SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT.

The autumn political contest in Virginia began this year as it always does, with a Labor Day parade and festival in the Shenandoah Valley town of Buena Vista. The event featured appearances by the Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, and his predecessor, Mark Warner, another Democrat, who was then considering running for President in 2008. Senator George Allen, a Republican, who was also contemplating a Presidential race, rode the parade route on a jumpy horse called Bubba, and forecast a victory in his current reelection campaign. Notably missing from the event was Allen's Democratic opponent, James Webb. To the consternation of some on his team, he had skipped the ritual opening of his first political campaign in favor of a private ritual, three hundred miles away.

At Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, members of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, were preparing for deployment to Iraq. Among them was Webb's only son, Lance Corporal James R. Webb, known as Jimmy. Two years earlier, Jimmy had interrupted his studies at Penn State and enlisted. His father could hardly protest; Jimmy was taking up the challenge posed by Webb in countless speeches, books, and articles. To Webb, himself once a distinguished member of the Marine Corps, military service was not just a patriotic gesture but part of a test of honor and courage, an essential rite of passage.

Webb had gone to Vietnam in 1969, unburdened by ambivalence at a time when the narrative of the Vietnam War had turned irretrievably toward tragedy. His first novel, "Fields of Fire," published in 1978, was based on the war--"the finest of the Vietnam novels," according to Tom Wolfe--and Vietnam continued to be his point of reference, to the degree that even his friends wondered whether it had distorted his perspective. But Webb was shaped not so much by the war as by what he discovered when he returned.

The year 1969 was one of the bloodiest for Americans in Vietnam, with the weekly death toll averaging about two hundred and twenty-five. At home, it was the year of Woodstock, the takeover of the Harvard administration building by student radicals, the trial of the Chicago Eight, and the huge National Moratorium antiwar protest. It was also the year that President Richard Nixon used the term "silent majority" to describe those Americans who did not protest.

When Webb, debilitated by shrapnel wounds received in an action that earned him the Navy Cross, was forced to retire from the military, he enrolled at the Georgetown University Law Center, and stepped directly into the culture divide. He hated his time at Georgetown, largely because of his encounter with an attitude that caught him wholly unaware. It seemed to him that many of his classmates had been untouched by Vietnam (except for a gain in self-regard, accrued from opposition to what they deemed an immoral war). Webb concluded that they not only had figured out ways to avoid the risk and sacrifice of military service but had convinced themselves, as they proceeded along their education and career tracks, that theirs was the true heroism of the time. Inspired by his rage, he decided to write "Fields of Fire," which included a series of withering cameo portrayals of Ivy League graduates who worked the system to avoid service. "Some day he will write speeches for great politicians," he wrote of one character. "Tim Forbes will confess his boondoggle, and we will admire his honesty. He only did what everybody else was doing." Webb could recite the minuscule number of men killed in Vietnam who, by his count, had matriculated at the elite colleges (Harvard, twelve; Princeton, six; M.I.T., two) compared with the vast numbers from public schools.

Webb returned to the subject repeatedly in his writing over the next twenty-five years, until he produced what amounted to his own ethnology. He saw himself as a creature of a pervasive but nearly invisible Scots-Irish subculture, descended from the warrior clans of Ulster who migrated to North America in large numbers in the eighteenth century. They came to live mostly in the Appalachian South--a stubborn, bellicose people, fiercely individualistic and egalitarian. They settled the frontiers, invented country music, and fostered a truly native form of American democracy. Most important, they bore the brunt of fight-ing the nation's wars. In 2004, Webb published "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America." He had found, he believed, the DNA of red-state America.

In Webb's world, manhood was a standing, to be earned. When he was a small boy, his father, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, would clench his fist and dare his son to strike it, taunting him to keep punching until the tears flowed. But Webb accepted that a father's highest duty was to prepare his son for manhood by teaching him to fight, to hunt, and to handle a weapon. He got his first gun when he was eight, and Jimmy did, too. In such a culture, going off to war is part of what Webb calls "the Redneck Bar Mitzvah."