When Deacon finally let Gary and me fly together, our first mission was to resupply a small patrol in the jungle. We used off-course navigation to find them, a method that wasn't taught in flight school. Monk had told me about it.

In standard dead-reckoning you corrected a plotted course for wind drift, but you never knew which way to look when you'd flown long enough to be at your target.

The wind-drift correction was a calculation. The actual track you made was off to one side or the other. But which side?

In off-course navigation you don't correct for wind drift. You fly the magnetic course you plotted on the map for the length of time you calculated, and then you know where to look - upwind.

We found our resupply without incident.