In a hanger as long and wide as a football field, a hundred drone pilots sit on ergonomically designed pilot seats, flying predator drones thousand miles away while their counterparts, who get shot at while flying their planes on combat missions, sometimes look down on them as second-rate pilots who never look the enemy in the eye. In Virgin Soldier, Conchor MacGregor, a young Air Force pilot with dual American and Scottish citizenship, is a top drone ace but he dreams of seeing real action as a fighter pilot.

In a Washington Post article, Combat Generation: Drone operators climb on winds of change in the Air Force , author Greg Jaffe discusses the issues facing a US Air Force which is increasingly dependent on predator drones. Like MacGregor, many pilots find their careers affected by the tendency to view their work as not as dangerous as a pilots who are actually in their planes during fighting.

In Virgin Soldier MacGregor jumps at the chance to go to Tirana to train Albanian pilots on how to fly their old, first generation drones. In the process he ends up seeing more action than he expected.