Written in his mother’s hand.

 

John.

 

Not him, his father.

 

The letter had been for John Puller Sr. At the time he was a onestar busting his

ass to add more silver to the epaulets. This meant leaving everything else in

his life, including his family, in a distant second place.

 

Puller Sr. would finish his career with a trio of stars. There were only

forty-three of those in the entire United States Army. But his old man wanted

the fourth, which would have put him in the elite company of only nine people on

earth at any given time. And because he never got there, he was a failure, at

least in his eyes.

 

A failure in the mind he used to have.

 

Puller took the letter out and unfolded it.

 

He had never read it. He had found it when he was a little boy, his mother gone

barely six months. His father had left it somewhere in the house at Fort Monroe.

The envelope had been opened, but he had no idea if his father had read the

contents.