Nor Tolerate Among Us (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781095304334)

FORWARD by Stephen Kentucky (Ky) Webb. USAFA Class of 1976
As a contemporary graduate of USAFA with the author, I have a distinct appreciation of the story Charles Williams has woven in his latest novel. I enjoyed the accurate remembrances of cadet life, both uplifting and depressing, from regulation and ritual, through the demands on time, mind, and body, to the valuable, identity-forming human interaction and relationships with other cadets.
While cadets are normal (mostly!) college-age youth with the same immaturity and social needs as their civilian college peers, they live in a pressure cooker of hardened rules and expectations. This life is on full display in Williams' novel.
But this is not a documentary on AFA cadet life. The Academy serves as a stage on which Williams has placed his characters, and the story is much more about their actions and reactions to the environment and, more importantly, to their friends and nemeses.
The title of the novel reminds us of the corollary tenet of the AFA Honor Code which holds that cadets must hold their fellow cadets to the same high standard of honor required of themselves. In my day, teamwork, esprit de corps and looking out for your brother cadet was stressed in training. A soldier will say that the prime motivation for bravery, heroism, and reliable performance in combat is that unquenchable desire to protect and support your brother soldiers. Not tolerating, hence snitching or ratting out a fellow cadet thus poses a moral dilemma for a young man. Williams weaves this conflict into his story.
I admire Williams' skill in overlaying a poignant human story on a deeper moral framework that will speak to every reader, regardless of your connection to service academies or the military.