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Fields of Fire: A Novel Mass Market Paperback – August 28, 2001

4.5 out of 5 stars 3,050

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“In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels.”—Tom Wolfe

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.

Praise for Fields of Fire

“Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.”
The Houston Post

“A stunner . . . Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people, not one a stereotype, and as many different ways of looking at that miserable war.”
Newsweek

“A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it to Norman Mailer’s 
The Naked and the Dead.”The Oregonian

“Webb’s book has the unmistakable sound of truth acquired the hard way. His men hate the war; it is a lethal fact cut adrift from personal sense. Yet they understand that its profound insanity, its blood and oblivion, have in some way made them fall in love with battle and with each other.”
Time

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Few writers since Stephen Crane have portrayed men at war with such a ring of steely truth.”The Houston Post

“In swift, flexible prose that does everything he asks of it—including a whiff of hilarious farce just to show he can do it—Webb gives us an extraordinary range of acutely observed people, not one a stereotype, and as many different ways of looking at that miserable war . . .
Fields of Fire is a stunner.”Newsweek

“James Webb has rehabilitated the idea of the American hero—not John Wayne, to be sure, but every man, caught up in circumstances beyond his control, surviving the blood, dreck, and absurdity with dignity and even a certain elan. Fields of Fire is an antiwar book, yes, but not naively, dumbly anti-soldier or anti-American . . . Webb pulls off the scabs and looks directly, unflinchingly on the open wounds of the Sixties.”
Philadelphia Inquirer

“Webb’s book has the unmistakable sound of truth acquired the hard way. His men hate the war; it is a lethal fact cut adrift from personal sense. Yet they understand that its profound insanity, its blood and oblivion, have in some way made them fall in love with battle and with each other.”
Time

“A novel of such fullness and impact, one is tempted to compare it to Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead.”The Oregonian

“In my opinion, the finest of the Vietnam novels.”
—Tom Wolfe

From the Inside Flap

They each had their reasons for being a soldier.
They each had their illusions. Goodrich came from Harvard. Snake got the tattoo -- Death Before Dishonor -- before he got the uniform. And 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 each other, and were each reborn in fields of fire....
Fields of Fire is James Webb's classic, searing 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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam; Anniversary edition (August 28, 2001)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553583859
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553583854
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.12 x 0.98 x 6.87 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 3,050

About the author

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James Webb
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The Honorable James H. Webb, Jr., has been a combat Marine, committee counsel in Congress, Assistant Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Navy, U.S. Senator from Virginia, Emmy-award winning journalist, filmmaker and author of 10 books.

Webb graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968, one of 18 midshipmen to receive a special commendation for “outstanding leadership contributions,” and was the Honor Graduate, first in his class of 243 lieutenants, at Marine Corps Officer's Basic School. At age 23 as a rifle platoon and company commander in Vietnam he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals with the combat “V” and two Purple Hearts, and was the most highly decorated member of the Naval Academy’s historic class of 1968.

Webb graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1975, receiving the Horan Award for excellence in legal writing, then became the first Vietnam veteran to serve as a full committee counsel in the U.S. Congress, serving from 1977 to 1981 as assistant minority counsel and then full counsel to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. In 1982, he led the fight to include an African-American soldier in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Webb was the first-ever Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs in 1984, and in 1987 the first Naval Academy graduate in history to serve in the military and become Secretary of the Navy. At the Pentagon, he also was a member of the Armed Forces Policy Council and the Defense Resources Board.

He was a Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics in 1992.

Webb served six years representing Virginia in the United States Senate. While in the Senate, in 2007 Webb delivered the response to the President’s State of the Union address, and served on the Foreign Relations, Armed Services, Veterans Affairs, and Joint Economic committees, including four years as Chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, and of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

He wrote and guided to passage the Post-9/11 GI Bill, the most significant veterans’ legislation since World War II. Despite strong opposition by the Bush Administration and Republican leaders, Webb conceived and implemented a bipartisan approach and accomplished the passage of this landmark legislation in only sixteen months. He also was the leading voice in the United States Congress on behalf of reforming America’s broken criminal justice system, and co-authored legislation which exposed $60 billion of waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan wartime-support contracts.

The Atlantic Magazine spotlighted him as one of the world’s “Brave Thinkers” for possessing “two things vanishingly rare in Congress: a conscience and a spine.”

Having widely traveled in Asia for decades, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Asia-Pacific Subcommittee, Webb was the leading voice in calling for the U.S. to re-engage in East Asia, meeting frequently with key national leaders throughout the region. He personally initiated what later became known as the “strategic pivot to Asia,” two years before Obama was elected President. He also conceived and carried out the process that resulted in opening up Burma (Myanmar) to the outside world. In 2009, he was the first American leader to be allowed entry into Burma in ten years, leading a historic visit that opened up a dialogue that resulted in the re-establishment of relations between our two countries.

