I wait for the next call, and within a few days it comes. I am asked how fast I can get to a clinic, where I can dispense with the last remaining step, a drug test and physical exam. I report to a shabby facility, where I spend several hours sitting in a crowded waiting room for what turns out to be a cursory test of my eyesight and hearing. The staff seem to be unaware which federal agency I am applying to, and I remind them that they'll need a urine sample when they seem ready to dismiss me. The following day, I get a call from a very pleasant woman who tells me there was a "problem" with the physical and explains that the clinic forgot to test my stamina. This is a sensitive issue: screeners have one of the federal government's highest rates of job-related injuries, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the TSA spends more than fifty million dollars a year in disability payments. Since injuries are mainly due to hoisting checked luggage and overstuffed carry-ons, weeding out weaklings from the pool of recruits is a high priority. When I tell the woman that I fear a return trip to the clinic will set the hiring process back another few weeks, she sweetly reassures me. "Don't worry, hon, you won't have to go back. Are you sitting down?"

I dutifully take a seat at the kitchen table.

"Now, lift your arm. Can you bend it?"

This, then, is how I finally become a transportation security officer: sitting alone in my bathrobe in a suburban kitchen, flapping my arms around and hoping that this bizarre pantomime is not an indication of what is to come.

On a Monday morning in September, I travel to a hotel on the outskirts of the airport to be sworn in as a screener.

"This is not like being on the assembly line! It's not like working at the mall!" a tall, ruddy-faced man standing at the front of the room roars at me and the dozens of other new screeners in the hotel banquet room. An assistant to the local federal security director, he is here to induct us into government service. We're groggy after hours spent filling out routine forms, and this fevered peroration is a welcome diversion.

"You are the last line of defense! Your life will literally be in danger!" he continues. The young man sitting next to me is impressed. "Like, this is our boss? He's really a cool guy." For a few moments, we're invited to imagine our importance on the front lines of the war on terror.

But before we can get to the action at the airport, we must undergo what we are promised will be a grueling two-week regimen of ten-hour-a-day classes—a sharp contrast to the ten hours of classroom instruction and twenty to thirty hours of on-the-job training pre-9/11 screeners got from their private employers. The intensive instruction we're facing is one of the many reforms in the Aviation and Transportation Security Act passed by Congress two months after 9/11. The message drummed into us today is that we're entering a boot camp from which only a few lucky aspirants will emerge.