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.
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.
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
The
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
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
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
“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
