Staff Sergeant E. Mercer.
“I read your name on the manifest this morning during the pre-flight brief,” Captain Shaw told me later, when the plane was at altitude and he had the first officer flying and he came back and knelt in the aisle beside my seat, my first-class seat, which I was still sitting in because he had made sure of it.
“Mercer. E. Mercer. I told myself it couldn’t be. There are a lot of Mercers. And then I came out to do my walk-through, and I saw the coin, second platoon, our brigade, and I saw the leg, and I saw a man being told to move to the back of my airplane, and I knew.”
He had to stop for a moment.
Captain Gregory Shaw, fifty-eight years old, thirty years flying, in front of a cabin full of strangers, had to stop and press his lips together and look at the ceiling the way men of his generation do when they will not let themselves come apart in public.
