And then, on his own egress, with his tanks near dry and the last of the guns finding him, Iceman took the hit he'd been spending the whole fight to keep off everybody else.
He punched out into North Vietnamese hands. And he disappeared into Hỏa Lò Prison, the place the men inside it called the Hanoi Hilton.
For five years.
The general let that sit.
Then he said the part that took the legs out from under the room.
"Five years," he said. "They had five years to make him break, and they tried every day of it. And the men who were in there with him will tell you to your face that he never gave them anything but his name and that flat, cold voice. They called him Iceman in that prison, too. Different reason. Same man."
He looked at the booth, at the thin old hand wrapped around a cooling cup of coffee, and his own voice finally broke all the way through.
"When they finally came home in '73, he walked off that airplane, and he never told a soul what he did out there. Not once in 50 years. That's why you think it's a figure of speech, Captain. That's why you think it's not a real person. Because the real person never once asked you to know."
And that should have been enough. It would have been enough.
But the general wasn't finished. And what he said next is the thing that the people in that bar still can't talk about without going quiet.
He turned back to Mercer, slow, and he looked at the kid the way you look at something you're about to break open.
"What's your name, son?" he asked. "Your whole name."
The kid's mouth was dry. "Mercer, sir. Captain Daniel Mercer."
Something crossed the general's face. Recognition. And then a kind of grief. And then something close to awe.
"Mercer?" he repeated. "You wouldn't happen to be kin to a Phantom driver named Dale Mercer? Flight lead. Shot down in the A Shau, spring of '68."