Drifting high over the desert he had no sense that he was at once an expression of an idea framed late one night in the White House by the president himself, writing with a No. He knew his assignment, his specific mission. He didn’t really know why he’d been sent here, to Libya, in the first place. The night air was cool, and there was no sound, only awesome silence. He now had reasons to think it might also be his last.Įven so, as he floated down, he felt almost calm. And on the night of March 21, 2011, Captain Tyler Stark took off in an F-15 from a base in Italy, with a pilot he’d only just met, on his first combat mission. In 2009 they’d shipped him to England, and to a position where he might see action. The first years of his air-force career he’d spent on bases in Florida and North Carolina. So the mix-up about his eyesight had been a blessing in disguise. At first he was crushed by the news, but then he realized that, while an air-force pilot might be assigned to fly cargo planes or even drones, the only planes with navigators in them were fighter jets. A misdiagnosis about his eyesight killed his dreams of being a pilot and forced him into the backseat, as a navigator. His parents didn’t take him too seriously until he went to college, at Colorado State University, when on the first day of school he had enrolled in the air-force R.O.T.C. When he was two years old, Tyler Stark had told his parents he wanted to fly, like his grandfather who had been shot down by the Germans over Austria. Below his feet he could see a few lights and houses, but mainly it was just desert. How fast he couldn’t say, but he told himself he’d have to execute a perfect landing. He went immediately to his checklist: he untangled himself from his life raft, then checked the canopy of his chute and saw the gash.
He could see the red light of his jet’s rocket fading away and also, falling more slowly, the pilot’s parachute.
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A minute earlier, when the plane had started to spin-it felt like a car hitting a patch of ice-his first thought had been that everything was going to be fine: My first mission, I had my first close call. They called it “opening shock” for a reason. The last thing he’d heard was the pilot saying, “Bailout! Bailout! Bail-” Before the third call was finished, there’d come the violent kick in the rear from the ejector seat, then a rush of cool air. Even after his parachute opened, Tyler Stark sensed he was coming down too fast.
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