The Edge of Honor Read Online Free PDF Page B

trackman, excelling in long-distance endurance running. He was popular with his classmates, both boys and girls, and well liked for his easygoing and sincerely friendly way with people.
    His parents assumed, and therefore so did he, that he would follow in their footsteps in one of the hard sciences or engineering disciplines when he went off to college, although it was an open secret in the family that money for college would be hard to come by. But one weekend, his father had taken him down to Annapolis to see the Naval Academy, having found out that Navy Department civilians could also apply for Academy appointments.
    Brian had been dutifully impressed, but he did not become really infected with the Academy bug until another side trip with his father, this to the Naval Weapons Station in Dahlgren, Virginia, where he sat enthralled one afternoon as he watched the test-firing of sixteen inch naval guns. Two years later, on a hot and steamy July day in Annapolis, he found himself being sworn in by the Naval Academy superintendent in the expansive brick courtyard of Bancroft Hall, along with about a thousand other new plebes.
    His parents were both delighted and very proud. Not only was it an achievement to be selected, appointed, examined, and then accepted but it was also a free education, leading to a bachelor’s degree in naval and marine engineering. The entire cost to his parents had been the three-hundred-dollar admission fee, which paid for his initial issue of midshipman uniforms. After a summer of physical training, rifle pits, drill fields, sailing, and small-boat seamanship, Brian was delighted with Annapolis—until plebe year descended with a roar as the remaining three thousand upperclassmen returned to the Yard.
    Plebe year had changed Brian in ways he was still discovering, years later. The Naval Academy’s plebe year was designed to teach some harsh lessons about personal accountability, strict adherence to the truth and the facts of a situation, and the concepts of loyalty to a classmate and his class. It was an entire year of the plebes against the entire world, and the front gates along Maryland Avenue offered exit for anyone who could not or would not conform. Brian, who up to this point had been a bright, happy-go-lucky, “get through life with a minimum of fuss” young man and accustomed to success, suddenly had to work very hard to stay even with the demands of plebe year. The first-year hazing, amplified by an intensely difficult academic curriculum, had shaken his confidence in himself and his choice of a college. His remaining three years were spent showing himself more than anyone else that he could cut the mustard and maybe even succeed. He had been determined to show these people that they not only wouldn’t get to him but that maybe he was going to get to them, even as nearly a third of his entering class had dropped by the wayside by the end of the second year. Brian studied hard and aimed at high grades after he realized that the seniors wearing stripes were also the seniors who wore the stars of academic achievement on their shirt collars. He graduated in the top 10 percent of his class, intensely proud that he had beaten the system, grown up physically and mentally, and attained a certain veneer of toughness and purpose not necessarily characteristic of a brand-new college graduate. In later years, he would sheepishly admit that the system had taken the defeat gracefully.
    By the time he had reached Hood, those same values instilled with such thoroughness at the Academy had produced a seasoned lieutenant who still tended to take things seriously, to assume that everyone else did, too, and that the people he worked for and with had the same sense of dedication to duty that he did. But the assignment to Hood, accompanied by his detailer’s warnings about where his career stood, had raised the first real doubts Brian had experienced professionally. He was still not quite sure why his CO in