New Job.(The Talk of the Town)

The other day, Ralph Dayton was standing in the middle of his living room in East Hampton, in jeans and hiking boots, packing for Anbar Province, in Iraq. For the next month, he will be embedded with the Marines as a photographer for the East Hampton Star. He's paying for the trip himself; he will use a laptop and a portable satellite transmitter to send, from the desert, images of the war to a paper whose front page recently bore the headlines "FAKE COP WASN'T FUNNY" and "OFFICIALS MUST RETHINK THE ICE RINK." He may write dispatches, too--"I'm taking it one step at a time," he said. As of that morning, he'd never published a photograph.

Dayton, who is forty-three, is tall and bald, with watery blue eyes. He is named for another Ralph Dayton, a shoemaker born in 1588, in Kent, England. (Many Dayton descendants live in the area.) He attended East Hampton High School. His father was a lawyer, his grandfather a farmer. "Growing up here was pretty special," he said. "Not like it is today. There was none of this materialism. When I was fourteen, I got a job as a beachboy, sweeping out cabanas." He went to law school, and tried practicing law but hated it, so, like many of his townie ancestors, he bought a place in Sagaponack and grew vegetables. The eventual bounty was real estate: he sold the farm and used the income to buy land in the North Carolina blacklands, where he planted cotton, among other things, and was happy.

Dayton's interest in the military began, he explained, during the early days of the Iraq war, when he met an off-duty Navy Black Hawk pilot during a surfing trip in Costa Rica. The pilot was part of a squadron that inserted and extracted Navy SEALs from Iraq. "I told him where my farm was, and he said, 'We fly over that area all the time. Give me the coordinates.' " A few days later, Dayton says, a group of helicopters landed on his farm; from then on, about once a week, he let them practice their touch-and-go drills there. (During a nighttime exercise, he once pretended to be a ...