CHICKS DIG THE LONG BALL:

Anne crawled out of bed in her North Las Vegas house around 10 p.m. and started to get ready for her shift.

She pulled her chestnut hair into a bun and slipped on her olive green flight suit. In the kitchen, she packed fruit to snack on during her shift and stuffed her schoolwork into her backpack-sized lunchbox just in case it's a boring night. Most nights she doesn't have a chance to open a book.

Giving her dog, a tan Sher-Pei/pit bull mix, one last pat, she left her house and joined thousands of other workers leaving for the midnight shift. Whi le most people were heading to hotels and casinos in town, Hubbard was on her way to Creech Air Force Base and a war. Anne, an Air Force staff sergeant, was--and still is--a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) sensor operator or "sensor." At Creech, she is assigned to a reconnaissance squadron flying missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. Few weapons in the American arsenal are more relentless than the RPA fleet, often called drones. For more than a decade, the United States has flown RPAs over Afghanistan and Iraq, providing forces on the ground with an eye in the sky to spot terrorists and insurgents, and in most cases the firepower to destroy them.

As she rode to work, Anne--or "Sparkle" as she's known to her fellow drone operators--wasn't focused on the desert outside her window. It was 2009 and President Obama was sending troops in a surge to Afghanistan. Sparkle's mind was on a desert 7,800 miles away. Over the next 24 hours she would track an insurgent, watch as he was killed by a Hellfire missile, and spy on his funeral before ending her night with a breakfast beer and a trip to the dog park. [...]

It is not unheard of for crews to track a target for two to three months. The constant surveillance creates an intimacy other fighter pilots and even soldiers don't have with the target. The crews get to know the target's family. They know the family's mosque, the kid's school. "I understand there is an intimacy you get with your target," Sparkle said. "However, you're a bad guy and you're doing bad things to the people I am here to support. We just don't go out there and shoot stuff. There is a reason. They are always associated with some part of hurting our friendly forces. At the end of the day, when you boil it down to that one point, the rest of it goes out the window." Back over the compound, Sparkle and Spade watched and waited for hours. Two hours after the shift started, the target finally came out of the door dressed in the baggy shirt and pants typical of the region. "He's coming out," Sparkle said as the crosshairs rotated to put the man in the middle of the screen. There was excitement as both Spade and Sparkle instantly locked on him. The crosshairs followed him as he stopped along the wall to take a leak. Finished, he walked back into the compound. That kind of thing went on for hours until he finally got onto the motorbike. Headsets go on. Extra radios go off. No one is allowed in the room. It is very quiet. "Headsets on mean game time," Sparkle said. "We're fangs out."

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