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"Got a story to go with that? One you don't mind telling."

I thought for a moment or two, watching the flames dance. "Okay, here's one. I was attached to a unit of Marine Raiders for a while, in Kandahar. I was their ride. I’d insert them, and then depending on the mission, either wait at a FARP or go into a terrain-masking holding pattern." I held up a hand to forestall his question. "Forward Arming and Refueling Point. Basically a temporary resupply waystation far enough from the EZ that enemy radar can't detect us, but close enough to reach the EZ quickly when we're needed. This mission was supposed to be a quick snatch-and-grab of an enemy HVT." He didn't look confused by that acronym, so I kept going. "Since the guys were only supposed to be on the ground for, shit, the plan was thirty minutes or fewer. Insert, infil, make the grab, exfil, extract. Intel said it should have been a soft target, meaning not a lot of resistance, and definitely no ground-to-air weaponry. Well, someone in the so-called intelligence community fucked the monkey on the intel." I just couldn’t stop myself from making the obligatory dig, but my heart really wasn't in it—those guys were pros, and I had a shit-ton of respect for them; the fault was likely elsewhere, not the intel folks. "I dropped them no problem and started my orbit. I was flying lower than snake shit, making big circles, keeping a mountain between me and the op. To this day, I can't explain what happened. There were no tones, no warning. I absolutely should not have seen that fucking missile. I mean, the fuckers must have just gotten lucky. I was passing within feet of the mountainside in places, so close my blades were just about giving the trees a haircut. I was banking hard when I got this…feeling. Just a quiet little niggle in my gut that was telling me I had to pull up. Pulling up was risky—if I popped up too far, I risked getting painted by enemy radar, and then the game was up; they'd know they had a fox in the henhouse. But that feeling went from quiet to loud real fuckin' fast, so I just listened. I yanked the stick back and laid on the speed, and we jumped up just in time for a SAM to slice right fucking under us. Like, the thing damn near left paint on our belly. That was a solid eight on the pucker scale."

"How could you have known?" Jax asked.

I shrugged. "No clue. I didn't see anything, and there wasn’t time for our radar to even pick up the missile. That's my point. It was just a feeling. Always listen to your gut."

"What was your callsign?"

I sighed. "Callsigns and nicknames aren't given out on the basis of what sounds cool. You earn your callsign, usually for something stupid or embarrassing. Or, in my case, because of my name and initials."

Jax looked up and away, thinking. "TT?"

I nodded. "Yup. Obviously, the first time someone sees my name in writing, they make the obvious assumption—that it's pronounced 'tee', as in the golf tee, or the hot beverage, mainly because when Mom and Dad put my name on the birth certificate, they forgot to add the accent over the E." I sighed. “Throughout high school and ROTC, everyone just called me Tee, basically just saying my fucking name wrong and I hated it. So then when I got my first berth, folks started calling me TT, as in my initials, and as in my name repeated twice, but wrongly, of course—works a lot of ways, I guess, TT. I hated that even more, especially when constant repetition shortened it into ‘Teety’, as in titty.”

Jax snickered, tried to cover it, and then gave up and burst into cackles. "Oh, shit. No! That's terrible!"

"I kicked up an unholy fuss about that. It's sexist, it's bullshit, blah blah blah. So then some asshole, I still don’t know who, decided to try Teabag."

"That's…not better."

"No, it isn't. But by then I had a reputation as one of the best helo pilots around.” I grinned. "I earned the callsign I used for the rest of my career by doing a dumb trick. I had my buddy Clover tie a tea bag to my strut, and I hovered over a mug full of water until I dipped the bag into it."

"Fuck you. Bullshit."

"There's a video out there somewhere. I'll see if I can find it someday. But that's a true story, and it's how Teabag turned into Bagger."

“Bagger? Your callsign was Bagger?"

"Yup."

"That's actually kinda cool."

"It was as good as I was gonna get, and it was sure as hell better than fucking Titty."

"It had to have been kinda funny, though. Hearing someone say, 'come in, Titty."

"Maybe a little, now, in retrospect. I didn't find it funny at the time." I shook my head, eyes rolling. "I was the only one who didn't find it funny, though."

"What was the worst callsign you ever heard?"

I thought about it. "Um? Chode."

Jax spluttered, cackled, and then gave me an incredulous look. "No. No fucking way. I refuse to believe that was a real, actual callsign.”

"Oh, it was real, alright. His name was Donny Cho. So, when you're doing roll call alphabetically by last name and first initial, what do you get?"

"Cho, D.," Jax answered. "Oh. I see."

"Yup. Cho…Dee gets shortened to Chodey, like Jodie but with a chuh sound, and then eventually it was Chode. There was a Cho Tee, as in Tony Cho, so they had to specify, Cho Tee or Cho Dee."

"I bet he loved that."

I laughed. "He did, actually. He thought it was fucking hysterical, but then he was the class clown type, so it worked for him. He was one of those people with zero capacity for embarrassment if it got a laugh."

"I can see it working, in that case."

"There ended up being a crackdown on problematic callsigns, and that definitely would have been nixed, but he'd moved on to the private sector by then."