"Sit down, son. You've got your grandfather's face. Let me look at it a while."
And the kid sat.
And the two of them talked low in that corner booth for the rest of the night, the way men talk when the story is finally light enough to say out loud. While a major general wiped his eyes, and the best young aviators in the Marine Corps stood around them in a loose, silent ring, not one of them able to speak.
The old man came back to that bar the next spring, and the spring after that, in the same faded cap. But it was never the same again. And that was the point.
Now, when the WTI students came through, somebody always knew. Somebody always leaned over to the new kid, nodded toward the corner, and said, "Look. That's him. That's the real one."
And the loud ones got quiet, and the quiet ones got quieter. And one by one, over the years, they'd find an excuse to walk past that booth, and pause, and say, "Sir," and mean it with everything they had.
Captain Daniel Mercer flew his whole career on it.
He named it in his own gun lectures, years later, when he was teaching the next ones. Not the call sign. The lesson.
He'd tell a room full of cocky young aviators that the man with the least to prove is almost always the one you should be most afraid of underestimating. That the loudest man in the room has never once been the strongest. That somewhere out there, right now, is a frail old man in a faded hat who flew through fire for a stranger, then spent 50 years letting the world think he was nobody.
"Be quiet," he'd tell them. "Be humble. And when it's your turn, when the whole world is screaming and the fuel is gone and everything in you says run, be Iceman about it."
The loud ones get the room. The steady ones get the legend.
Hold the line.