A long-term observer of the strategic balance in East Asia, Webb has been warning for twenty years about Chinese expansionism in the Senkaku Islands and in the South China Sea. He speaks Vietnamese and has maintained strong relations with the American Vietnamese community, including extensive pro bono work dating from the late 1970s. He has maintained continuous relations in Thailand for more than thirty years, and In 2015 was a guest of Thai government leaders to discuss how to improve deteriorating US – Thai relations. He also has maintained similar relations in Japan.

In addition to his public service, Webb has had a varied career as a writer. He taught “Poetry and the Novel” as writer in residence at the Naval Academy. He wrote frequent policy-oriented articles and editorials for major American newspapers and magazines, particularly in the area of defense and national security issues, including numerous articles for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorial pages. Traveling widely as a journalist with multiple assignments in Japan, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, Webb was the first American journalist ever allowed access to report from inside the Japanese prison system. He covered the American military in many ways, including TV coverage of the Marines in Beirut in 1983 for PBS for which he received a national Emmy Award, and in 2004 as an “embedded reporter” with the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

Webb is the author of ten books. These include six best-selling novels, notably “Fields of Fire,” widely recognized as the classic novel of the Vietnam War. His nonfiction books include “Born Fighting,” a sweeping cultural history of the Scots-Irish people that author Tom Wolfe termed “an important work of sociological history…the most brilliant battle-flare ever launched by a book."

Webb has extensive experience in Hollywood as a screenwriter and producer. He wrote the original story and was executive producer of the film “Rules of Engagement,” starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson, which held the top slot in U.S. box offices for two weeks in April 2000.

Webb has received more than 30 national awards, including two American Legion National Commander Awards for his work in the area of Veterans Affairs and for his writings, including the Vietnam classic “Fields of Fire,” and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Citizen Leadership (in April 2014), which is the University of Virginia’s highest recognition for public service. He received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 1987, as well as the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s Patriot Award for being an American who “exemplified the ideals that make our country strong and a beacon of liberty to people throughout the world” (President Ronald Reagan was the previous year’s recipient of this award).

Each year, the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation presents a series of awards to Marines and civilian community members, recognizing exemplary work in advancing and preserving Marine Corps history. The James Webb Award is named for the senator, author, and Navy Cross recipient. It is given for distinguished fiction dealing with U.S. Marines or Marine Corps life.

Webb has six children and lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, Hong Le Webb, who was born in Vietnam and is a graduate of Cornell Law School.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
3,050 global ratings
James Webb is a great writer and a magnificent human being
5 Stars
James Webb is a great writer and a magnificent human being
James Webb is a great writer and a magnificent human being. Fields is honest courageous and spectacularly illustrates the sheer folly not to mention horrific loss of lives brought about by selfish self centered lunatics in the guise of acting for the common good.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2024
This book was a gift for my husband and he loves it. The story is captivating and intriguing, easy to get into and hard to put the book down.
Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2023
This is hard to put into words. This is probably one of the best novels of our Vietnam experience I have ever read. The book pulls you in and not only puts you into the terror of combat but places you into all of the characters involved. Not only should it be read by anyone ready to enter such an environment, but by those who put our best in that situation. As a veteran who served during this conflict but not in Vietnam, Fields of Fire touched me deeply.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2011
I first read this book back during my Vietnam-fixation in high school, and decided to re-read it now, twenty-something years later, as a prelude to the much-praised 2010 novel "Matterhorn" (which I've not yet read). What I found (or re-discovered) is a tremendous accomplishment by James Webb that more than compensates for minor shortcomings in style with an intense authenticity and compassion.

The novel that I was most reminded of in this second reading is "The Naked and the Dead." Both were debut novels written by young veterans of recently-concluded wars, there are stylistic similarities (primarily, in the way that both visit their characters before the war and during) and both are filled with real experience and true-life details of combat that are simply not achievable by writers who never saw war, regardless of their talent. But while Norman Mailer's World War II epic is ultimately both more accomplished and grandiose, "Fields of Fire" is every bit as intense, harrowing, authentic, rewarding, and, finally, more accessible.

This was James Webb's first novel, and his inexperience shows in parts. He re-uses certain descriptions and relies on some adjectives too heavily at points. But the honesty and compassion for the impressively large cast of characters is there; what Webb may lack in style here is easily carried by the commitment to truth and accuracy that seems to burn through every page. And although his descriptions are largely unadorned, they paint surprisingly effective portraits of the Vietnamese landscape and the men fighting there.

