Stephen Hunter - I, Sniper

But the point was that Swagger-“Bobby Lee Swagger,” the name sounded like someone had run an algorithm on every NASCAR driver in history, Banjax joked-had somehow had a Svengali-like hold on Memphis, and maybe Nick’s reluctance to push forward the case against Carl Hitchcock was some kind of psychological projection; he saw Hitchcock and Swagger as the same man, that tough-as-nails southern shooter marine NCO type so appealing to the immature mind.

“I mean, it seems funny on the face of it,” Bill had told David at lunch at Morton’s. “Memphis is an educated professional of great attainment, and evidently this Swagger is kind of a cowboy type, unlettered, cornball, barely a high school education, but possessing some magic charisma that certain types of people fall for every time.”

“Weird,” said David, who could make no sense of it at all. He hated the kind of man he sensed this Swagger to be, some kind of macho blowhard who radiated aggression and stared down every man in the room. Football captain, cop, jock, that kind of guy, hopelessly obsolete in America today, but too dinosaur to realize he was dinosaur. Dinosaurs: not too keen on self-awareness.

“But if you think about it, it makes a little sense,” explained Bill. “Think of it as the puppy and the cat. The puppy comes into the household where the cat is a god. The cat can do anything-leap, fight, climb, race, hunt, kill-and he does it with utter disdain, ignoring the puppy, as if the puppy is too insignificant to notice and completely unable to ever impress him. And that is how the relationship is cemented in each mind, forever and ever. But what happens over time is that the cat grows old and feeble while the puppy grows into a sleek, magnificent animal that dominates every single transaction it enters. It has become the god. However, when it looks at the scrawny, desiccated, mangy old fleabag of a cat, with its rotted teeth and bloated stomach, it still sees deity. For him, the cat will always be the god, even if to the whole world, the cat is long past its prime and headed to the sharp end of the vet’s needle.”

“Maybe I could do a piece on that relationship. A holding story. To keep the scandal in the news.”

“I’m sure there’s not much on this Swagger. But there might be a little.”

David worked it hard and came up with more myth than reality. No one had ever written a book about Swagger, and he’d never been the marine celebrity with the SNIPR-1 license plate that Carl Hitchcock had been, he was no gun show autograph seller and nobody had ever named rifles, ammo, or shooting matches after him, but it didn’t take long to establish his bona fides as a war hero. He’d been a real mankiller in Vietnam, and two sources confirmed some ambush of a North Vietnamese unit heading toward a Green Beret camp. He’d won the Navy Cross for that. His kills were fewer than Carl’s, to say nothing of that new guy, Chuck McKenzie, but still, he’d spent a long time in the boonies.

David shivered inwardly. These guys, where do they come from? They spend all that time alone, crawling through swamps and up mountains, just to snuff out another man’s life. What was the point? What did you get out of it? It seemed somehow creepy. What was the difference, really, between them and the DC snipers, those two fruits who’d roamed the Beltway picking off people randomly while living in a car? Okay, the marine wore a uniform, but really it was the same thing-the same charge, that kick a fellow got from playing God and watching somebody else a long way out die of his own agency.

But after Vietnam the record got vague for this Bob Lee Swagger. There was a divorce on the record in South Carolina in 1975, and a few DWIs and minor scuffles with the law around the same time-drinking problem was written all over these years-and then silence, as if the guy had disappeared to reinvent himself. There was a Soldier of Fortune magazine story not available on the Internet now, because this Swagger was litigious; some Arkansas lawyer had beat the publishers of that magazine out of a substantial sum, and try as he could, David could never come up with the copy. Then there was that very odd business in 1993 with the Salvadoran. Again, it was hard to know what was real and what was fantasy. What was documented didn’t make a lot of sense, and the way the case had disappeared without a trace gave the odd impression of some kind of government entity at work. Intelligence? The Bureau? Now it was said Swagger was retired and lived a quiet life as some kind of businessman in the West. But nobody really wanted to talk, and David kept running into a wall of silence, along the lines of, “Well, Bob Lee’s not the sort who likes attention, and I love him too much to disappoint him. If you knew him, you’d know what I mean. So why don’t we just agree to end this conversation right now.”

As for Swagger, there was a listed phone number; he called it, got a frosty-sounding woman who would give him nothing at all and kind of frightened him, truth be told. His usual phone charm didn’t cut him any slack with her.

In the end he turned out a little piece that page one wouldn’t take, but it did keep the story alive on the From Washington page until the news from the lab arrived. His story simply pointed out that Memphis had a history of involvement with “sniper types,” as this “Bob Lee Swagger” certainly was, and it didn’t ask, there being no justification for pointed observations in a legitimate news story, whether an agent with known connections in the “sniper community,” including a long-standing friendship with one of its legends, was an appropriate choice to investigate a series of sensational murders whose perpetrator was suspected to have come from that community. Maybe an editorial writer would pick up on it, and the next day, indeed, one had.

It wasn’t the lead editorial, but even an off-lead got noticed in the Times.

We wonder what is going on at the Federal Bureau of Investigation these days. The Bureau, charged with investigating the heinous deaths of four Americans whose only crime was that they used their constitutional rights to protest a war that was both a tragedy and a mockery, turned that investigation over to the stewardship of an agent whose experience put him more in sympathy with its alleged perpetrator than with its victims.

As the Times reported yesterday, Special Agent in Charge Nicholas Memphis, who ran the investigation that quickly identified former marine sniper Carl Hitchcock as the primary, indeed only, suspect, has long enjoyed a relationship with another well-known marine sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, formerly of Blue Eye, Arkansas. One doesn’t begrudge Memphis his choice of friends, but at the same time, perhaps one should begrudge the Bureau its choice of executives. In matters of such importance, it would have been better for all concerned if the Bureau had selected an agent in charge whose connection to the act of sniping-the cold murder of a human being, guilty or innocent, at long range for something called “military necessity,” though too often neither military nor necessary in application-was more distant and less inclined to be tarnished with emotion.

Perhaps that is why the investigation has apparently fallen off the tracks and a final report, which all Americans must regard as an act of closure to these final, horrible war crimes, is nowhere in sight.

That got him the usual invites to the usual talking head roundtables-he was getting pretty good at it-but he passed that night because, well, because he too felt some combat fatigue; it had been a nerve-rattling few weeks, and he knew his career hung in the balance. It was still unclear whether he would ultimately join, in Howell Raines’s memorable phrases, the culture of complaint or the culture of achievement that prevailed in any given newsroom.