Ready to Kill; AH-1 Super Cobra pilot Katie Horner has blasted the enemy with missiles and a three-barrel 20mm turreted cannon. Being a woman hasn't made her any less lethal.

THE SCOWLING MAN DECLARED IT LIKE AN ORDER: "YOU DON'T FLY THIS."

He was in his 40s, a civilian. With his knitted brow and jutting jaw, Marine Capt. Katie Horner recalls, the man seemed half perplexed, half ticked off. About what, exactly, Horner wasn't sure at first. Looking back on it now a few years later, she remembers he was so insistent that passersby began to glance at him. The woman with him was tugging his arm.

Horner was a first lieutenant at the time, baking in the sun at an air show next to one of the Marine Corps' light attack helicopters, both she and the AH-1…