the old club was forced to accept young men like Mr Webb's father, who made up in mechanical skill and wit what he lacked in education and pedigree. Mr. Webb's parents came from the poor South. His father was the first in his family to graduate from high school.

Note:
(a)
(i) Jim Webb
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb
(1946- ; born in Missouri; Democrat;  US Secretary of Navy  May 1, 1987 – February 23, 1988 [9 months, under Pres Reagan]; US senator 2007 – 2013)

was pro-Taiwan, but did not do much for it.
(ii) The English and Scottish surname Webb means “a weaver, early Middle English webbe, from Old English webba (a primary derivative of wefan ‘to weave’; compare Weaver 1). This word survived into Middle English long enough to give rise to the surname, but was already obsolescent as an agent noun; hence the secondary forms with the agent suffixes -er and -ster.”
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.

(b) somnambulant (adj): “resembling or having the characteristics of a sleepwalker : SLUGGISH”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/somnambulant

Its etymology: Latin somnus "sleep"  + ambulare "to walk"
(c) “Base-to-base travel [when his father was transferred] was always by car, with Mr. Webb's father the pilot and the family his crew: hundreds of miles a day, endless western vistas rushing by with only the occasional Burma Shave sign to break the monotony.

Burma-Shave
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave
(view photo)
(d) “The Air Force [of which his father belonged] has long since torn down the flimsy crackerbox dwellings hastily built in the barren western deserts after World War II. But at the time these apartments were magic to an extended family used to being crammed into rented off-base bungalows. Mr Webb admits to having few friends during his childhood and adolescence, because friendships rarely lasted more than a few months: Before long, one family or the other would be transferred away. But what Mr Webb lost in the loneliness of a Cold War vagabond he gained in his ability to be self-reliant, to read a room and to get along with strangers. The Scotch-Irish chip on his shoulder grew as he learned to survive in a kid's world of constant bullying from ‘off-base’ kids who ridiculed these sons and daughters of a strange community thrown up abruptly in their midst.”
(i) One can read the room, audience, another person etc.
(ii) Max Nisen, How The Most Effective People Learn To Read A Room. Business Insider, Jan 18, 2013
www.businessinsider.com/how-the- ... -read-a-room-2013-1
(“who manage to sense how people relate to each other, and use it to get things done”)
(iii) A service member has the options to live on or off (military) base.

(e) Mr Webb’s father ‘pushed Mr Webb to apply to Annapolis as the surest path to a Marine commission.”
(i) United States Naval Academy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Academy
(Graduates are usually commissioned as ensigns in the Navy or second lieutenants in the Marine Corps)
(ii) commission (n): “a certificate conferring military rank and authority; also : the rank and authority so conferred”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commission
(f) “Mr Webb's time as a midshipman in the class of 1968 was disagreeable * * * He detested upperclassmen who seemed intent on driving certain plebes out of the academy. * * * In spite of his cynicism and silent rebellion [at the academy], he rose to become a ‘four striper,’ one of the top leaders in the brigade of midshipmen. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.”
(i)
(A) midshipman (n): "a person in training for a naval commission; especially : a student in a naval academy"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/midshipman
(B) midshipman (n): “c 1600, so called because he was stationed amidships when on duty (see amid)
Online Etymology Dictionary, undated.
www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=midshipman
(ii) plebe (n; obsolete plebe ‘common people’): “a freshman at a military or naval academy"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plebe
(iii) four-striper (n; so called from the four gold stripes worn on the sleeve of his uniform)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/four-striper

(g) “what he found in Vietnam was the so-called Arizona Valley near Da Nang, a churned, blackened strip of ground that had witnessed four years of horrific attrition from ambushes, mortar attacks, booby traps and mad sapper charges, all coming from a skilled and tenacious enemy. Mr Webb joined ‘Dying Delta’ Company and immediately began to watch his soldiers suffer and die in a morally debilitating series of deadly tragedies. He survived through skill and luck to become Delta's commander.”
(i) Da Nang
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Nang
(Chinese name 峴港)
(ii) A battalion in either US army or Marine corps is made up of several companies: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, in that order.
(iii) Paul A McNally, The Best of the Best; The fighting 5th Marines Vietnam; Dying Delta. Outskirts Press, 2008.
books.google.com/books/about/The_Best_of_the_Best.html