Flashback – a nugget joins the fleet

The target, they had been told, called for only one weapon. A JDAM, to be precise, the wingman thought, and chuckled to himself: To be precise.

All that they were told about the target was its location – a location that had been plotted very precisely, whose position had been checked by dozens of people in several different decision cells. A target whose location was known down to the last meter in a three-axis representation, whose existence on a common spheroid was known down to the last hundredth of a second.

Nothing at all more than that were they told – nothing at all more than was necessary. This was not to be an LGB strike, one in which the strike fighter pilot was importuned to know his target utterly, to be one with its ontology. They would not be required to fall in love with it, to in fact, love it to death. This was not to be the mission of a pilot, but rather that of an engineer: Their role was less than a warrior’s, but they told themselves, more than an assassin’s.