A few decades back, I was a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, a proud moment in my young career. And I remember having a conversation with another cadet, and we were discussing the inevitable topic of “how did you get into West Point”, and he went first. He told me that his father was a senator, that his father had used those connections to get another senator to nominate him for the academy slot, and that pretty much was how he got in. His father had been a West Pointer before him, and if I remember correctly, there may have been a number of other West Pointers in that family line as well. His father’s wealth and status got him lots of nice perks throughout his schooling, so that he was able to attend the best schools, have the best tutors, and everything you would expect from that type of life.
At the time, I thought, wow, this guy really had it lucky, so he must have just been that anomaly that I happened to come across, but then as that conversation happened with more and more cadets over my time at the Academy, I started to realize that this was more the norm than the exception. Strangely enough, whenever I was asked the same question, the attention in the room changed from “oh yeah, me too!” to “how the hell did you get it?”
There were times where I found myself suppressing my desire to share my story because after telling it a few times, I was…
