Authors: Stephen Hunter
This pain was stunning and pointed but he knew he could beat it. He’d had worse pain than this, plenty of times. This was nothing. He snorted, trying to get out of the ’Nam, and made himself concentrate on old Jack Payne and the happy glint in his pig eyes as he pulled the trigger.
He felt himself slipping into numbness and stupidity. He hated himself for that moment of utter strangeness when he’d been shot.
Gun-simple fool. He’d been easy for them because he wanted Solaratov so bad, that was it. That was the best trick, how they played on what he wanted. These Agency fucks had somehow found out about him and
Donny and how they got nailed by a Nailer coming over the crest, and they used it on him like a club, used his most private thing. Agency hoods, working on something big and dark and complicated, meant to turn on his stupidity and his vulnerability and his need.
Now, I got to stop the blood or I die. He looked about him. On the seat was a bag that said Dunkin’ Donuts. He reached in, pulled out a wad of waxy paper. He tightened it into a ball and stuffed it into the entrance wound, the one that was bleeding so badly.
There. Wasn’t much, but it was what he had.
He knew exactly where he was going, if he could only stay smart enough to get there.
He’d studied it, after all. There was only one escape route. Now, he had only one problem and that was the fact that he was dying.
Or was he? Shouldn’t he be dead by now? The first bullet had gone right through him, for some crazy reason, and he suspected that it was a ball round, overpenetrative, it had missed major body structures, taken out no arteries, whatever. As for the shoulder hit, that part of his body had gone to numbness, but there wasn’t much blood and he had a sense, maybe illusory, it didn’t matter, that no bone had been broken. So on he drove, by this time calmed down and no longer roaring. But he had to dump the car, that was the thing. The car was death.
He drove toward water.
In water there was safety.
“Attention all, units, we have a definite confirm, we have Government Interagency motorpool car, a beige eighty-eight Ford Taurus, plate number Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima, that’s Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima. Suspect is armed and dangerous, a white male, about forty, wounded but considered dangerous, and an early ID for the name Robert Lee Swagger, I say
again, all units, he’s armed and dangerous, approach with caution.”
Oh, shit, he thought.
But Bob had seen the water.
He rolled off the road, raising a cloud of dust behind him, slewing through weeds and mulch. Suddenly it was before him, the vast band of blue-black Mississippi, a sinewy, bending thing. He had no real idea of what he was doing because of blood loss. And of course the rage which was making him insane. He had no sense of making a decision. The car just surged ahead and he felt a sense of liberation, of release, similar in fact to the one he’d felt as he blew through the window, and then suddenly there were bubbles and blackness all around him, pulling at him. In the pocket of the cab, the water line rose as the car sank. He rose with it, until his head struck the ceiling. He felt the torrent blasting through the car’s open windows as he sank, and he knew he’d die now, trapped beneath the surface.
But again his rage helped and it released a last pump of energy and adrenaline, and with half a body and the thrust of his legs, he managed to get the door open. He was almost born again. The water was warm and green now and he rose toward sunlight, and then suddenly tasted the air. The plunge off a dock had carried the car maybe fifteen feet out; overhead a helicopter made a sweep of the river, the way the Hueys had buzzed the Perfume during Tet. But it was far off and couldn’t see him.
He flipped to his back, and propelled himself toward shore. Drifting, he eventually found himself among green reeds weaving in the current. Barges plied the water a half-mile or so away, but the river was so wide here it looked to be a placid lake. Bob waded woozily, his hair plastered against his scalp, his wet shirt heavy against his skin, his body drugged with fatigue. He
couldn’t believe he was still alive and able to move. It seemed a miracle.
He found a rotting log floating in the weeds. If he stayed there he’d die or get caught and he knew if he got caught, he couldn’t kill them all, kill Payne and the colonel—and kill Solaratov, who made it all possible. If it was Solaratov. And if it wasn’t, he’d kill whoever it was. That’s what he wanted.
