The Profession Read Online Free PDF

broad daylight, then made it disappear from the impound lot. We had fake names on our uniforms and everything. We took the Cruiser to a chop shop in el-Kadr’s kitchen, where it was repainted, numbers swapped out, new seats, new upholstery; it was a better job than you could get in Detroit. This was totally off the books; if “higher” found out we’d done this, I’d be in the brig for twenty years. I presented the machine to el-Kadr, who of course already knew all about it. He loved it. The prior group in our AO had lost four killed and thirteen wounded during its seven-month tour; ours in the preceding two months had had three hurt, two badly. After the Cruiser, no one fucked with us. We were bulletproof on those streets.
    The Toyota was how I first came into contact with Gen. Salter. This was long before his mercenary days. He was a passionatepatriot then, a shooting star not only in the Marine Corps (he had already achieved two spectacular tactical successes—in Yemen and Nigeria) but in all the armed forces.
    Salter came from a celebrated military family. His father had been a Special Forces major in Vietnam, who went on to wear three stars before he was killed in a chopper crash during Desert Storm; his mother’s dad was Adm. Scott X. Vincent, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Eisenhower and wrote, among a number of other books,
The Projection of Power
, which was one of the sacred texts of the neocons during the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Salter’s degree is in history from Northwestern; he has a Ph.D. from Duke in political science and has studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics. Commandant of the Marine Corps was a sure thing for Salter, it was assumed, with chairman of the Joint Chiefs to follow. Salter is a widower; he has one son, Robert, a captain in the Marine Corps.
    Salter’s command at that time included all the Marines on both sides of the Iran-Iraq border. He himself was in the field all the time. That was his style. His Jump CP, his mobile headquarters, consisted of three unarmored OIF-era Humvees in charge of a six-foot-four, 240-pound gunnery sergeant named Dainty (his real name), with crews that Salter had trained himself, and an Iraqi “terp”—interpreter—named Sayeed who they called Sam and who Salter trusted with his life. Salter would show up anywhere at any hour and just flop down with his Marines and shoot the shit.
    I had to make a report to him once, during an operation about a month after snatching the Cruiser. This was at Bagofah, east of the Tigris, in the pancake country not far from ancient Gaugamela, where Alexander defeated Darius to complete his conquest of the Persian Empire. Gen. Salter kept a straight face through most of the report, then, when I was just about finished, he said, “I see your man Abe’s rolling ’round the hood in a fine new piece of iron.”
    I said I’d seen the vehicle; it was definitely a primo ride.
    “While a Land Cruiser just like it,” Salter said, “went missing from Rashidiyah at just about the same time.”
    I said that Sheikh el-Kadr was an influential man; I was sure he had many connections in the auto sales world.
    “Yeah,” said Salter. “I hear he got a helluva deal at Gent’s Motors.”
    Salter was one of us. He got it. It was Salter who plucked me out of the enlisted ranks, pushed me through four years of college in twenty-seven months, at Uncle Sam’s expense, and got me to the head of the line for OCS and TBS, The Basis School at Quantico, when the waiting lists for both were eighteen months long. He changed my life. I wasn’t the only one he helped either.
    Salter’s Marines loved him. Even after the debacle in East Africa in 2022, when Salter was stripped of his stars like MacArthur in Korea and forced to walk the plank in UltraHi-Def and 3-D, the mass of the ground-pounding grunts still stood with him. He was their kind of commander. Even now, a generation since he had worn the uniform of