More important personally, Horner began to understand what mentoring meant in the military, as the newly promoted Major General Taylor took him under his wing. “Bond and Taylor challenged me,” Horner says now. Bond threw Horner into some of the General’s pet projects, which meant that Horner and the General often found themselves on their hands and knees on the floor of the General’s office, building charts that the General could use to brief his four-star boss, General Spike Momyer, at the time the TAC commander.

In young Captain Horner (promoted to major in 1969), Taylor saw a man who would see the problems through to a solution. Horner fought problems the way a dog worries a rag. He plunged into them and let fly. He loved making order out of chaos. When the smoke cleared, the floor would be covered with debris, but there’d also be the glimmers of a solution here and there, which Horner would gather up and present to his boss. During this process, he and Taylor would argue the concepts, push them and pull them, and in so doing Taylor often elevated Horner’s sight picture, got him to aim better at the real target, propelled him toward working the right problem . . . often to stop thinking small. Taylor showed him how to think big.

This was Horner’s first time really working the bureaucracy—an experience not too very different from combat, he quickly realized: a lot of men were gunning for him—not because he was arrogant, but because he wasn’t afraid to stick his neck out and do the work at a pace they could not generate.