Former Secretary of the Navy, Navy Cross recipient, and Marine officer James Webb lit the fires of controversy with this startling inside look at life at the U.S. Naval Academy when A Sense of Honor was first published in 1981. Some of his fellow Academy graduates attacked it as exaggerated and extreme, but Webb's portrayal of a gung-ho first classman's campaign to shepherd an unprepared plebe through the academy's complex and unforgiving ethos was hailed as a "considerable achievement" by the New York Times and "a remarkable moral statement" by the Boston Globe.