Army Flyer, you're right, people make logging time fuzzy. Not sure how the army logs time, on the civvy side it's pretty much a spreadsheet. The big column is total time, all your flights, lighter than air, rotorcraft, glider, airplane, whatever. People have columns for the different categories and classes of aircraft, airplane single engine land, helo, glider, balloon, etc. All of those columns should equal your total time. There will be another set of columns for your position during the flight, PIC, SIC, F/E, Dual Given (CFIing), Dual Recieved (Student). Yes, there are times you can be recieving instruction and still log PIC and folks now seems hung up on ways to log another 10 hours of PIC time but the last time I got any instruction in an aircraft I was rated in was almost 20 years ago and all of those columns in my log book also equal TT. I have a separate column of sim time that doesn't count towards the TT. Finally there are columns for conditions of flight. Night, IFR, Hood, Cross Country, NVG, Aerobatic whatever. These numbers are stand alone and won't add up to anything. I think this is where your question is. If you're flying at night, that's one column. If you're under the hood it doesn't matter much if it's day or night outside but it's still night and you're under the hood so you've got two entries. If you take off at midnight, do five T+Goes, head off X-C, wear a hood for thirty minutes and land at your destination at 2am you could log 2 hours TT, 2 hours night, an hour of X-C and .5 of hood.