One evening, the VC-10 commander, Edward J. Huxtable Jr., watched the sun sink into the ship’s wake, “and it was one of the most beautiful sunsets I had ever seen with the purples, never had I seen such purples, and the dark hues that were in the sky as in an Arizona sunset.” But few of the other veterans on the Fanshaw Bay were paying attention. They had seen a thousand Pacific sunsets, and the spectacle no longer drew their interest. If they looked anywhere on the sea horizon, they looked forward, to the east, toward home. And one of the other VC-10 pilots, standing nearby on the flight
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