Whether Trump fired Flynn, as his White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters, or Flynn decided to jump before he was pushed, is still unclear. Either way, as attendees dined on filet mignon, Flynn was likely crafting his resignation letter, in which he acknowledged that he had “inadvertently” given Pence “incomplete information” regarding his calls with Kislyak.

The unraveling of Flynn’s brief tenure in the West Wing culminates a bizarre period in his career that few could have predicted when he was earning plaudits as a brilliant, iconoclastic intelligence officer. During his JSOC tour, he oversaw a transformation in intelligence processes that enabled the command’s task forces in Iraq to conduct several missions a night, each one based on intelligence collected from the previous raid. A series of increasingly high-profile director of intelligence jobs followed at U.S. Central Command, the Joint Staff and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, where he again served under his JSOC boss, General Stanley McChrystal. In that job, he burnished his credentials as an officer willing to take controversial positions by co-authoring a paper that was highly critical of the United States’ intelligence efforts in Afghanistan.

But it was at his final assignment, as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, that Flynn’s star lost its luster. Flynn’s bosses fired him in 2014 amid complaints about his allegedly overbearing management style and a series of public comments he made that ran counter to Obama administration orthodoxy. From there, it was a short jump to the Fox News circuit, where he reliably bashed the Obama administration for being weak on counterterrorism, and an ever-shorter one to a position as an adviser to presidential candidate Trump.

As they perused the vendor booths offering military widgets at the NDIA tradeshow, the middle-aged former special-ops personnel who made up the bulk of the conference attendees, many of whom had multiple Iraq and Afghanistan tours under their belts, expressed surprise and disappointment that one of their own had lost his job so quickly, and over a question of personal integrity to boot. “There’s a lot of people that are shocked that it happened in the first month in office, and over an integrity issue,” a retired special-operations officer who served on the National Security Council said.

Others saw the issue in starker terms. “He lied to Pence and he had to go,” a retired Special Forces colonel who described Flynn as a passing acquaintance told me. Retaining Flynn would have entailed a major risk for Trump, he said. “The real danger for the administration is if he’s going to lie about something that small … what happens when something really big hits the fan?”

While acknowledging that Flynn enjoys a sterling reputation among his peers, the retired colonel evinced little sympathy for his predicament. “Everybody thinks the world of him,” he said. But “integrity is something you have to give away,” he said. “Nobody can take it from you.”