That A Sense of Honor is … successful as fiction owes little to the author's skill in developing "character"; the cast is familiar enough. The novel is compelling because an essential question is honestly and simply posed and an honest, somewhat complicated answer is attempted. The question is this: How should a professional military man be prepared for his career of service? There is a corollary inquiry: What pressures can legitimately be applied to test, and to temper, the military novice? All military academies implicitly endorse the notion that the best way to prepare people for real stress is to devise a reasonable approximation in school. True; but how is such stress to be created? Who shall administer it? Can the purpose of education and training, fundamentally antipathetic, be served in the same institution, at the same time? Education, after all, aims to prepare people to ask intelligent questions; training habituates to obedience.

The sufferers—variously denominated plebes, smacks, doolies—are at the mercy of upperclassmen. In A Sense of Honor, one plebe, infelicitously named John Dean, presents a familiar pathology. He is very "bright"; but he is also terrified, and he is not very "military." An excellent student with a strong bent for science, he is hopelessly rational in what is portrayed as a closed world of jarring and unreasoning authoritarianism….

His principal antagonist is the first-classman (senior) Bill Fogarty…. [Fogarty] takes as a personal obligation the conversion of the cowering and bookish Dean to a satisfactory midshipman, the conversion having as its more-or-less routine staples certain disobliging disciplines: many push-ups; sleeping on a mattressless bunk; running three miles before reveille along a lumpy and icy seawall. Such things tire Dean. His academic work suffers. A civilian chemistry professor, who does not "understand," grows curious, believes Dean to have been hazed, enlists a lawyer and undertakes to find out who's responsible. (p. 5)

That such hackneyed elements of military school fiction can be mixed into a useful chemistry—and notwithstanding the gratuitous and constant sniping at the Academy's targets of opportunity, and the obligatory sexual couplings that seem to be staples of such books—testifies to Webb's determination to show both the dangers and necessities peculiar to such an enterprise as education in a military academy. The plebe Dean does respond to the grim prescriptions devised for him; the civilian professor both misconstrues and detests that portion of academy life outside his classroom. A single question, posed starkly at the very end of the book, is its summation….

A Sense of Honor is full of stereotypes, but in its assertion that the academy's military masters and its civilian professors should see their work as complementary rather than as antagonistic, and in its insistence that the qualities that go to the making of a military man can partly be inculcated by a system of intense stress, it is undoubtedly right. Its portrayal of life at the Naval Academy in 1968 (the year in which the action takes place) is harsh. But during that year of political assassinations, the Tet offensive, the Democratic convention in Chicago, life on no American campus is apt to be recollected as tranquil. Whether the book is intended as a commentary on a system which yet survives, in 1981, or as an account of usages once common but now erased, its questions, and answers, remain useful to an assessment of military education and, in particular, its first-year "Plebe" traditions. (p. 8)