 Welcome to, oh no, this isn't Figments. I'm Dan Leith, go by Fig. Usually the host of Figments is Barbara Magination, but today I get to guest host, military in Hawaii here on Think Tech Hawaii. And we've got a great topic today. We're gonna talk about one of the military academies. We might talk a little bit about all of them, but in this case, specifically West Point. And West Point is a pathway to becoming a commission officer in the United States Army, specifically, I like to say the commission officers are the most powerful people in the country, not in terms of having power over, say, the president or the senator, Congress, but they, even a second lieutenant, make federal law by issuing a lawful order. And our young adults, young men and women from Hawaii can become commission officers in the Army through West Point. So how do I know that? I applied to West Point and was turned down, but I have friends, including today's guest, Bruce Fink, who is a graduate of West Point Class of 79, Aloha Bruce. Aloha, thanks. Welcome, you are a graduate. I know this because we play golf together and you've been a guest on Figments. You're also a cancer survivor and a great friend. So tell me a bit about West Point and its important role in your family's history. Well, my dad and both brothers were graduates of West Point, so that's sort of how I got there, not just because of them, but because I knew of it. And their various paths to get there. I was, because I was the son of a military officer able to get a presidential nomination because you move around a lot, but you normally get nominations through your senators or congressmen. And if you're interested, it's a lengthy process, but it's not a hard process. Well, we'll get to that process a bit later, as you know, but this has been part of your life. You graduated, okay, folks, we're gonna admit to being a Capuna here. You graduated 43 years ago in the class of 1979, right? That's correct. Last all-male class, by the way. And we won't hold that against you. But you still say, you know, this is an important thing in the screenshot that our viewers see, you're surrounded by West Point memorabilia. I know you're active in association of graduates, association of graduates from West Point. Not sure that's the right title here. Yeah, that's correct. But it is a threat of your DNA, isn't it? It's not just a diploma from the university. Yeah, and the mission of the Academy is for lifetime of service. So it doesn't end when you finish West Point, it doesn't end when you finish military service. It's for your entire life. I'm still serving, even though I've finished my regular career, I'm still serving in various community activities. I think you had a distinguished military career and then a civilian career into Paycom, then Paycom, where we served together. But the fact that the service academies, and in this case, West Point, truly our life-enabling education is something we want to share with viewers to interest young folks. Now, I realize that your average 17 or 18-year-old would be not normal if they didn't look with a little skepticism at what folks our age have to say. It's the nature of life. They are living in a different era than we were growing up in. But we'll talk about why you think it's a relevant path. First, I'd like to share your story because it's a cool story. And the story of your life in the Army and life beyond the Army kind of starts with graduation that moment at West Point where you've enjoyed four rigorous demanding, difficult years and you finally get commissioned as a Second Lieutenant US Army. There's the moment. What do you remember about the moment? Well, yeah, I remember thinking that General Andrew Goodpaster, who was the man in the white uniform giving me my diploma, we thought of him like a grandfather. And I just looked up his age at that point in time. He was 64. And how old are you now? I'm now 65. So I'm a year older than he was in that picture. So I'm thinking, you know, I didn't think I was gonna get as old as he is, but I did. Well, thankfully we're in an era where being our age isn't as, is better than it used to be, I guess is a good way to put it. Yeah. So you left West Point as a graduate and embarked on a 20-year Army career. And I think it's interesting and important to the audience to talk about what you did because you might tend to, to think that everybody in the Army drives tanks or is a rifleman or an aviator, but you're a combat engineer. Right. I started out in an infantry division as a combat engineer. Then I went to Korea for a year and did construction. And then I was back in the same infantry division as a combat engineer. After graduate school, I went to Japan to do construction. Then back into a combat engineer unit with some schools thrown in between, before I came here to Hawaii and worked at Pacific Command for four years in the engineer division. So very career in the Corps of Engineers. So let's dig into that a little bit. I kind of know because I served with the Army a lot during my career, including with the Second Infantry Division and the Republican Korea, but an engineer in the Army doesn't drive trains. Just to clarify that, I do understand that as I get it. But what does an Army engineer do in an infantry division? What are you engineering for, what do we play? A lot of times in both the offense and the defense, you're out in front of the infantry and the armor, either clearing obstacles or creating obstacles. There's places that we go and train like the National Training Center where you actually go out and implant mines. And then you clear things like mines and tank traps and bar bar or other things that would stop the