From the Introduction

Few cadets at the United States Air Force Academy would describe themselves as romantics. Weeks out of high school, they begin their military careers in an explosion of criticism and punishment that strips their identities raw and hunts down their defenses with the inexorability of a laser-guided bomb. They learn to fight with mud soaked through their clothes and covering their ears, to shower in thirty seconds, to eat like automatons, and to sound off, or shout, an answer to somebody inches from their face. They can do fifty or more push-ups on demand.

And yet, in an era when air travel has been stripped of its glamour, when commercial flights resemble nothing so much as flying crosstown buses, cadets at the Air Force Academy are probably the last young people who are unabashedly in love with flying. The 9,000 high school seniors who apply to the academy each year, of whom only about 1,300 are selected for admission, share a common overriding trait: the dream of flight.

Three in four hope to become pilots. Some long to fly an F-15 Eagle, a tactical fighter, while others yearn to pilot the F-16, the lightweight fighter jet that slashes across the sky at twice the speed of sound, pulling turns at nine times the force of gravity. Some seek the bulk of heavy transporters like the C-130 and the newer C-17, the flying equivalent of a Hummer; still others, quirky souls that they are, feel drawn to helicopters. Many of them post pictures of their pet aircraft on their walls like pinups or doodle them in the margins of their notebooks.

The cadets spend hours learning the details of each model. Of course, not all cadets will become pilots. More than half will work in the panoply of supporting roles that keep the air force running and planes flying: as engineers, as communications specialists, in logistical support or maintenance, in accounting, in intelligence, or in special operations. The ideal, however, the dream that inspires thousands of cadets in Colorado Springs, is flight. The most ambitious and successful of them aim to fly fighter and bomber jets, each worth tens, or even hundreds, of millions of dollars.

I first came to know air force cadets after women from the academy alleged that they had been raped and, worse yet, punished by their chain of command when they reported the assaults. When I interviewed the women, I noticed that many shared an unusual, seemingly inexplicable, love for what they had set out to do in joining the academy.

A year later, the Air Force Academy was back in the news, and again the issue at hand involved the blurring of boundaries. This time, the new commandant of cadets, Brigadier General Johnny Weida, who had been appointed to restore morality, was promoting Christianity among cadets and faculty. In one classroom building, the normally stark white walls were covered with flyers for The Passion of the Christ. Jewish groups condemned the Mel Gibson film of unrelenting violence and betrayal as anti-Semitic and historically skewed, but evangelicals saw in it a vehicle for winning converts. “This is an officially sponsored USAFA event,” the ad announced. “Please do not take this flyer down.” Lest they miss the point, each cadet found a flyer for a special academy showing of the movie on his or her seat in the dining hall.

Well after the news cycle rolled on, as it always does, I remained curious about the broader world of the cadets that the rest of the country was coming to know only by the academy’s blunders. The nature of those mistakes was intriguing: each suggested deep roots, and a gulf between sensibilities in early twenty-first century civil society and life inside the academy.

Outwardly, that world that unfolds over the academy’s 18,000 acres is bound by tradition and ritual, almost a religion unto itself. The cadet career is divided by milestones and punctuated by parades: First and Second Beasts, Acceptance Day, Commandant’s Challenge, Recognition, Hundred’s Night, Ring Dance, Graduation Day, and so on—the same, year after year. Beneath the fixed order and the reverence for tradition, however, change was constant, coming from all directions and playing out on many levels simultaneously.

As I’d expected, the academy was struggling to redefine the relationships among cadets at different grade levels, openly acknowledging that the historically unchecked, Godlike power of upper-class cadets over freshmen had opened the way for abuse. Academy leaders were experimenting. They gradually redrew events like Basic Training and Recognition—the final, grueling training exercise for new cadets each spring—toning them down to conform to the active-duty force, at times sparking tension with older cadets. The leadership ordered cadets, faculty, and staff into hours of lectures on sexual assault and religious tolerance and ordered them to refrain from invoking Jesus during prayers at mandatory events.

That was only the start of the changes that were under way. Within each cadet was a personal universe that was being blown apart and reconstructed, piece by piece. Furthermore, beyond the academy, the role of pilots as heroes of air and space was becoming more elusive each day: more and more of the functions traditionally played by military bombers and fighter planes were being taken over by increasingly sophisticated drones, and the country began confronting the limits of air power in winning wars against guerrillas embedded in civilian populations.

Instead of soaring over enemy territory, dodging radar, rescuing comrades, or bombing bad guys, today’s cadets are as likely to end up hunched over the military equivalent of a video game somewhere in Nevada after graduation, controlling an unmanned drone thousands of miles away. The cadets are at once more remote and yet closer than ever to war. Whereas pilots once zoomed in over enemy territory, dropped bombs from miles up in the sky, and returned to base, technology now allows them to see their targets before, during, and after an attack. They can see the house or building exist one moment and vanish the next; they can see bodies flying apart, in high definition. Then they still take in a daughter’s dance recital.

This book is about metamorphosis—the main business of the Air Force Academy. It follows the cadets of a single unit, the Fighting Bulldawgs of Squadron 13, as they make their way through a year at the academy. The newest cadets include a recruited athlete from Georgia who openly doubts his decision to attend the academy; a young woman who had gone through Junior ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corp) in high school and figured that the Air Force Academy offered her the best chance of seeing combat; a Californian who had set her sights on outer space; and the son of a rocket scientist who was homeschooled along with his nine siblings. We also track the upper-class cadets training them: a cadet officer who learned to fly with Martin Burnham, a missionary kidnapped by Islamist terrorists in the Philippines and killed in a siege to win his freedom; a flight jock with two vastly different sides to his nature; an African American cadet with top grades, who nevertheless worries that he must prove his worth.

The year that’s covered here is the midpoint of 2006 to the midpoint of 2007. America is slogging through its third year of a bloody, seemingly intractable war in Iraq, with more than 3,350 service personnel dead by May 2007. The military is blaming the torture and deaths of prisoners at Abu Ghraib on “a few bad apples.” The Republicans suffer stunning defeats in midterm elections, losing their majorities in the House and the Senate. Ted Haggard, the powerful president of the National Association of Evangelicals, loses his post at the popular New Life Church, which is just outside the academy gates, because of a three-year affair with a male prostitute. The seniors were one of the first classes to apply for admission after 9/11; the freshmen barely mentioned the terrorist attacks in their admissions essays.

Cadets come here from all walks of life. In one sense, they are more representative of the country than are the students at any undergraduate campus, because candidates for admission come from every congressional district. At the same time, cadets here do not exactly mirror the country at large. Rather, they represent a cross section of a particular slice of the United States. The average grade point average of incoming cadets is 3.9, and most are in the top fifth of their graduating classes. The majority has perfect vision, which is required for flight training, and nearly all have won varsity letters.

“We know they’re not quitters,” says Rollie Stoneman, the former associate director of admissions. Most are members of the National Honor Society, and most are also politically conservative—a tendency that becomes accentuated in the closed universe of the military academy. The cadet body is more Christian and more white than the rest of the nation.

During their four years at the academy, the individual cadets shed the person their parents shaped and educated for eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years in order to become, as one graduate put it, the person the cadet wants to be. More precisely, each cadet melds the person he or she envisions with the new person the air force hopes to make of them.

This is the map of their journeys.