The Grit Factor

—3—

Draw Your Circle

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.”

—William Shakespeare

After six months of sleeping on a cot in a tent in Bosnia-Herzegovina and flying armed aerial-reconnaissance missions nearly every day, our battalion was ready to go home. As much as I loved the mission focus and the flying, it was a lonely time, too. For many of the warrant-officer pilots, it was yet another deployment, yet more time away from their families. One reported that he would be transferring to the Coast Guard once we returned—his wife had given him an ultimatum. He’d been gone too much, deployed too many times. On that final day, we flew north, a long and loose formation of twenty-four Apaches ...