13 Second Lieutenant’s at The Basic School (this is where all newly commissioned Marine Officers go to school for six months) are being discharged for cheating.

They used an old (and wrongly obtained) answer sheet for a land navigation exercise. The land nav exercise is not easy. It involves a map and compass and hours walking and running in the woods of northern Virginia to find small markers at given locations. You have to find many markers over the course of the day. In fact, I failed my first time. I had a bad day. I was usually good at land nav. On the retest I got a perfect score. Oh well.

Anyway, these new officers cheated. They are now being discharged. Some complain that land navigation is an obsolete skill in the days of GPS. True, but what if GPS fails at the point of attack. And you still have to know how to read a map even if GPS is telling you where you are. Of course, they are missing the point with this line of reasoning. Others involved said they were not alone but they were the ones that got caught. Perhaps but the “everyone was doing it” defense has long been a very weak one.

We all have our moments of weakness. We have all taken liberties along the way. But some are held to a higher standard. Those who will lead young Marines, the sons and daughters of America, into battle must be trustworthy. It is a high standard that all leaders must aspire too.

Keep striving. Aspire to that highest level of honesty. Your people will respect you for it, and you will respect yourself.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 1:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.