Point of Impact

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

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.

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.”

A few ex-Marine snipers who’d served with Bob were located; only one would go on television and say “interesting” things – and only with the proviso that his face not be shown. He was now an automobile salesman.

“Bob was just a great shot but he had the coldness,” the man said, “the coldness of heart that makes a killer. Of all of us, and there were over fifty men rotated in and out of that platoon over the three years it was operational, he was certainly the best. But as far as I know, we all went back to civilian lives convinced we’d served our country as well as we could. And most of us readjusted.”

The man went on to detail his own psychic difficulties with living with his own evil, his own fascination with violence. He’d been in and out of programs, he said, had a long history of alcoholism and only just lately had gotten his life together again. Later, when it was determined he was a fraud, the story ran only on Entertainment Tonight.

On the third day, the ballistics report was issued by the FBI. It began with the bad news that the bullet – which had mushroomed considerably as it plowed through bone and brain, then veered free and struck something hard, perhaps a nail in the podium – was unreadable as to its rifling marks. However, preliminary results of tests on the bullet’s metallic structure via a neutron activation analysis revealed that it matched perfectly with traces of copper residue found inside the Hart stainless steel barrel on Bob’s Remington action. Two partial fingerprints were lifted from inside the weapon’s barrel channel; from Marine Corps records, they were quickly verified as Bob’s. The empty shell found on the floor had indeed been fired in the chamber of the Remington; all its marks corresponded exactly to the markings of the chamber. The shell itself probably came from an order of brass -.308 Winchester Match Nickel Plated, Lot No. 32B 0424, manufactured by the Federal Cartridge Company, Anoka, Minnesota – which Bob had purchased, mail order, from Bob Pease Accuracy in New Braunfels, Texas. The matching shells, some loaded, some yet untouched, were found in his workshop.

And last, there was the letter. Poignant, desperate, awkward and naive, it swiftly became the most famous letter in American culture: Bob telling the president he wants the Congressional Medal of Honor because he’s earned it. It was the letter that got him on the Secret Service’s Charlie list, and had not an idiotic FBI agent blown the assignment, it was the letter that might have saved a man’s life. But there it was, the crucial issue of motive.

In all this, there was not one public doubt raised about the guilt of Gunnery Sergeant (Ret.) Bob Lee Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, in the matter of death by gunshot in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 1. That was finally uttered, for the first time, on the fourth day, when a reporter from WKNU-TV finally tracked down Mrs. Susan Swagger Preece, of Highland Junction, North Carolina, who had once been married to Bob Lee Swagger and was now the wife of a hardware store owner.

She was a bitter little woman, her face almost completely concealed under a headscarf and sunglasses. The reporter caught her rushing from her husband’s Cadillac toward his lawyer’s office.

No, she had no idea where Bob was, and doubted very much, if he was alive, if he’d try to make contact with her. That was all over, she said, and life was too short to be involved with Bob Swagger more than one time.

But she had a last thought.

“I’ll say this, though,” she said, turning for just a second, “if Bob Lee Swagger took it in his mind to fire a bullet at the president of the United States, then the president of the United States would be a dead man, and not no Salvadoran archbishop. You’re telling me Bob Swagger aimed at a man and missed and killed another man? Bob Lee Swagger never missed nothing he aimed at his whole life and that’s the Pure-D truth.”