Word: honors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have been that very devotion to duty that turned this possible inflation of an already impressive resume into a profound issue of honor. In a suicide note written to "the sailors" (he wrote another one to his wife and family), Boorda expressed fears that the controversy over his battle decorations would damage the institution to which he had devoted his life. (The suicide notes were misdated May 15; naval officials speculated that Boorda avoided dating them May 16 because that is his only daughter's birthday.) Those who knew Boorda could understand his chagrin. "Since a military officer...
...Arizona, who was investigated over savings-and-loan abuses as a member of the Keating Five, says the pressure is even greater for a career military man like Boorda. "For some of us who served in the military, the thing we prize more than anything else is our honor and our reputation. People shouldn't be interested in destroying a reputation built up over all those years of dedicated and loyal service because of one mistake...
...moments when the burdens of their office or the severity of public criticism became too great to bear. We will never really know what drove Admiral Mike Boorda to suicide; I believe it was the convergence of two factors: the medical disorder of depression and an extraordinary sense of honor. Severe clinical depression is a fairly common occurrence in Washington. As tragic as is the loss of Admiral Boorda--a man of proven courage and high moral precept--it will be compounded if we don't think hard about how to lower the likelihood of more such calamities...
...obligation to atone with his life for the embarrassment he believed he had brought on the Navy, his institution, his anchor, his family. Mike Boorda, like most of the senior officers I have known in our military services, would have felt himself the steward of his service's honor and concluded that his sacrifice would uphold it. For a man to have placed a higher importance on upholding an unreachable standard of accountability than on his own survival expresses an ethic that, however misguided, ought to be respected...
...poet laureate of England (Tennyson, say, in the days when the post and poetry mattered) had been found guilty of plagiarism, it would be an interesting cultural scandal. To wear the valor decorations, as Boorda did, amounted to a kind of moral plagiarism--a theft of other men's honor, and therefore a debasing of the coin rewarding their courage...