Some life lessons are hard. Ethical lapses by people you thought honorable are some of the hardest.
Some life lessons are hard. Ethical lapses by people you thought honorable are some of the hardest.
The price, and the cost, of cheating ...
Even though I was a modestly successful practicing lawyer, lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard enrolled in the selective and highly demanding US Army War College, which is the final prerequisite to being promoted to general officer ranks, I sandwiched in time to take an active role in my younger son’s Boy Scout troop.
July of my second year of the war college hybrid learning process found me escorting, with the Scoutmaster, eight or ten early teen Scouts from Southern Illinois to a high adventure camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia. The Scouts were slated to hike part of the Appalachian Trail, float parts of the New River, go rock climbing, zip lining and a host of other adventurous outdoor activities.
I had just finished a two-week in-residence course at Carlyle Barracks, Pennsylvania, home to the Army War College, and had received yet another infamous “box of books” for my next non-resident phase. The non-resident phases lasted six-eight weeks each and required reading hundreds of pages of materials on geo-political strategy and complex military doctrine, followed by a writing a rigorously graded paper on the topics covered. Graduates of the program are not only eligible for promotion to general officer ranks, but also receive an accredited master’s degree in strategic studies, thus, the program’s rigor.
The hybrid course is attended by active-duty Army, Reserve and National Guard officers, as well as a smattering of other US service officers, senior federal civilian employees and allied international military officers. Three-hundred-sixty attendees are selected to attend each year.
As an Army National Guard officer, the first step in selection was to apply to a state selection board. Three officers from Illinois, of the roughly one hundred eligible, were selected by the state panel. Those selectees were then nominated to an Army wide panel at the Pentagon, which then selected those officers deemed to have the potential for general officer rank. About one-third of the selected officers drop out prior to graduation each year. A few are dismissed for academic reasons.
I had warned the Scoutmaster prior to the week-long adventure camp that I wouldn’t be able to participate fully as I couldn’t take a week off from studying. The Scoutmaster told me “That’s fine Bill. I just need you as a second chaperone for the boys. You can stay in camp and study all day long while we go out on activities, because there will be other adult leaders there. I just need you to help drive to and from Virginia.”
Immediately after arriving in camp and setting up my one-man mountaineering tent, I pulled out the box of books and opened the first one. Another Boy Scout troop was camped adjacent to our site. The two adult leaders, sitting in camp chairs, saw the box and the books and said, “You must be in the Army War College.”
“Yes. How did you know?” I replied.
“The box of books is a dead giveaway. Our Scoutmaster is in it too. He never goes anywhere without one of those books! He’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Great! I look forward to meeting him.”
When he arrived the next day, I didn’t recognize him as one of my classmates, but since the class was divided into roughly thirty ten-person seminar sections I wasn’t surprised.
The war college encourages collaboration and students were free to share notes, papers and concepts among themselves to facilitate a group learning process. Because staff work is vital to all military operations this sharing of work product only makes sense.
We were not allowed however, to plagiarize another’s work and proper attribution of sourced material was required.
The other Scoutmaster and I hit it off, commiserating with each other on the burden of the coursework. Having a week in camp where I could devote full days to the courses was a rare luxury. At home, I would rise at 4:30 am, study until 7:30 am then head off to the office for my real job. On weekends I would study from 8 am until 3 pm and Sundays from 8 am until noon. When we went on family vacations, Annette would drive, Alex entertained himself in the back seat and I studied. I found the war college tougher than law school.
Like me, the Scoutmaster had a real job. He lived in a small East Coast state and commuted to his job in the Inspector General’s office of a federal department in Washington DC. Just as I had stringent ethical standards as an attorney, his role as an IG demanded adherence to a code of conduct.
The Scoutmaster not only had a senior federal government position in Washington DC, based on the fact that he’d completed half the War College, he had been promoted to full colonel in the Army National Guard. Completion of half the War College is not a requirement for promotion to full colonel, but it does give a substantial edge to officers for that promotion. He told me that his state Adjutant General, the two-star general commander, had called him into his office and told him that based on his performance at the War College, he was promoted to full colonel.
By the end of camp, we swapped email addresses and phone numbers and agreed to share our draft papers and the draft papers of our seminar mates for critical comment, as well as insight into fellow officers’ thinking process. All of which was not only permissible, but encouraged by the faculty and administration.
