He'd sit in the same booth with his friend Sal, a stooped man with a VMFA ball cap of his own and hands that shook a little now. And the two of them would talk low, the way men talk when the stories are too heavy to say at full volume.
Nobody bothered them. They were just two old guys in the corner. Furniture, almost. That was how the old man liked it.
The young Marine's name was Mercer. Captain. An F-35B pilot, sharp as anybody who'd ever come through the schoolhouse, and twice as sure of it.
He wasn't a bad man. That's the thing people get wrong about a night like this. They want the loud one to be a villain. And he wasn't.
He was 28 years old and the best he'd ever been at anything, surrounded by people who told him so. And somewhere along the way, being good had curdled into being certain.
He'd noticed the two old men in the corner the way you notice a chair. And when his buddies started ribbing him about respecting his elders, he decided to make a show of it.
He walked over with that grin, the one that had always worked, and he started in.
Asked the old man if he'd ever fired a weapon. Asked if the hat was real. Asked, with the whole bar half watching now, whether the old man even knew what the patch on his own cap meant.
Sal's jaw tightened.
The old man just watched him. Patient, unbothered. The way you watch weather.
You have to understand what the old man was sitting on while the kid talked. Because the kid didn't know. None of them knew.
They saw a frail man in a faded hat, and they filled in the rest the way people always do. Small life, small story, nothing under the surface.
But the patch on that cap was the rattlesnake of VMFA-323, the Death Rattlers.
And the man wearing it had flown the F-4B Phantom off the matting at Chu Lai when most of these kids' grandfathers were still in grade school.