A Soldier's Duty - Tapa dura

A powerful novel from one of the nation's most respected military journalists exposes the "culture wars" raging within the Pentagon as two young combat officers, Majors Cindy Sherman and Bud Lewis, discover the dangerous politics within the military and become embroiled in a deadly game that holds the future of the American military hostage. 75,000 first printing.

Sherman and Bud Lewis are the best young combat officers the army has, and they’ve both been tapped for plum positions as aides-de-camp for two of the Pentagon’s most senior generals. The Pentagon is a cauldron of careerist jockeying and factional squabbling in the best of times, though, and these are not the best of times. A president whom the officer class widely loathes sits in the White House, and grumblings that he’s steering the military onto the rocks are growing louder. Some officers are openly asking: If you believe the president is betraying his country, where does your duty lie?

Just as Sherman and Lewis ease into their jobs — and into a deepening romance — a secret pressure group of military officers called the Sons of Liberty begins to carry out covert protests, symbolic at first, against White House policy. It is with shock that Lewis comes to suspect the group’s leader is his own boss and hero, General B.Z. Ames, and that the man in