I found this essay, which until now has only been available
on an internal Army website, quite striking. It essentially asks: How could a
place that prides itself on its honor code tolerate sadism?
Just FYI, the author's own title for this piece is "Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and
Character Development at West Point."
By Lt. Col. Peter Fromm, U.S. Army (Ret.)
Best Defense department of military ethics
Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and
Character Development at West Point
I have had one serious unanswered
injustice done to me in my life, and it occurred when I was 21 years old. I
mean "unanswered" in the sense of reciprocity-there has been no accounting for
this injustice. I have always wanted to write about it, not because of
self-pity but because of something I learned from it that has grown on me over
the years. This personal essay describes it as a snapshot from the Army's
troubled times in the 1970s. The story surfaces one important aspect about
leadership and stewardship in the modern Army: the antithetical relationship
between gratuitous cruelty and honor and the duty to do something about it. In my experience as an Army ethicist,
having been sent to graduate school for that purpose, I have seen this
antithetical relationship as potentially the most important ethical failure the
institution faces. I say this because the institution puts weapons in the hands
of young, inexperienced people and then gives them the power of life and death
over others. If we do not do all that we can to get this part of Army culture
right (the relationship between cruelty and honor), we stand convicted of
hypocrisy of the worst kind.
When the Army educated me to teach
ethics (a sign of health in the organization that it actually does such a
thing), I developed an eye for institutional moral window dressing. That's
mostly what I want to talk about here. In the Odyssey, Homer says that "the blade itself incites to
violence." I want to rephrase that beautiful observation to say that
"power over others incites to cruelty." When one exercises power over
another, if there is a lack of moral sense, of maturity, or of wisdom in the
execution, it inevitably becomes entangled with that most basic of impulses,
sexual dynamics.
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