Range - David Epstein Page 0,103

guessed, he knew his senior enlisted team member could manage leadership on the ground while administering medical aid. Lesmes could help ready the field hospital for returning patients, and coordinate helicopter pickups from the operations center, adjusting as he listened via radio to his guys on the ground. It was a trade-off, but every option was.

Lesmes went to the team with his “hypothesis,” as he called it—his hunch held lightly. “I wanted them to disprove it,” he told me. He told them he planned to stay at the base to save room for equipment and patients. The helicopter blades were spinning up, moments ticking away in the so-called golden hour, the critical window for saving a severely injured soldier. He told them to talk quickly, and he would consider everything they had to say. A few were quiet. Several objected. Togetherness was their most basic tool, the one they didn’t know could be dropped until someone said to drop it. One of the men said flatly that it was the commanding officer’s job to come along, and he should do his job. Another got angry. A third reflexively suggested that Lesmes was afraid. He told Lesmes that when it was his time, it was his time, so they should just do what they always did. Lesmes was afraid, but not for his life. “If something bad happens, and the officer is not there,” he told me, “think about explaining that to ten families.”

I was sitting with him at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., when he said that. He had been stoic, and then he started crying. “The whole construct is built on that training and that familiarity and that cohesion,” he said. “I totally understand why some guys were upset. It was breaking our standard operating procedure. I mean, my judgment was questioned. But if I go, we might have to go to the rescue site twice.” The objections he got were emotional and philosophical, not tactical. They had changed his mind about a plan before, but not this time. He would stay, and it was time for them to go. The helicopters strained into the air as Lesmes returned to the operations center. “I struggled immensely,” he said. “I could see what was going on, and if something bad were to happen, I could literally watch the rescue helicopter go down.”

The rescue mission, thankfully, was an unqualified success. PJs treated injuries at the explosion site, and seven wounded soldiers had to be loaded into the helicopters. They were packed in like sardines. Several required amputations at the field hospital, but all survived.

When it was over, the senior enlisted man acknowledged it was the right call. Another PJ did not address it for months, and then only to say that he was taken aback that Lesmes had that much trust in them. The soldier who had gotten angry initially remained angry, for a while. Another Bagram PJ I spoke with said, “If I was in that position, I definitely would have said, ‘Yeah, we’re all going.’ It must have been really hard.”

“I don’t know, man,” Lesmes told me. “Sometimes, I still struggle with that decision. Something could’ve gone wrong and then it would be a bad decision. Maybe it was luck. None of the options at the time looked very optimal.”

As we finished talking, I mentioned Weick’s work about wilderness firefighters clinging to their tools. Under pressure, Weick explained, experienced pros regress to what they know best. I suggested to Lesmes that maybe his PJs were just reacting emotionally, with a reflex for the familiar. There must be times when even the sacrosanct tool of togetherness should be dropped, right? “Yeah, mmm-hmm.” He nodded in agreement. It was, of course, easy for me to say. He paused for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, “but everything is built on that.”

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The Challenger managers made mistakes of conformity. They stuck to the usual tools in the face of an unusual challenge. Captain Lesmes dropped a sacred tool, and it worked. Once emotions cooled, several members of his team acknowledged it was the right call. Others never did. Going back over it brought Lesmes to tears. It isn’t exactly the fairy-tale ending to a good decision. Had NASA canceled the launch, Allan McDonald told me that engineers who pushed to abort might have been cast as “Chicken Littles.” Chicken Little doesn’t fare well in the space business. As NASA engineer Mary Shafer once articulated, “Insisting on perfect