On the last day of his long, troubled life, Grover Cleveland Chapman packed a black duffel bag, washed out his coffee cup, put it in the dish rack and fetched his Smith & Wesson.

He threw away his favorite slippers and left his house key on his bedside table in the two-bedroom yellow bungalow he shared with his daughter, tucked in an aging neighborhood full of 1950s starter homes a few miles from downtown Greenville.

Harriett Chapman called as she always did on her morning break at the Walmart deli, checking on her 89-year-old dad. Everything is fine, he told her.

As he shuffled down the steps that spring morning in 2008, Grover Chapman carried the latest letter denying him treatment at the Veterans Affairs clinic in Greenville, directing him instead to take a 200-mile round trip to the VA hospital in Columbia. This time it was about his prostate cancer, though Chapman had received plenty of notices just like it turning him down for help with his jumpiness and frayed nerves. He folded this letter neatly into the bag beside his bottles of medicine and settled into a taxi.

In a few weeks, candidate Barack Obama would take note of what Chapman would do upon arriving at the clinic this last time, calling it an indictment of society's treatment of disabled veterans.

And maybe that's what it was. Or maybe Chapman just didn't want his daughter to have to come home and find him.

Perhaps this was simply an old man choosing when, where and how to close a life that had turned out, like so many, a good bit messier than he would have liked.

Before heading to the clinic, Chapman had one stop to make. He directed the cabbie to Dewey's Pawn Shop.

His .38-caliber revolver was out of bullets.

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The Army made Chapman a sharpshooter in the late 1930s and sent him to the Panama Canal. He spent another two years in the Navy at the end of World War II, manning machine guns on Liberty Ships, merchant marine vessels that moved supplies and men around the world. More than 200 of the 2,700 Liberty Ships were sunk by the Japanese and Germans.

Long into his old age, Chapman spent hours telling military psychiatrists about seeing men buried at sea and how he couldn't stand the thought of having to kill another person. He reported frequent nightmares and flashbacks, according to his military psychiatry records given to The Associated Press by his family.

Yet it's unclear how much action Chapman really saw or whether he ever took a life.