Bob got his belt off, stopping momentarily to discover with surprise the gun he’d taken jammed into his waist. Thank God it was stainless steel and probably wouldn’t rust. As for the bullets, would they corrode? He didn’t know. What choice did he have? He slid it to his jean pocket, a tight fit that would hold good. Then he buckled the belt around the log and wrapped his arm through it, and pushed off. With surprising swiftness, the log carried him into the center of the river, and the current picked him up. But he felt amazingly good. Now and then a chopper buzzed by but he wasn’t visible against the log and when darkness came, he swore at the flashing lights here and there along the shore. But Bob just let the current carry him along through the afternoon and the night, and when the dawn broke, he was right where he wanted to be. He was in the jungle.
The lead editorials mourned the passing of the great man, of course, but the off-leads quickly got to the matter of blame.
And so he returns, ran the piece in the Washington Post the next day, the seedy little man with the grudge and the rifle
.
The grudge does not make him special; only the .38 caliber rifle does. Like a figure from our darkest, most atavistic nightmares, he returns, and writes himself into history. If, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has alleged, the perpetrator of yesterday’s shooting tragedy in New Orleans turns out to be Bob Lee Swagger, the Vietnam War hero fallen on
hard times and embittered because his country would not award him the Congressional Medal of Honor he felt he deserved, or if he turns out to be another man with vainglorious notions of what he deserves but could not get, it really doesn’t matter. What matters—what has mattered since 1963—is that in this country alone history can be written with firearms precisely because firearms are available; small men can become, momentarily and delusionarily, big men, because firearms are available. In the case of Lee Harvey Oswald it was a cheap Italian war surplus rifle. In the case of yesterday’s tragedy, it was a high-powered American sporting firearm, manufactured by Remington. Again, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that guns have no other purpose but to kill, and that they kill so frequently has begun to erode the illusion of the “American sportsman.” Isn’t it time for everybody, in the terrifying wake of another bloody American tragedy, a
typical
American tragedy, involving guns and dreams that would not come true, to begin to work toward the day when only policemen and soldiers and a few forest rangers have guns?
The
New York Times
, by contrast, took a more geopolitical view:
The terrifying events in New Orleans yesterday merely reconfirm that as a nation we have not yet recovered entirely from the great cataclysm that was the Vietnam War, no matter our nearly bloodless victory over Saddam Hussein last year. A veteran of Vietnam, much
decorated and held in great esteem by his peers, perhaps propelled into bitterness by the glory of the recent battle in distinction to the lack of glory in his own, evidently descended in hatred to the point where he could commit a terrible act, and thereby blaspheme his own well-established heroism and the cause he fought so valiantly for 20 years ago. It is to be hoped that Robert Lee Swagger, the Marine gunnery sergeant and champion sniper who yesterday apparently achieved his 88th kill, may be captured alive, his psyche examined, the seeds of his violence exhumed. The first interest here must be justice. If Sergeant Swagger is indeed guilty of this crime, he must be punished. But we hope that the punishment is tempered with mercy. Like few other men, Sergeant Swagger was a product of his times. The wounds from which he has bled internally over the past two decades were wounds inflicted by his own country and its vast and careless disinterest in his struggles and the struggles of the men with whom he served. That is why, although he is not a victim, he is certainly a tragedy. When he is apprehended—if he is not already dead, as some law enforcement officers have conjectured, given the gravity of his wounds—perhaps these issues will be answered; but perhaps they will not. And perhaps finally, the largest perhaps of them all will be if Bob Lee Swagger comes at last to have some peace himself. When that happens, perhaps we as a nation can also have some peace, when we at last accept the evil of our enterprise in Vietnam, and the squalor of our position in the world as we
attempt to impose our way on other nations. Once again, our way, the “American way,” has been shown to be the way of death.
The Baltimore
Evening Sun
wondered:
Who needs a long-range assault rifle capable of shooting a man dead at over 400 yards? Certainly not the thousands of children who perish accidentally at the hands of such militaristic-styled guns each year nor the thousands more innocent citizens killed by such multi-shot long-range guns when carried by drug dealers on our city’s streets. Nor do the innocent animals slaughtered by such weapons in our nation’s forests. Only the powerful gun lobby, drug dealers, the demented men who kill animals for pleasure … and assassins, as yesterday’s tragedy in New Orleans proved, need such a gun. Congress should act immediately to ban telescopic-powered long-range multi-shot assault rifles. That way, we can give life a chance.
