John ‘Sully-John’ Sullivan

… by two this afternoon he really will be blind, just as he kept screaming he was when he and John Sullivan and God knows how many others were medevacked out of Dong Ha Province back in ’70. I’m blind, he was yelling it even as he picked Sullivan up off the …

Willie recalls carrying Sullivan during their evacuation.

“My boyfriend’s real name is John Sullivan,” she said. “Like the fighter. Now tell me the name of your girlfriend.”

Carol gives her boyfriend’s full name as John Sullivan.

He would ask his friend John Sullivan about inside straights at school on Monday. Bobby thought it was poker, but wasn’t completely sure.

Bobby thinks of asking his friend John Sullivan at school.

Bobby felt a stab of jealousy. “Don’t tell me.” Sully-John grinned. “Yeah, man! Seventy names in the hat, seventy at least, and the one that bald old bastard Mr. Coughlin pulled out was John L. Sullivan, Junior, 93 Broad Street. My mother just about weewee’d her pants.” “When do you go?”

Sully-John tells Bobby that the raffle winner was John L. Sullivan, Junior, 93 Broad Street, explicitly linking his full name and nickname. Boxing-pose comparisons elsewhere refer to the boxer.

narrative

embassy in Saigon and almost thirty since a Huey evacked John Sullivan, Willie Shearman, and maybe a dozen others out of Dong Ha Province.

The narrative names Sullivan and Willie’s Vietnam evacuation and calls him Sully-John.