infantry and armor from advancing. So the engineers tend to be out in front a lot. So I remember a mantra from my time serving on the ground with the Army and footing and combat and being at their school at Love and Worth and teaching their move should communicate, right? And it seems to me that you can't move if the engineers don't make it possible. Yeah, and we had guaranteed job security. We would build things and then blow them up. Nice, but interestingly, and I also know this to be true from working with the Corps of Engineers, the Army Corps of Engineers, you also in peace time, both at home and abroad, Army engineers have important environmental roles too. Yes, yeah, they're in fact, probably most known in Hawaii right now for the Alawai project, which had gotten to the point of they wanted to move forward with it, but because of a lot of public input, that's been put on hold. And they're doing a lot of that sort of work around Hawaii every day that you just don't notice. Harbors and dredging and things like that that the Corps of Engineers is responsible for. And all of that, they have to do in an environmentally conscious way. So that's one of the many career paths you could take if you go to West Point and get commissioned. You could be an infantry officer, a tank driver, a helicopter pilot, or any of the other, a number of other roles that you could play. Your family, as you said, served the all attended West Point, your three brothers shown here, including you said your brother on the right, was a new young lieutenant and refused to wear his or didn't want to or whatever wears uniform in the picture. That's right. So what I take from that, Bruce, is stubbornness is congenital and the pink family could be wrong. I think it comes from my mom. But that family tradition goes beyond the fact that you have a family fabric of attending West Point. Your son Andrew, who I know is no gas an Air Force HH 60G helicopter pilot attended the Air Force Academy. But as we were getting ready for this, you also talked about the friendships that you formed. Frankly, I have college friendships, but we didn't live together. We weren't all of the same ethos who came to the University of Wisconsin from, I guess, like the Academy, came from different places and perspectives, but I don't think you get quite as close as you do in a service Academy. And so here's a picture of you and your college roommate. Yeah, I'm in college, it was West Point. Yeah. Tell me about that relationship and how you've sustained it over years and years and years of moving around. Yeah, Tim was my roommate, three out of the last four semesters. And this picture is from Korea when we got together to celebrate being promoted to captain. And then we stayed in touch. He was here in Hawaii when we were in Hawaii and then he moved to Washington, DC and whenever I'd go back there, I'd see him. And his wife actually went to the Naval Academy and I went to their wedding. I went to their wedding at the Naval Academy. We heard John Paul Jones rolling over in the grave below. But their daughter just got married and we're still in touch. We just had a reunion of about 20 classmates and their families here, a mini reunion back in February. Thankfully we were able to pull that off. So we stay in touch and we have some special good friends but every five years we have a big reunion that's pretty well attended. And that's cool. And I don't have that from my college class to the University of Wisconsin. So that's a good part of it. But the threat goes beyond people who were actually at West Point and then you do have an association of graduates here in Hawaii on Oahu. Right. How many members are there? I think in the West Point Society there's probably 150, 200. Something we started recently is trying to encourage more between the Forest Service Academies, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. We had a golf tournament last month with those four academies. And we're looking at other things like maybe a ceremony, a remembrance type of ceremony on a holiday and a holiday party where we get current cadets together. But are you saying there are 150 West Point graduates on a relatively small population on Oahu? Yeah, I'm retired and at duty. For some people, I mean, for some reason, military people get to Hawaii and they want to retire here. I'm not sure why. Because we're not idiots. Yeah. And we know that some folks don't appreciate living here in the middle of the ocean but people like you and I do love Hawaii. So 150, and the point I'm trying to make with that, observation, Bruce, is that many of these people, I suspect, didn't become Lieutenant-Colonels-Colonels-General. They served for a time and went into active life. And folks, if you or your young adults in your family are considering West Point Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy inapolis or the Coast Guard Academy, an important thing to understand is it does not, it enables life and success beyond. And you can check the bios of important people and commercial and government roles. And it's not unusual at all to see, including the current Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall, somebody who's a former Army officer and West Point graduate. I think Secretary Kendall was a West Point graduate. And it really, everybody doesn't serve 20 years. In fact, most don't serve 20 or 30 years, but they are given skills of leading and doing that enable success beyond. So you don't have the goal, have to have the goal of becoming a 12-star general to want to attend West Point or the other academies to improve your life. Great? I agree. Cool. I was afraid you were gonna fight me on that, Bruce. Let me