In James Webb's taut second novel ["A Sense of Honor"],… he returns to terrain he has personally reconnoitered. A 1968 graduate of Annapolis, he writes as only an insider could of that peculiarly costly education. His uncanny ear for the raunchy vocabulary of military life (he must have taken notes) is matched by his evocation of its spit-and-polish claustrophobia and its inherent contradictions: loneliness in the midst of camaraderie, brutality mixed with decency, pain with pride, honor with death and destruction….

It's a shame that the principal plot covers familiar ground. John Dean … is a sensitive, scholarly and totally unmilitary plebe who'd better shape up or ship out. Fogarty, a gung-ho first classman, decides to hasten Dean's maturation by methods that, though officially outlawed, are unofficially tolerated. Under Fogarty's harsh but well-intentioned "guidance," Dean begins to get with the program. But which way is Fogarty's moral compass pointing?

Mr...