For the next ten months the colonel and I swapped emails with drafts of our papers and our seminar-mates’ papers. I turned in my final paper in May. A couple of weeks later I flew down to Florida for a three-day continuing legal education seminar. And before you think it, no it wasn’t a beach side boondoggle. Orlando, in June, is, despite the tourism bureau’s claims, hot, muggy, rainy and bug-infested so yeah, I really was working.
As I took a coffee break from the legal seminars at 4 pm on Friday, my cellphone had a message from my secretary back in Illinois, that the dean of the war college had called and wanted me to call him immediately. Panic set in. “The dean himself calling me and demanding an immediate call on a late Friday, June afternoon, can’t be good news.”
Before returning the dean’s call, like any good soldier, I sought out further intelligence about the battlefield. A quick call to my secretary was of no help. “No, he didn’t say what it was about. He just wanted you to call immediately.”
“OK, thanks.”
I dialed the number he left. Since it was after sixteen hundred hours, that is 4 pm for you civilians, I, of course, got his voice mail.
“Dean, this is Lieutenant Colonel Bill Enyart returning your call. The time is now 1605 Friday. My cell number is 618, blah,blah,blah. You can reach me there 24/7.”
I knew I’d spend the weekend concerned about the dean’s call. Here I was finished with all the hard work of a two-year program, all the papers written, with only a two-week in-residence phase separating me from a master’s degree, my Army promotion board selection to full colonel in hand and the possibility of eventual selection to brigadier general.
Flying back from Orlando to St. Louis, the nearest airport to my home in Belleville, Illinois, I turned over all the possibilities for the call in my head. None of them good.
Monday morning, 0730 hours, Illinois time, 0830 Carlyle Barracks, Pennsylvania, time, I called the dean.
“Dean, this is Lieutenant Colonel Bill Enyart, returning your call.”
“Thanks for calling, but I don’t need to talk to you now.”
“Sir, if you don’t mind my asking, why were you calling?”
“We had an ethics code violation last week. A professor grading papers found two identical papers and one of them was yours. I called both officers. When I told the other officer about the problem, he asked me what would happen if one of you didn’t admit plagiarizing the other’s paper. I told him a board would be appointed to investigate. The guilty party would be dismissed from the war college and a report sent to his commanding general. If a determination of guilt could not be made both parties would be dismissed. At that point he confessed and asked to withdraw from the course.” He went on to tell me the guilty officer’s identity.
I was stunned. My nearly twenty-three-year career, to that point, had been nearly ruined by someone I thought a friend. Not just a friend, but a fellow Scout leader, a full colonel and a federal inspector general. All positions requiring the greatest integrity.
I couldn’t imagine going back to my commanding general and telling him why I’d been kicked out of the Army’s premier educational program. Nor could I imagine explaining to my spouse why I wouldn’t be headed back for the final two-weeks seminar and a graduation ceremony complete with master’s degree.
A few days later the guilty colonel called me, not to apologize, but to rationalize, to explain his deed. “I’d bolo’ed a couple of earlier papers and had to do re-writes. I knew another re-write could get me kicked out. I was too short of time to get it written, so I copied your paper.”
In his effort to avoid getting kicked out, he cheated and gotten kicked out. He may have been looking for forgiveness. He may have been seeking to ease his guilt. He didn’t say and I didn’t speculate.
I was disillusioned that a person capable of such an ethical violation reached the positions he held. I was angry that he, through his calculated violation of military and academic standards, had nearly wrecked my career. I was angry that he’d violated the trust that soldiers must share as we place our lives in others hands.
I was angriest that a Scoutmaster, a person entrusted with instilling the Scout Oath and the Scout Law, which begins “A Scout is Trustworthy”, in our youth, could commit such a violation not only of academic and military integrity, but also of the Scout Oath and Scout Law.
I terminated the conversation without giving him the absolution that he sought.
As I look back on it, I realize the system worked, in that case, as it should. He doesn’t need my forgiveness. He needs his own. I sometimes wonder what might have happened had there not been the time and date stamped email traffic that showed who originated the paper. Would he then have had the honesty, the courage, the ethics to admit his wrongdoing?
Even though I was innocent in this incident, it troubles me yet to this day. Disillusionment is even harder at fifty.
(c) William L. Enyart 2021
www.billenyart.com
Email: bill@billenyart.com