As a wing commander Deacon never had the opportunity to log as many flight hours as he would have liked. Not that he was alone. All but a handful of the pilots in the peacetime Air Force racked up the flight time they needed to stay truly proficient and combat ready, let alone satisfy the insatiable desire to punch holes in the sky that all pilots possess. Yet Lee Deacon was able to bring his F-16 around and start his gun run with ease. For several seconds, the ground fire that had been so disconcerting disappeared from his consciousness. He became fixated on his target. Every thought, save pressing home his attack, vanished from the wing commander’s conscious mind. There was only the A-10 below, struggling to grab some open sky and Lee Deacon, a brigadier general in the Air Force, a husband of twenty-eight years, the father of three, grandfather to five, and a man who had become by order of the President of the United States an angel of death.

When it came, the decision to fire was easier than Deacon had feared it would be. In fact he started firing without really having to think about it. It came instinctively. The process that combines target, a pilot’s actions, and machine into one continuous, closed loop operating almost without thought, took control. Nothing could break that loop. The hideous tapping of bullets ripping through the control surface of Deacon’s aircraft, the bucking that shook the F-16 as its cannon cut loose, or the recorded warning blaring in Deacon’s ear to tell him that he needed to pull up failed to brake the Air Force general’s concentration. For a moment there was no wing to command. There was no ground fire. There were no concerns over what would become of him when he had finished this mission. There was only himself and the A-10 he had selected for destruction.

Just as suddenly it disappeared. What had been a sophisticated ground attack aircraft ceased to exist. With a force that Deacon imagined he felt, the fuel and munitions of the Idaho Air National Guard A-10 tore the hapless aircraft apart. Like a man awakening from a dream Deacon pulled back on his joystick and sought to regain some of the precious altitude he had burned during his gun run.

It was then, as he began to ease his joystick back, that he realized he was in trouble. All at once the cockpit of his F-16 was alive with the squawk of warning buzzers and the glare of indicator lights that told him his aircraft had suffered mortal damage. With effort Deacon was able to bring the nose of his aircraft up until he had achieved level flight. Ignoring the chatter of his squadron commanders as they issued their orders to attack, Deacon allowed his aircraft to fly west, out of the battle, as he looked about the confines of his fighter to assess the damage.