Standing on the observation deck of the USS Coral Sea, Petty Officer Third Class Mark Allan thought: If I’m going to stay in the Navy, that’s what I want to do. A handful of years later, Allan was flying low-level strike bombers out of Oceana, Va.

After years of an itinerant lifestyle, Allan calls Dewey Beach home. It’s a relaxed town, he said – it’s a place where you can share the beach with your dog.

Allan grew up in Oxford, a small rural community in southeast Pennsylvania. His father was a sulky racer, traveling the circuit from Ocean City, Md., to Freehold, N.J., and beyond. The meager earnings were barely enough to house and feed his four children, of whom Mark was the oldest.

Though the family was academic, college wasn’t an option for Mark. Instead, he enlisted in the Navy at the end of his senior year in 1975. Three days after he graduated, he left for boot camp in Orlando, Fla.

Navy officials were quick to recognize Allan’s sharp intelligence and assigned him to work as a radar operator and air traffic controller. Watching fighter jets vault off the carrier deck in great clouds of steam, Allan applied to the U.S. Naval Academy for the next four years.

He didn’t get in.

Instead, he took classes whenever he could, attending night and weekend courses in his various ports of call. Meanwhile, he shot up the ladder, reaching the stratosphere of noncommissioned officer ranks. While stationed at Naval Air Station Patuxent in Maryland, he joined the flying club and got his private pilot’s license.

He would be abandoning a promising career in naval surface warfare – “I was actually pretty good at the whole driving ships thing,” he said – but he wanted to fly. He applied to Aviation Officer’s Candidate School.

While serving aboard the USS Stark, Allan’s commanding officer handed him an envelope. It was his acceptance to flight school at Pensacola, Fla.

He arrived in Florida on Super Bowl Sunday, 1985. Flight school breezed by. He graduated first in his class and was selected for an A-6 Intruder squadron in Oceana.

“I thought going fast and blowing things up would be pretty cool,” Allan says in a wry deadpan.

Allan said the A-6 was like a muscle car – big, mean and straightforward. Like most aircraft of its generation, the A-6 was meant to penetrate deep into Soviet airspace and deliver a nuclear bomb via the “high loft” method – the pilot enters into a steep angle of attack, pulls up dramatically and then releases the bomb, sending it on a parabolic arc towards its target.

“It was the first plane on the flight deck capable of delivering a nuclear strike,” he said.

It was a mission Allan planned for – a lot.

“For every one hour of flying,” Allan said, “there were eight to 10 hours of planning.”

He narrowly missed the Gulf War by transferring to a test squadron in California. His exemplary service as an A-6 driver gave him his pick of assignments, and he liked the idea of tearing across China Lake, the Navy’s test strip near the Mojave Desert.

“I knew it would be three years of pure fun,” said Allan.

In California, he got coveted cockpit time with the F/A-18 Hornet, an all-weather fighter and attack jet. If the Intruder was a muscle car, Allan said, the Hornet is a Porsche.

“It looks great, it goes fast and everyone wants it,” he said, grinning.

After his tour at China Lake, priorities changed for Allan. The Navy had decided to retire the A-6, and its replacement, the pricey A-12, was cancelled. While the Navy would have transitioned him into a different aircraft, Allan’s marriage was failing, and he felt the need to spend more time with his two daughters.

He turned in his wings.

“It had been a great 25-year career,” he said, “but I wanted to watch my kids grow up.”

He walked away from a lucrative future, he said, but he can only look back with gratitude.

“It wasn’t the end I had planned on,” he said, “but the Navy had given me a career I could only ever have dreamed of. I miss it every day.”

After careers in telecommunications and aerospace engineering, Allan is pursuing his second dream – owning and managing a NASCAR team. Sponsors are coming together, he said, and he hopes his driver will hit the circuit by 2011.

But the skies still tug at his heart, Allan said. Recently, while picking up a rental truck in Marcus Hook, Pa., Allan spotted a familiar fuselage languishing in a junkyard. It was a Russian-built MiG-17. After recovering from the initial shock – MiG-17s were common adversaries in Vietnam, and certainly meant trouble for an A-6 pilot – he asked the owner if it still worked. It did, the owner said, and it could be Allan’s for 20 grand.

Allan sighed. He has his NASCAR team, he said, which is enough of a financial commitment.

“But if not…” Allan said, and smiled.