Watching Fred in action, I was struck not by the grandness of the enterprise, but by the tedium and the minutiae necessary to coordinate the pilots, the crewmen, the forklift operators, the engineers, and the drivers. The orchestration of every movement consumed him—any lapse in the assembly line could spell disaster. “If we don’t get the details right,” he observed to me when a mix-up brought the exercise to a halt, “people are going to die.”