"Fields of Fire" is highly recommended - an utterly gripping American novel that fully deserves to be considered a classic, if it isn't already.
8 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2015
Finished reading Jim Webb's "Fields of Fire", 1977, a few days ago. The experience haunts me. I wish Jim Webb, a hearty, "Welcome home".
My review Fields of Fire (1977)
James “Jim” Webb
Yes, the author is “that” Jim Webb, the Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, the 1968 Annapolis graduate, the Democratic Senator from Virginia. Why I owned no previous knowledge of this book remains a mystery to me. "Fields of Fire", an epic novel serves as an introduction to what Webb calls, “My Marines”.
Webb’s Marines are complex and nuanced characters, far from the stereotypes that so many held for our “grunts” during those times when we first became so divided over Vietnam. Webb writes with precision and accuracy, often more accurately than the artillery fire which rained in 1969.
The stories of the 2.5 million Americans who served in Vietnam covering the entire involvement from 1959 through 1975, differ markedly based on time and place. Yet, so many in the US. In 1969, the total numbers for Americans serving in the military were:
1969
Army = 1,512,169
Navy = 775,869
Marines = 309,771
Air Force = 862,353
Total = 3,460,162
Source: http://historyinpieces.com/…/us-military-personnel-1954-2014
Of that 3.46 M total, 549,500, or approximately 1 in 7, served in Vietnam.
Webb’s experiences and mine both took place in 1969. However, we served in markedly different places. Webb served in I Corps, the farthest northern region of the Republic of Vietnam. My First Cavalry Division experiences took place in III Corps, about 50 miles northwest of Saigon. Distance over 300 miles.
The Vietnam experience was a complex, confusing, dangerous, terrifying, dirty business. All our technology, all our training, all our spirit, were tested and matched by a devout, determined, willing enemy. Our leaders made bad decisions, backed corrupt South Vietnamese dictators. Our military faced an impossible task. Even today, I hear many people, including veterans attempt to oversimplify the enormity of the task with thoughts like we should have bombed them into the Stone Age. Well parts of Vietnam, were still in the Stone Age, both Paleolithic variety (hunter-gatherers, who became some of our staunchest allies, see Montagnards, and Neolithic variety raising their own food, though they really remained living within a few miles of their village. The Vietnamese had been digging tunnels since fight Japan in WW2 and the French during the forties and fifties. We poured more ordnance on Vietnam than the whole of WW2. We bombed and fired artillery every day.
Much of the literature of Vietnam War tells the stories up to 1968, as if the war ends in that watershed year. However, 1969 continued a brutal war and the second most number of Americans to die in a year was the year 1969.
Webb’s war, chronicles insight into the continuance in the Marine Corps Area of Operations (AO). Webb’s main character, a platoon leader, like Webb, suffered debilitating injuries which first required MEDEVAC to Okinawa, operations and lengthy rehabilitation. Webb and his character choose to return to the field. Webb saw 51 of his Marines become KIAs, a terrifying number to comprehend from a single company in the space of less than a single calendar year.
But Webb takes the reader beyond the Vietnam combat scene. In addition to training, transit, and R&R, Webb recounts who the men were before becoming Marines. Plus, he shares survivors and their saga following the combat experience, zeroing in with one character who returns to college. That man is recruited to speak at an anti-war rally, but disappoints the anti-war leaders and inflames the crowd because he speaks of the authentic experience of combat camaraderie, the building of brothers.
This novel would make the Great American Vietnam War movie, though I read that the Pentagon vetoed that proposal.
It is not light reading. Be prepared to descend into the muddy hell of firing positions, call for medic, carry your dying brother, and loading your KIA brother onto a Medevac. If you can take it, be sure to read this incredible story.
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Top reviews from other countries

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cory
5.0 out of 5 stars great book
Reviewed in Canada on March 29, 2022
very good read
Richard Bailey
5.0 out of 5 stars Revisit
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 27, 2023
I first read this book many years ago and I wanted to read it again. It is written by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and his personal knowledge of that ultimately wasteful, destructive and divisive war shines through. A sad and moving book.
Amazon Kunde
5.0 out of 5 stars Sehr lesenswert
Reviewed in Germany on October 3, 2022
Wer sich für eine realistische Darstellung des Vietnamkrieges interessiert, hier ist sie. Ohne Pathos, ohne retrospektive Erkenntnisse, ehrlich und sehr gut lesbar.
Steve Jay
5.0 out of 5 stars Everything war is
Reviewed in Australia on April 3, 2020
I've never been in war but I would imagine how it would be, from joy to despair, courage to cowardice, compassion to hatred, empathy to blind anger in fact, pretty much every emotion, feeling or act known to man, from one extreme to the other and everything in between, is the closest I will ever get without being there .
Book Enthusiast
4.0 out of 5 stars An evocative and frustrating fictionalised account
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 5, 2023
An evocative and frustrating fictionalised account of the author’s own experience in Vietnam. It is easy to be lost in the apparent maturity of the protagonists until you remember they are in their late teens and early 20s.

One of those stories where you root for supposed bad guy in the unit, and dislike the one on the moral high ground. The author gets across the combination of terror, frustration, anger and boredom, as well as the specific futility of this particular war.

Up there with the other classics of the Vietnam war, highly recommended.