We could lift off from the KOP and all be dead in minutes. I don’t have to go on this mission, I don’t even have to be in this valley. Right now I have everything—my life, my safety, my friends and family back home—and I might be allowed one moment of regret before those things are taken from me. One moment of crazy downward acceleration in a Chinook; one moment of dirt unzipping toward me faster than I can get out of its way. “The quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity,” as Melville called it; the last impossible phase shift from being a person to being nothing at all.
