A large force exercise is a lot like playing defense in a high-stakes soccer game, in three dimensions, at four hundred miles per hour and thousands of feet in the air. I was on the “good guys” side, and our job was to protect the base, “our goal.” We did this by “shooting” down the “bad guys” aircraft before they could get close enough to release their simulated bombs and strike our base. I understood my role, but my brain was having a hard time keeping up with the combination of complex tasks that, until then, I’d only read about and performed in a simulator. At any given moment, I had to
...more
