Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

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., USMC. 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.