After a helicopter crash in the Pacific, Paul Fields, the senior aircraft accident investigator for the Navy and Marine Corps directs the salvage and the rather grizzly recovery of the helicopter and its crew. Once he has determined the reason for the crash, he returns to the Naval Safety Center in Norfolk, Virginia to await the next crash he is to investigate. This is a man with little in his life but the job he loves. He has spent his entire career with the Navy, first as a helicopter pilot, then as an aviation analyst with the Safety Center and then over twenty years as an aircraft accident investigator. At this point in his career he has completed nearly a hundred major crash investigations. Divorced and estranged from his children, he is wondering if his job is enough to justify his life. As Fields returns to his office in Norfolk, a Marine pilot, Maxwell Sturgess IV, at the Cherry Point Marine Base is coping with a disgraceful event while he was deployed to Iraq. His actions had caused the Marine Corps to pass him over for a promotion. Col. Sam Ramsey, Sturgess' Wing Commander tried to help Max avoid the consequences of his actions in Iraq but is unsuccessful in keeping his pilot in the Marines. In fact, being passed over meant the end of his military career. Grateful to Ramsey for his efforts, Major Sturgess becomes concerned when he sees his mentor dangerously drunk, driving home early one morning. Sturgess, before he leaves on a training flight, attempts to help his superior officer by asking the Wing's Flight Surgeon, Commander Paplos Slokowski to try to help Ramsey with behavior that is now evident to Max could damage his Colonel's career. While Paul Fields is out of the office, a crash is called into the Office of Mishap Investigation by a Sheriff in the little town inVirginia and one of the other investigators is dispatched to investigate the crash. A chute was seen so there was a least one Marine that had ejected. The crashed aircraft was an A6 Prowler, an electronic surveillance plane that carried four when in a war zone but was reported to have only three on this training mission. The site of the crash was somewhere on Afton Mountain between Charlottesville and Waynesboro, Virginia. After a series of events displaced two other investigators, Fields was sent to join the Mishap Board from Cherry Point. The Board is made up other specific officers from the Squadron to which the downed plane was attached. The Squadron's CO then selected his Executive Officer, Lt, Col. Jonathan Smoot as the Senior Board Member. This group would work with Fields to go through the rigorous processes necessary to determine the cause of the crash. Even before Fields reaches the site of the crash, Col. Sam Ramsey begins to try to insert himself into the investigation in his effort to manage the findings. During this same time a group of citizens in Waynesboro were complaining to the Navy and their Senators about the Navy and Marine Corps training flights over their community. The leader of this group is a woman who had grown up in the protest movement of the 1960s and is anxious for a cause to lead. She is also a reporter for the small weekly paper in Waynesboro. There she had met a strange young man who claimed to be a student at the University of Virginia and clearly had revolutionary ideas. At his urging, he and Ms. Jones cook up a plan to support her efforts against the Military Establishment. Late the first night of the crash investigation, Ms. Jones appears on the mountain side, deep in the Virginia forests at the camp of the group investigating the crash. During questioning by Fields and Smoot she mentioned hearing that the plane was shot down. This is a fact that had not been evidenced in anything that the investigation had uncovered about the crash. When finding two living crew members and the body of the pilot, the investigators begin to complete their process of removing all of the