Direct Fire (Drop Trooper, #4)

by Rick Partlow

“Wouldn’t that apply to Captain Cronje too?” I asked. “I mean, he made a call based on what he knew. Maybe he was just doing what he thought was right.” “I might believe that if I didn’t know Greg Cronje. The man’s sloppy, and I used to think it was on purpose, that he was too loose and too relaxed because he knew he wasn’t that good of a leader and wanted his Marines to love him anyway. But now I know it’s more than that. He’s mentally lazy. He gets fixated on one tactic, one way of doing things and won’t look aside to the left or right. He had it in his head that the only way to stop his people getting killed was to kill the civilians to get to the insurgents. But there was no imminent threat to his Marines. All he had to do was withdraw from the warehouse, set up a perimeter and order his people to fire on any vehicles that tried to leave.” Covington shrugged. “Of course, it would have taken longer, wouldn’t have looked as efficient, and he’d already fucked up the mission. He got impatient, sloppy, and when it all blew up on him, he blamed you for being the one to point out his mistake.”