The dawn-drills collapse: 60, 59, face-down, and the swingset-shove

pivotal · 9 Nov YDAU (dawn)

• When: 9 Nov YDAU, dawn drills (the active part ends at 0720h), the morning after the I-Day Eschaton debacle.
• What: In the Star Drills — where Hal runs 41/38/48 and Wayne a 33 — Kahn "gets a 60 and then a 59 and then pitches forward onto the hard surface and lies very still. Tony Nwangi tells people to walk around him." He cannot start the next drill under his own power, but he does not quit: "Even Petropolis Kahn staggers through them, who after Stars had had to be sort of lugged over by Stephan Wagenknecht and Jeff Wax with his Nikes dragging behind him and his head swinging free on his neck and given kind of a swingset-shove to get started." All three go-arounds — and afterward "Kahn makes it through but stays bent over the distress-bucket long after the third go-around, staring into it," still there while everyone else towels off and picks up balls. It is exactly here that the narration pauses for its one direct note of sympathy, the portrait sentence of event 1: Hal feels for Kahn.