In fact, it was not the murdered man’s face that appeared on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek;
it was Bob’s. In an instant, he had become a world celebrity, by virtue first of the killing and second of the miraculous escape, and third for what he represented: the Dixie gun nut with all that trigger time in the ’Nam, gone off on his own twisted route. He was Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray and Byron De La Beckwith all squashed into one mythic figure, the sullen white trash, yankee-hatin’ shooter, a character out of Faulkner, a Flem Snopes with a rifle.
The case had been swiftly developed by the FBI;
Nick Memphis’s visual ID of the suspect minutes after the shot had been fired only hastened matters by an hour or so, and the media and police computer networks were far faster and more sophisticated than they’d been in 1963.
The rifle, for example, was quickly tracked by serial number to the Naval Post Exchange system, where it was identified as having been purchased in 1975 by an officer in the Marine Marksmanship Unit for presentation as a retirement present to Bob Lee Swagger, Gny. Sgt., USMG. Bob’s signature upon a receipt was uncovered. It followed quickly that the new barrel, a Hart stainless steel model, had been installed by a custom gunsmith in Little Rock named Don Frank; Frank had the serial number in his records, and verified that the job had been done in 1982 for Bob Lee Swagger.
With that information in hand by eight
P.M
., agents from the Little Rock office of the FBI obtained a search warrant and journeyed out to Blue Eye, cut through the padlocks at his property and examined his trailer and the contents of his life with a great deal of care.
There, they found even more incriminating evidence—maps, drawings, sketches and notes of the four cities in which the president of the United States was scheduled to speak in the months of February and March, with diagrams of the speaking sites. The notes were particularly damning: “Wind, how much wind?” Bob had written. “What time best to shoot?” Bob had wondered. “What range? Go for a long shot, or just try and get up close?” And, “.308? .50? What about some sort of .308–.50?” They also found ticket stubs and hotel receipts indicating that he’d traveled to all four cities, and other teams of agents quickly verified his presence in each. And finally, they found a Barr & Stroud rangefinder, for calibrating the exact distances between shooter and target, an invaluable aid for any sniper.
They also found thirty-two rifles in his gun vault and seventeen handguns, and an empty space where the Remington 700 had rested before he removed it for his trip to New Orleans, and over ten thousand rounds of ammunition.
And they found one other sad thing, much remarked upon in the press for many weeks: lying in a shallow grave, the body of Bob’s dog Mike, his brain blown out with a 12-gauge shotgun, because, as the senior agent in charge told NBC news, “He knew he probably wasn’t coming back and there was no one to take care of Mike, who was probably the only creature Bob loved in this world.”
On the issue of the dog, there was one demurral, from Bob’s friend the old ex-prosecutor and war hero Sam Vincent, who never for a second believed Bob had taken the shot, and who had once helped Bob sue
Mercenary
magazine.
“I’ll tell you this,” he said to the newsmen who had tracked him down. “Whoever done this thing to Bob did a good job. He framed him, he took his reputation from him, he made him an outlaw and the most hated man in America or the world. And he’s got you boys putting your lies about him in your magazines and newspapers and on the TV. Well, I tell you, he done a good job, but he made one mistake. He killed Bob’s dog. Well, around these parts, we consider our dogs family. And that makes it
personal
.”
This quaint bit of Arkansas lore made the evening news, but nobody paid it much attention because nobody wanted to get into the bitter old man’s delusions.
Other witnesses were located to discuss the phenomenon that had become Bob Lee Swagger. His father’s legendary heroism was hauled out of the files, and his father’s death on U.S. 67 the night of July 23, 1955, as a sergeant in the Arkansas State Police and one of Arkansas’s
seven Medal of Honor winners from the Second World War. A number of old Arkansas salts who knew both men made television news appearances.
“Hard to b’lieve a son of Earl Swagger’s could end up like this,” they said to a man. “He was one of the bravest, fairest, most decent men to ever walk the face o’ the earth. We-all thought Bob was a true-blue type too, but you can’t never tell how a boy’s gonna turn out.”