The Profession by Steven Pressfield

Author:Steven Pressfield [Pressfield, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-88858-7
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

For a moment it looked as if Salter’s charisma and the sudden groundswell of support might actually pluck his chestnuts from the fire. Then came the bombshell on CyberLeaks and the mil/blog, the Courtemanche Report.

Both sites broke the story of the massacre of the Brown Bombers. Somehow DeMartin White, the CyberLeaks CEO, and Eric Lavalle Courtemanche, the radical blogger, had gotten their hands on a draft of an internal Marine Corps report. The document named Rob Salter as the initiator of the outrage. For some reason, Jack Stettenpohl’s name and mine either did not appear or had been redacted. The leakers weren’t after us, or even Rob. Their target was Gen. Salter.

The story exploded. Salter came forward at once and took responsibility for issuing the orders that led to the massacre.

It was too late. The cause was picked up by the fire-breathing congressman from Montana, Jake Fallon. He led the torch-and-pitchfork brigade. Rob’s career was finished. His life was ruined. He faced prosecution for war crimes. He could go to prison or even face a firing squad.

There’s an unofficial military communications channel, as I mentioned before, called AKOP. The system had been put in place in the early teens to expedite resupply of forward units from bases in the States, but various geeks and gamers had figured out how to hack into and tweak it so that one serviceman could contact another, by text in the notepad section, through their All Force Trackers.

I jumped on this channel now, straight to Rob. It was eleven in the morning in Quantico, where I was—twelve thirty at night (with the half-hour drop east of Kabul) in Paktia. Rob had seen enough of the news to reckon the scale of the catastrophe; he had talked to his dad; he knew how bad it was, not only for himself and his father but for the Marine Corps and for the whole country. No one from higher, he told me, had contacted him yet; he still commanded his three TacOps teams. “What’s next?” I typed.

“Fuck ’em.” Rob’s text ticked back in real time. “I got a job to do and I’m gonna do it.”

An army COP, a combat outpost on the Pakistani border, was under attack at that moment. Rob took two of his teams and went in.

The Bomber fiasco had turned my life and A.D.’s upside down too. I prepared a letter confessing my role. My wife begged me not to send it. I’d be taking down not only myself but Jack Stettenpohl and his wife, not to mention further opening the can of worms that led to every other Marine who had taken part that night. Besides, A.D. said, she smelled a deeper story, a giant rat of a story, in the leaking of the report and then, twenty-four hours later, its mysterious deletion from all Marine Corps databases. She wanted that story.

We fought. I hated myself. I hated being safe in Quantico. I should be with Rob in Paktia. I should be backing up Gen.

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