The Price of Time

by Tim Tigner

Her hypothesis was that he naturally evoked their better angels by using his big brain to see things from their points of view.

I prized adventure over money and prioritized country over self. Patriotism meant more to me than pinning a flag on my lapel. It meant living by a time-honored code of conduct and a consistent set of values. Even when inconvenient. Among people who believed and acted the same. My values hadn’t changed since graduation, but management’s attitude surely had.

You are free to ignore any part of it that you consider questionable. And I’m certainly not going to repeat what I saw. But I’m also not going to lie about an operation on the record, even if that lie is just a lie of omission.”

still lived one day at a time, and that money couldn’t buy the unbeatable feeling of flow they got from rewarding work.

He loved vacations as much as the next guy, but largely for the contrast. If you didn’t have black to make the most of the white, everything was gray.

When your parachute snarled up, there was no time to worry. You spent your last seconds attempting to untangle the spaghetti. Eric had died trying. One second he was tugging parachute cords, the next he wasn’t anything.

As for my survival, I had a one-word explanation. Hooah! I had completed the Army ROTC program at Princeton. That included spending the summer between my junior and senior years at Airborne school in Fort Benning, Georgia. During the first of three weeks, the Black Hats taught me how to fall. During the second, they trained me to fall from fast-moving objects. During the third, I learned how to leap from aircraft and land alive. Of course, each stage stressed surviving the impact without breaking anything required for combat.

The trick was learning to land in a way that transferred momentum through your body and into the ground rather than your organs or bones. This was accomplished by funneling the kinetic energy through a pendulum-like leg swing that planted your heels and stopped your slide. The reason the Black Hats spent three weeks teaching wasn’t to put the right moves in paratroopers’ minds; it was to meld them into their muscles. To make them automatic. To train their student soldiers to reflexively tense and twist and adjust just right whenever and wherever they “hit the wind.”

I’d passed then, and apparently I’d passed now. I did not recall making those moves after my motorcycle hit the guardrail. I did not remember properly positioning myself for each of the five prescribed points of contact. But clearly, my cond...

Most men wear suits to hide their flaws. This guy wore suits to camouflage his perfections.

“Yeah. It looks like the solution to all your problems, the thing that will bring you everlasting happiness. Until you get it. Then your mind adapts and resets, and you find yourself faced with a new and equally compelling set of wants and wishes.”