Michigan Bagel Bender

There are unintended consequences to everything. It is hard to explain to civilians how strict the Naval Academy honor code is. I had a friend Plebe year who was deathly ill with the flu and missed an exam. Page one of the syllabus said, in bold letters: "If you miss an exam, you will take it immediately during the next scheduled class." She gets out of the hospital, and her upperclassmen ask if she missed anything important. She says yes, an exam. They ask if she rescheduled it. "Yes, for Monday," she says, knowing that is the next scheduled class. One of the upperclassmen runs into the professor and asks if she called him to reschedule the exam. He says no. She was put on trial and kicked out of the school for lying. This was the late nineties. You'll have to subscribe to @CSSProvision's USNA podcast to find out if it's still that strict, but it is definitely not a joke. Historically they take even the whitest lies seriously. And history matters because today’s generals attended college last century. This is a good thing. I have advocated for new immigrants to be held to the West Point honor code... "A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do." ...during a five-year probationary period after becoming a citizen. It doesn't have to include white lies, but it absolutely must include fraud of all types. So why do I say there are unintended consequences? Because the second you receive your diploma and commission, you no longer have to follow the honor code. This makes sense. We couldn't keep national secrets if no Army officer could lie. BUT... During those four years at USMA you become hyper-aware of lies, and people who are told not to do something, anything, are tempted to do it. Some do lie, and they go to extraordinary lengths to cover it up. We had another classmate, a senior, who didn't want to go to war. He wanted to be a supply officer instead, but the only way to get a non-combat assignment was to be injured. This man tied his arms behind his back and launched himself off a top bunk to dislocate his shoulder. But that's not the crazy part. The crazy part was the rumor that his parents had hired a lawyer and an acting coach to run him through a murder board before the injury. They trained him on exactly how to deliver the lie about his injury. I don't know if that rumor about the murder board was true, but it was directionally correct. At the very least, he had been thinking through exactly what he would say for years. This was a very high-IQ individual, working for YEARS to tell one lie. And it worked. He graduated into the Supply Corps. That is an extreme case. The vast majority of service academy graduates don't tell lies while enrolled. But every single one of them thinks about how to lie, a lot, because human nature is to be tempted by prohibitions. And even the most squeaky-clean midshipman has to sit on the jury during Brigade Honor Board trials. So they get an insider's view of how lies fail. The unintended consequence is that you become very good at understanding what lies work and what lies do not. And West Point has something Annapolis does not. The Naval Academy's Honor Concept is, paraphrasing, "Midshipmen do not lie, cheat, or steal." West Point's is different: "A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do." Or tolerate those who do. Army cadets have the added obligation to be on the lookout for lies. All this is to say that USMA graduates are exceptionally intelligent and have a very keen sense for spotting lies. Again, that's a good thing. But that superpower can also be used to become an exceptional liar. And in today's hyper-political climate, it is not easy to get a star without lying about something big.