Breaking the Trust Barrier

Epilogue

My thoughts filled the cockpit as we taxied to the runway to begin the final act of the show at Andrews Air Force Base—and I was beaming. At the start of training season, the distance between jets was the same as we had flown throughout our operational lives, but then we had hardly known each other. Closure had come at a glacial speed as we waited for the lines of coding to settle in—the coding of commitment, then loyalty, and finally the kind of trust that would allow us to give up the peripheral cues and the safe separation on which our lives had depended. We gave them up every time we took off, out of trust in one another, and we were about to do it again.

I returned Mo Southern’s salute and watched his crew clear the runway in a ...