take a quick breath, if I may, to talk about my show because Jay gave me this opportunity. So I wanna say from an Air Force perspective because I am an Air Force fighter, Bob, even at this elderly age, that on the next pigments, Monday, June 13, on pigments to the power of imagination, imagine. Top Gun, you. That's right. I'm going to talk about Top Gun Maverick, the movie, which I saw at the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum with my beautiful wife, Alejandra, in a historic hangar, 79, with an eminently qualified Air Force guy to talk about a movie about a Navy school because Major General Dallas Thompson, Dallas, not the city I like to call him, actually flew, not just the F-15, that's what our leads go back together, but the F-14 and the F-NA-18 with the Navy and then the F-16, he's a great guy. We're gonna remember what awesome fighter pilots we were and give you a little extra special insight into flying jets like that or maybe remember a few of our own Top Gun moments. Okay, so, first, we're old, you know? You alluded to that and I said it expressly earlier. Why would somebody who's 16, 17, 18 listened to us, let me rephrase that. What are the enduring elements of a military academy education that are relevant to date, that should be meaningful, that you think would be meaningful to a young person today in their lives? It gives you the foundation for life that is something that can't be taken away from you. The values and duty on our country is the motto of the academy and it is something that changes the rest of your life. Even now, do you talk to recent graduates? Do you still hear that? I'm playing a little devil's advocate here, but you didn't have a cell phone. You weren't on social media because neither of them had been invented yet, Bruce, when you were there at the military academy. So, even in this very different environment, that still matters? Well, and we have, my West Point class has an official email group forum where they try to keep it light and interesting and then a discussion group that if you want to bring up something that's a controversial subject and get the opinions of the other people who are on that forum, you get it. And that's not from just again, you're running the mill person. That's from people who went to West Point and served in lots of interesting places. We have one former president. Yeah, president of Costa Rica was West Point classmate. So, you know, and four-star general's retired and other people who've gone on to really some interesting positions. So we get into some good discussions. And of course we do have a Facebook page so you can wish everybody happy birthday or whatever else. They try to keep that light too. So let's say that somebody, if we're gonna talk in just a second about the process of trying to gain entry to West Point. By the way, truth and advertising folks, I did apply to West Point and the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy and they all laughed. It was not accepted, rightly so. It's a rigorous process, but let's say somebody's just thinking about it. Young man, young woman here in Hawaii, can they talk to somebody closer to their age? Is there a way to speak to somebody's either a cadet or a young officer and say, hey, what's this about? Why would I wanna do this? That is taking our word for it. Yeah, there is a West Point graduate who was here in Hawaii who they could reach out to and say, hey, I wanna talk about going to West Point and he can put them in touch with current cadets. And I think we're gonna talk about that on the next slide as we talk about the process here. I think, yeah, I think so. Talk to this slide if you could here. Right, so the first thing is you have to be eligible and that's basic stuff like being a citizen and being not over 23 years old. You have to be at least 17. So there's some certain basic requirements. You have to gather all the information that you normally would gather for a college application and there's a way to start an application online. And as part of that process, the fourth step, they will connect you with the local West Point representative. And he is charged with making sure that- He or she, Mr.- Right, in this case- You all may have class, so. Yeah, in this case, it is a he. And they will hopefully connect them with current cadets who can tell them what it's really like because I have no idea what it's like that was 43 years ago for me. You have some ideas, but not a full picture. No, not a full picture. So that's the first four steps. So wherever you are, because we do have viewers outside of Hawaii, wherever you are, they will connect you with a local representative. Correct. And my experience, not just from the process, but from advising young folks who were considering a military career, is that these representatives are very honest. They're gonna give you the straight skinny. They don't want you to wind up where you don't belong. And frankly, I didn't belong there. I would not have been a good fit with any of the cadents at the time. I needed a different kind of tempering, if you will. And I got that in the university experience, but then once you've done all that, there are a series of more steps. Yes, you have to get a nomination. We talked about that congressman or senator or there are also other routes through son or daughter of a military officer or prior service and prep school. Prep school is a year before the military academy and you can get a nomination through that. Yeah, so the prep school is an option. If you don't aren't accepted to the academy or don't think you'll be eligible to get a year to do two things. One, be better prepared to competitively select into the