“I am serious,” the young man said as he moved onto the stool beside Richard. His name was Marcus. “This is not exactly the VFW hall. You look a little lost, Pops.”
Richard finally turned his head. His pale blue eyes examined the younger man with a weariness extending deeper than age or bone. They were eyes that had seen too much sunlight and far too much darkness.
He offered a small, noncommittal shrug.
“I am only having a drink.”
Marcus’s friends laughed from their booth. Their unofficial leader was bored, slightly intoxicated, and had selected a target for his amusement.
Marcus’s attention moved toward the jacket draped across the back of Richard’s stool. It was an old field jacket of the kind commonly found inside military-surplus stores. Its fabric had faded, the seams were worn, and one sleeve carried a patch so frayed that its original design was nearly impossible to distinguish.
The patch appeared to contain a dark circular shape surrounding what might once have been a stylized skull or winged creature. Most of its threads barely remained attached to the fabric.
Marcus pointed toward it with a smirk.
“What is that supposed to be? Did you pick it up at a flea market to impress people?”
Richard’s expression did not change. He reached over and pulled the jacket closer, a simple gesture of quiet possession.
“It is only an old patch.”
That was the wrong answer for men like Marcus.
He and his teammates had sacrificed for the insignia they wore, including symbols that were never officially acknowledged. The possibility that someone might falsely claim such history was deeply offensive to them.
Even the suspicion of stolen valor, initially raised as a joke, acted like a spark dropped onto dry grass. The atmosphere changed from casual mockery into something considerably harder.