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other graduates were implicated in the myriad scandals of Vietnam. Although accounting for only one tenth of the officer corps in 1976, West Pointers were meant to catalyze honor and discipline in the rest of the Army. But in the eyes of many, they had fallen short in that mission. During my time there, it struggled to repair the damage. Progress was made there and across the Army, but shortly before I graduated in June 1976, the academy was rocked by the largest cheating scandal in its history. More than a hundred cadets in the cow, or junior, class one year behind mine, including members of the honor committee, faced expulsion for colluding onan electrical engineering exam. The scandal spurred national media attention and congressional hearings. If honor could not be safe at West Point, what chance did it stand in the nation as a whole?
    When I arrived, the code had been distilled to a simple directive: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” Cadet leadership added the last part, the “toleration clause,” only in 1970, but it had existed for many years in the self-policing spirit of the corps. If the code’s basic wording became simpler over time, its enforcement did not. In the late nineteenth century, cadets elected a “vigilance committee” to police honor violations and field accusations. When a cadet was found guilty of an honor violation, the committee made sure that he left the academy. Eventually, the committee became an advisory body without explicit punitive powers, although thecommandant almost always expelled a cadet whom the committee found to have violated the code.
    In the rare case when the committee’s recommendation was not followed, the corps’ summary justice took over. A year before I arrived, the honor committee had found Cadet James Pelosi guilty of cheating. Pelosi’s lawyer got him reinstated on a technicality, so the corps began to treat him as if he did not exist by “silencing” him. No one spoke to him; he had no roommates and ate alone at a separate table; reportedly, plebes in charge of delivering laundry threw his in the dumpster. Being in a different company, I never knew Pelosi, but I recognized how precarious it was to allow vigilantism among eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. The corps saw that as well, and banned silencing in 1973.
    While honor was sacrosanct to me, other academy regulations were not. On the afternoon of Saturday, October 27, 1973, one day after I finished the sentence from my May slug, I screwed up again, this time drinking in my room with classmate and friend Rick Bowman. Rick and I would go on to serve together in the 82nd Airborne as lieutenants and then for many years in special operations, where he flew in, and ultimately commanded, the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. But that was later, and for now we were fools in trouble—again.
    When I appeared before the commandant’s board two weeks later, the colonel in charge, after hearing the details of my infraction, took off his glasses, paused, and shook his head. “Okay, you have
got
to explain this to me. You
just
finished a slug,” he said, tapping my files, “and here you are about to eat another one. Explain that to me.” I had no explanation, but I was glad to hear him asking for one: It meant that I wasn’t going to be thrown out. The colonel could do the math and knew that if he wanted to, he could make the slug big enough to put me over the limit in demerits. I did not offer any excuses and simply explained that I had shown poor judgment. He agreed. Forty-four hours on the Area.
    Despite all of my behavioral nonsense, my peers evaluated me well. My tactical officer expressed disappointment in my poor decision making but never wrote me off. Some classmates jokingly compared me to Captain Virgil Hilts, the character played by Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape
, the 1963 film about Allied