academy or two, decide that's not for you. It's a good opportunity for those on the fence. And it gives you a rounding academically that you otherwise might not have. The medical examination, start that process as soon as possible, because it's a long process and there are some pitfalls in there. Yeah, and it's those, the loyal viewers of pigments, which I know number at least one, my wife, Hollerhounder, thanks Hollerhounder for being that. Know that my journey to being an Air Force pilot while not in the academy was the long one because of a small color vision problem. Don't give up, but do start early because you never know what path you're gonna take. Okay, sorry. So the fitness assessment, I would say is probably one of the hardest parts. Even for me, I remember it being difficult. And I was in good shape. I was riding my bicycle every day to school. I mean, I was really in pretty good shape, but that's a hard assessment and it's hard for a reason is because if you go to West Point out of shape, you're not gonna do well. You're gonna have a tough time. Your life will be kind of miserable. Yes. Right? So let's talk, go ahead. I would say the standard stuff that you do for any school, your SATs, your grades, your leadership, your community service used to be Eagle Scout and Gold Award now for Hollerhound was a big deal. I don't think it's as big a deal as it used to be, but it certainly I think helps if they have that kind of background. Yep. And it's an interesting time. It would be interesting to me to see what matters now if it's not Eagle Scout or the equivalent. But let's talk first before we wrap up here in just a few minutes about what the benefits are. We can't bury the lead here. Why go to the military academy, to West Point or one of the other academies? What do you get that you don't get anywhere else? One of the things that you get is you get paid to go to college. Right. But there are many others. What else do you get that isn't available in any other form type of institution because there are military colleges like the Citadel, BMI, Texas A&M. So what do you get at West Point? You can't get elsewhere. They train you for a military career and a lifetime of service. And you also get the imprints. I think that's probably a good word of four years of hard training and excellent education that stays with you for the rest of your life. And if you're fortunate, like me, the Army will send you to graduate school. They sent me to Stanford for graduate school. It seems to me that most of the academy graduates, the various academies have some opportunity for not just GI Bill-funded advanced education, but there's ample opportunity to further your education once you're on active duty, right? Right. And they tend to send you to schools for training you at each level that you go to to make sure you're ready for your next job. One of the big things I would say is to make sure that a candidate knows why they wanna go. I'll give you the example of our son, Andrew. He had applied to 10 colleges and he had said he was going to Carnegie Mellon. And then one morning he just woke up and he says, he's going to the Air Force Academy. And I said, why? And he says, well, that just feels like the right place for me. And I know I'll do well there. And just not for me, I didn't go to the Air Force Academy so it wasn't for me, it wasn't for a girlfriend, it wasn't for anybody else. It was his choice that he thought that was the best place for him. Probably the best advice you'll give all day and I'll echo it or mirror it with a little different experience in that I gave my, I went to my daughter Yateng and it was 17 it's time and said, can I need you to apply to the Air Force Academy and for an ROTC scholarship? Because you need to do it, you need that experience. I didn't care if she went to the Air Force Academy or not. She lost it and she's a very even keeled if any of you saw her episode on Figments. This is a supremely composed human being. She went crazy and through a tantrum. The only tantrum I ever saw her through. The reason was, it wasn't for her. I just wonder the experience but she knew it wasn't for her. She went to UC Berkeley in ROTC, got commissioned, served for six years and now is doing very well as an executive at Google. So you got to go to the right place. If you go there, you'll get an unparalleled experience, a very high caliber education. Friends that last for a lifetime and the ability to do really tough stuff whether it's in the boardroom or the battle field. And that can't be bought. And you don't have to buy it. Bruce, how are your student loan balances? Never had one. Never had one because the government pays for it. Now you pay it back over the course of many years but it's a different thing. Hey, Bruce Frank, graduate U.S. Military Academy at West Point Class of 1979. Thanks for joining us on Military in Hawaii and sharing your experiences. I hope we've touched some folks who will consider an application of West Point or one of the other service academies. Thank you. Aloha. You bet. My pleasure. Well, thanks folks for joining us on Not Figments. I almost said it again. So on Military in Hawaii, please do join me Monday for Figments, the Power of Imagination. Remember we've got a couple of playlists here for both Figments, the Power of Imagination, Figments on Reality. And I, as always, want to thank Think Tech Hawaii, an amazing nonprofit that needs your support. Please go to their webpage and consider donating to their efforts to support citizen journalists like me and citizen guests who have served their country and keeps learning like Bruce Fink. Mahalo and Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.