Daylight

Chapter 39

Puller had just finished a six-mile run at Quantico, keeping pace with a couple of long-legged Marine recruits still in their teens. He returned to his “new” apartment, since the other one was still a crime scene, took a shower, and was about to put on civilian clothes when his phone buzzed.

It was a text from his brother.

Tonight twenty hundred, ANC, Remember the Maine. Salt. Four bars and a star.

Anyone not knowing the brothers, or the military in general, would be hard-pressed to decipher this message. But it made perfect sense to Puller, up to a point.

He checked his watch. He would have just enough time because he needed to make a stop first. He went to his closet and pulled out his set of dress blues. It was for the meeting tonight, though it wasn’t exactly required. But it was also for where he was going right now.

For a long time the Army had stuck with dress greens and dress whites. But now blue was the thing. It was the color of America’s two greatest military home-turf victories. The bluecoats against the redcoats in the Revolutionary War. And the Union blue against the Confederate gray in the Civil War.

Why mess with success?

He checked his row of ribbons to make sure they were all where they were supposed to be — the military allowed no margin for error there — picked up his dress cap and headed out after allowing AWOL to give him the once-over and purr his approval.

He drove to the VA hospital and was escorted to the memory care unit. Along the way he saw and saluted soldiers sitting in wheelchairs, lying on gurneys, and roaming the halls using walkers. They had all served their country well and honorably. Now they were here, the last deployment of their careers: a nursing home provided by Uncle Sam.

The escort left him, and Puller tapped on the door to the room. He waited for a moment and then entered.

The space was small, and held very few things, chief among them a bed with an old man in it. That old man was Puller’s father and namesake. John Puller Sr.

It used to be that his father, upon seeing Puller, would bark out, “XO, what are you doing here?”

Puller was not his father’s executive officer, or XO, but he had played along with it because the doctors said it was probably for the best.

That was then.

That was no longer the case. Now was very different from then.

His father lay curled in the bed. Once six three, he had been robbed of several inches by age and bad health. He was bald except for small pockets of hair the color of clouds strewn around his scalp. His clothes these days were not combat fatigues or dress blues. They were hospital scrub pants and a white T-shirt, where curly white chest hair poked out from the front.

Puller came around to the side of the bed so he could face his father. He stood there flagpole straight and looked down at the man who had helped create him, giving him half his DNA and other attributes, some good, some not so good.

“Reporting in, sir,” said Puller, a bit half-heartedly. He did not expect an answer. The last five times he had come to visit his father, the man had never even woken up.

Alzheimer’s was the worst thing that could happen to a person, Puller thought. It eventually killed you, like other bad diseases. But before it did that, it took away the one thing that made a person a person, leaving their physical husk reasonably intact. And that wasn’t much of a comfort, not for the family and friends. It just made one wonder how a person could look normal, and yet no longer be anywhere close to who they had been.

To his surprise, his father stirred. The eyes blinked open for a moment before closing again. Puller thought that would be the end of it. But the eyes came open a second time and stayed that way.

Puller leaned down and decided to forego the subterfuge. “Dad?”

“Bobby?” he said gruffly.

His father now often got the brothers mixed up.

Puller Senior had endured his oldest son going to military prison for a crime that he didn’t commit. He had seen Robert Puller freed and fully exonerated. He had also endured learning what had happened to his wife, Puller’s mother, who had vanished decades before. That had been the hardest for the old man, Puller knew. Nothing could be worse than that. But at least he had closure on that.

At least we all have closure.

Puller glanced at his father’s still-broad shoulders and visualized seeing the three stars on them. There should have been a fourth star, but politics had gotten in the way of that. And Puller knew there wasn’t a four-star in the Army who felt Fighting John Puller didn’t deserve that last bit of shiny career acknowledgment. But it wasn’t to be. Just like the Medal of Honor wasn’t to be, another sacrifice to politics over merit. But his old man was a legend, and legends didn’t need stars or medals. They lived on in the thoughts and memories and myths of everybody who came after them.

“It’s Junior, sir. Not Bobby.”

His father straightened in the bed, sat up against the pillow, and looked around at probably the last room he would occupy on earth. By his expression, he didn’t seem to recognize it at all. He lay back, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then turned his head to the side and stared at his youngest son.

“You in the Army, soldier?”

“Yes sir. Chief warrant officer.”

“What are those?”

Puller’s heart sank because his old man was pointing at his rows of ribbons. Puller had been a combat stud. He had earned every major wartime commendation the Army offered, several more than once. And with all that, his rows of “guts and glory” would have paled in comparison to his father’s, whose commendations had run to a dozen horizontal rows. They could have made a blanket out of them. But then again what did you expect from someone who had tried to enlist to fight in a war while in his sixties?

“Just something that came with the suit,” replied Puller.

“They’re nice,” said his father.

“Yeah, thanks. I think so, too.”

“Who are you again?”

“I work here. Anything you need?”

“Better chow. The crap they serve here I wouldn’t feed to a damn dog, that is if I had one. Do I have a dog?”

“No sir.”

“Well, the food still sucks.”

“Yes sir, I’ll check on that.”

“I don’t know how I even got here. I was at work and now I’m here.”

“Yes sir. I think it was complicated.”

“And they put this here and I have no idea who she even is.”

Puller glanced at the framed photo of his mother, Jackie.

“You know her name, son?” asked his father.

“I... No.” Puller didn’t know what his father’s reaction might be if he mentioned his mother’s name.

“Doesn’t seem right, putting a strange woman’s picture in here. My wife might get angry.”

“Do you remember your wife?”

“What?”

“Your wife?”

His father turned the photo on its face and settled back against his pillow.

Puller glanced at the window and hurriedly changed the subject. “Your bird still around? Outside the window. There was a nest last time.”

His father looked at him blankly. “Bird?”

“Yes, I... Do you need anything, sir?”

His father stared more intently at him. “You look familiar. You remind me of somebody.”

Puller’s gut clenched. “Is that right, sir? Who might that be?”

“Guy I went to school with, least I think. Didn’t like him very much. Can’t recall the name of the place right now.”

“You went to West Point.”

His father looked confused. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure, sir,” said Puller quietly.

“Yeah?”

“You did very well there. You became quite the leader of men.”

His father just grunted at this.

Fighting John Puller had never lost a battle. He had taken enormous risks, thrown out the Army playbook when it suited him, demanded everything from his men and given even more of himself. He pissed his superiors off beyond belief, and then handed them one improbable victory after another to take credit for. There were two generations of warriors in this country who would fling curses at the mere mention of the name “Fighting John Puller,” and those who would go anywhere he would lead them, convinced of victory because of the man at the helm.

And the two groups would be one and the same.

“The men respected you, sir. We... we all do.”

Another grunt was the response to this. And then his father curled up and fell back asleep while his son was standing at attention next to him.

Puller would take the father he remembered, the screamer, petty and vindictive at times, relentlessly pushing his sons when he was home, which was almost never, the iron man of the Army, but also the man of smiles and encouragement and moments of pride in his sons, over this disoriented shell of a man.

Puller covered up his father with a blanket and then marched out with his heart split right in half. But with his face unblemished by tears, his spine still straight, and his focus back on the mission at hand. Coming to grips with the fact of his rapidly failing father was the only enemy John Puller had ever been afraid to face.