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READY ROOM 3, DECK 03

I found Doug filling up his coffee cup in the squadron's ready room, the Blue Blasters' one place to conduct meetings, receive instructions, make flight plans, debrief, read the paper. He greeted me with the swagger he's learned since he became a fighter pilot, smiling, his blue eyes glowing. Doug has a prominent jaw and brown hair cut to make his head look square. I could see gray flecks of stubble and heavy lines across his forehead and around his eyes, blood-black circles underneath. A strange crease ran across his face from the rubber gasket of the oxygen mask that had been tightly clamped over his nose and mouth for the last couple of hours. We normally exchange a quick and manly bear hug like men do these days, but the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids any physical show of affection while in uniform. We shook hands.

An F/A Hornet takes off at sunset from the deck of a Nimitz-class U.S. Navy aircraft carrier.

Another pilot, C.C. "Heater" Heaton IV, introduced himself. Like the others, he moved and spoke with a stiff confidence, immediate and robotic; even though his squadronmates ran the gamut of personality and looks, and even though they could be charming or pensive or joking, it was impossible to penetrate what an individual man might have felt about something deeply—such as being called "sir" all day or the off-chance of disappearing in a fireball.

The fighter pilot derives his swagger in part from his privileged position in the Navy. Fighter pilots, who comprise less than 1percent of the Navy's population, make more money than their nonflying peers, and unlike anyone but a ship's captain, have command over their vessel. They're privy to all sorts of highly classified information and combat rooms. They enjoy their reputation, and star in the very public show up on the flight deck. Everyone inside the ship seems to keep track of each feat or botched landing.

WARDROOM 3, DECK 03

Among Doug's Blue Blasters, 10 of the 18 had become new fathers within the last year. Despite the dull conversation, the slouching, the silences filled by chewing noises and stupid Lewinsky/Clinton jokes, a brotherly closeness marks their group, as with a professional sports team who are forced to travel the poky backwaters of the world in close quarters but who still like to play ball together, except that these guys are trained to fight in the air and drop bombs that blow things up and kill people. Every pilot Doug introduced me to was "a great guy" and "an old friend," but I could see the stress of competition. Pilots are ranked within the squadron on every imaginable statistic, from bombing accuracy to staying on the correct frequency to the grace of landings.

Doug asked Phil if he thought there'd be any residual light cast from Virginia this far out into the ocean, to define the horizon. Phil said, "I don't think so."

From the beginning of his Navy career, Doug filled his letters to me with detailed descriptions of how it feels to perform the carrier landing at night. The pilot stares blindly into a "black void," then comes aboard at a high speed, crash-like, at a steep angle for accuracy of hook position, almost out of gas—the plane can carry only a small amount of gas because if it is overburdened with fuel, it might break apart on landing. "Whoever invented the night cat/trap is a lunatic," he wrote. "As soon as I launch, I'm worrying about the landing when I get back."

I wondered why he spent so much energy telling me his fears of landing at night. Doug is a typical daredevil: this fear seemed like an anomaly, a hysterical concoction, but I couldn't figure out to what end. He talked about the anxiety, the adrenaline that rushed through him during the final moments before touchdown, the sleeplessness, the misery and humiliation of counting days until the moon comes back out. Night-carrier landings are by nature intimate: the pilot reaches back to an intuitive, athletic marriage of instinct and faith in order to land. By last spring, Doug had performed 360 carrier landings, 115 of them at night. Since the birth of his son Craig, though, he'd begun to obsess even more than usual about safety and proficiency. Things seemed to have gotten worse. "None of us likes to fly at night," he told me. "I hate it and I wish I didn't have to go through it."

PILOT'S STATEROOM

Catching the number 3 wire, an F/A-18 Hornet lands on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

I knocked on Doug's door. He lay on his bunk in the dark, not sleeping. He asked me to flip on the light. Pale fluorescent bulbs came on. His "stateroom" was as ugly and barren as a high school locker room, the furniture and walls constructed of that same thin, dented metal they use to make lockers, with paint chipping on the ceiling; beside the door was a list of phone numbers and a heavy black inter-ship telephone. The room was like the inside of a steel crate, two strides across, and, like the rest of the ship, it shook with vibration.

He started taping a photo of his baby on the metal bureau. "I want to be home more. That's the effect that little bastard has," he said. Aware that soon he would have to perform the night landing, he waved to the face in the photo, stepped across the room, and grabbed his flight suit off a hook on the wall.

Doug explained that the risks were known—one in four died during a 20-year career—and he kept a will on file with the squadron, in case of a mishap. He had talks with Sarah; she was always very strong about such things, though in the last conversation, "She got a little edgy," because they now had a son.

I mentioned that I'd read that naval aviation was safer now.

"Safer than what?" Doug asked. "I personally know 10 guys—these are guys I flew in the same airplane with, students and instructors—who died in crashes in my 12 years in the Navy." [Doug's roommate] Barry sat calmly and listened, nodding along. "The most disturbing one was a Harrier pilot, a Marine guy I trained with, who was lost at sea. He just never showed up back at the ship."

I asked Doug what his father thought of all this.

"Every time I go home my dad cries."

Barry interrupted. "Your dad, too?"

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