If you watch Fox News you are bombarded with the ads for New Day USA, a company selling home equity loans to veterans. A good number of the ads feature Rear Admiral Thomas C. Lynch, a 32-year retired veteran of the United States Navy and Chairman of New Day USA.

Admiral Lynch tells us we should trust him because he served with us understands us and is here to help us. All is probably true and what he is doing, flacking for a finance company, is not unlawful or illegal; however it is unethical and perhaps immoral.

No law exists banning senior military officers from selling products using their rank and the trust and the confidence they earned over decades of honorable service. However, an unwritten rule of ethics, an unwritten ethical standard, is that a serving or retired senior military officer will not use his/her military officer rank to sell soap, sox or anything other item. Admiral Lynch saying you should trust him and go even more deeply into debt because he is as leader who earned your trust and confidence and says so, is wrong. His sales pitch is immoral and just plain unethical; once again it is totally legal.

In researching New Day USA, I found a report in Military Times that New Day USA was fined two million dollars by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau for deceptive advertising and paid kickbacks to a major veterans’ group, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The VFW maintains it was misled by New Day USA and corrected the problem as soon as notified. No action was taken or is contemplated by the Bureau against the VFW.

New Day USA is $2 million lighter, but making around one hundred million a year, they hardly miss it.

The burr under my saddle is Admiral Lynch being used as a pitch man for a company that is less than fully on the level. Even if the company was the most moral, lawful and honest lending broker in the world, Admiral Tom Lynch should not be a pitch man, it is just wrong.

After the Civil War Confederate General Robert E. Lee was offered $50,000, an enormous amount of money at the time, to be pitch man for an insurance company and he refused. Robert E. Lee was broke, homeless, jobless and with no prospects, but his honor and ethics would not allow him to accept. A general/admiral or any senior officer who uses his/her rank to get veterans to purchase anything is in my view a contemptible human being.

Flag officers (a term for a General Officer or Admiral) who identify themselves as experts because of their training and experience is fine; in keeping with the unwritten standard. A senior officer who works as a talking head news commentator is ethical. The line is crossed when they say trust me and purchase a product because I vouch for it; it makes a flag officer no better than a baseball or football player selling shaving cream or razor blades.

General U.S. Grant lent his name to an insurance company that failed and he regretted it until the day he died. To his credit, General Grant did see that every investor was reimbursed, even working on his biography almost up to the day he died, wasting away from cancer, to raise the necessary funds.

A special bond exists among those of us who served in our nation’s military. The trust earned over decades of honorable service by our senior leaders is a sacred bond that no one should sell for personal profit. The bond is just too precious to cash in for a few pieces of silver.

Admiral Lynch sold his honor; no matter what the price he sold it for it was not enough. Honor is priceless. Well it is to those of us who understand its true value.