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Commander Mike ‘Viper’ Metcalf never spoke about his time in Vietnam. He couldn’t. The horrors that he witnessed and experienced over there were something that he never wanted anyone else to experience. But more than that, he couldn’t share it with anyone without risking his future.
Viper loved his wife, Linda, she was everything to him, but the problem was that he loved someone else as well. He loved the wrong time of someone and then he watched it happen. He watched as the person he had started to love fought like hell in a dogfight. He watched as his best friend, the man with a wife and son at home, kept fighting to save everyone else. He watched as the bullets rained on his plane like stars falling from the sky. He watched as Duke kept going to get another three men out despite the fact that he was wounded and his plane was just fit enough to make it back to the carrier.
He could hear the warning bell in his own plane as he fought tooth and nail to make sure that everyone who could, would make it home. The warning bell was a distant noise though, shut out by the fear, the heartbreak, and the thundering of the bullets coming from the enemy planes.
Viper shot awake from where he had fallen asleep next to his son’s bed. The flat spin that Maverick had ended up in, it had brought back memories of his wingman, and now he was trapped in a cycle of nightmares where he was either losing his wingman or he was watching his son die. He had spent the better part of the last two days sitting here, waiting for Maverick to wake, or for news on Goose.
He hated it, the waiting. It was just like that day in Vietnam. He had eventually made it back to the carrier. His plane had been shot to hell, he had been battered inside it, but all he could do when he landed was collapse on the deck and sit there. It took hours before anyone convinced him to go back inside, and even then, it was only because someone had mentioned little Pete, mentioned how it was a shame that the boy had lost his dad like that.
“Pops?” The voice that asked that was hoarse with lack of use over the past forty eight hours, but it was like music to his ears. It was what he needed to hear to beat the memories out for just a while.
“I’m here, Pete, you’re okay, Goose is going to be okay.” Viper had plenty of experience with Pete waking up scared. He knew that his boy always worried about everyone else first. He had always been that way, ever since his mumma had died.
“I thought I saw dad. There was this moment where I was so excited to see him, and then I realised that I would be leaving you and mum, and I didn’t really want to go with him. I can’t even remember him to miss him,” Pete rambled as the tears started to fall. For the first time in years, his boy was letting him see his emotions.
“What if, when we get you out of here, I tell you all about Duke, tell you about how much of a hero he was,” Viper offered as he pulled Pete into a tight hug. It was all he could do; he couldn’t stop the hurt, but he could soothe the pain.
“Please.” The single word from the son of the man he had cared too much for, who his last memory of was him falling from the sky like stars, was all it took for him to decide to share the memories even if they hurt.