“Bob is, in many ways, a child of the embarrassing Second Amendment, and he fits the profile of other great American gun heroes – both Alvin York and Audie Murphy come to mind. He grew up orphaned early, in a border state, on a hardscrabble farm, where his hunting was not only natural and expected but necessary. He quickly became a proficient hunter with a single-shot.22 rifle, and graduated, in his teens, to a lever-action deer gun and finally a Winchester in.30 caliber. He was, from the very first time his father allowed him to shoot, an exceedingly gifted rifleman.

“In 1964, having graduated from high school where he got – this is perhaps not as amazing as it seems – excellent grades, Bob turned down a college scholarship and instead joined the United States Marines, just in time for the Vietnam War.

“He did a tour in 1966 as an infantry lance corporal and was wounded twice; he did one in 1968, during Tet, as a recon patrol leader, doing a lot of dangerous work up near the DMZ. In 1971, at Camp Perry, Ohio, Bob Lee was the national thousand-yard center-fire rifle champion. It got him noticed. He returned to Vietnam in late 1971 to the Scout-Sniper platoon, Headquarters Company, Twenty-sixth Regiment, First Marine Division, operating outside Da Nang.”

He clicked a button.

The screen displayed a business card with a neat block of print under the silhouette of a telescopic rifle.

It said,

WE DEAL IN LEAD, FRIEND.

– SCOUT-SNIPER PLATOON,

HEADQUARTERS COMPANY,

FIRST MARINES.

“The line was stolen from Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven. It was his platoon’s calling card, part of the First Marine Psywar operations in its region, left in prominent places in the area where Bob and his men were operating, usually in the left hand of corpses dropped by a single bullet in the chest. Scout-Sniper of the First was the most proficient unit of professional killers this country had ever sponsored, at least on an individual basis. In the six years it operated, it is said to have killed over one thousand seven hundred fifty enemy soldiers. Itself, it only counted forty-six men in its ranks over those years. A sergeant named Carl Hitchcock, with ninety-three confirmed kills, was highest; Bob, five years later, was second, with his eighty-seven; but there were several other snipers in the sixties and more than a dozen in the fifties.

“As for Bob, I’ll only sketch the high points. He evidently did a few jobs for the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, liquidating hardcore infrastructure people, Vietcong tax collectors and regional chieftains and the like. So he is not unfamiliar with the operations of professional intelligence agencies. But his more common targets were rank-and-file North Vietnamese regulars operating in the area. They even had a huge reward out for Bob, over fifty thousand piasters. But most astonishingly, he and his best friend and spotter, a lance corporal named Donny Fenn, once ambushed a North Vietnamese battalion which was rushing toward an isolated Special Forces camp. The weather was bad, and the jungle was triple canopy, so air support or evacuation was impossible. It was out of range of artillery. A thousand men, heading toward twelve on a hilltop. But Bob and his spotter were the only other friendly forces in the area. They tracked the North Vietnamese, and began taking out officers one at a time over a forty-eight-hour stretch in the An Loc Valley. The battalion never reached the Green Berets, and Swagger and his spotter made it out three days later. He killed over thirty men in that two-day adventure.”

Even Payne, who tried never to be impressed, had to suck in some air.

“Cocksucker can shoot a little,” he said.

The projector clicked.

A man swaddled in bandages lay in a hospital bed, leg locked in traction, face bleak, eyes hugely hollow.

“Bob Lee Swagger’s war came to an end on eleven December 1972. He was sliding over a crest line on his way out when he was hit in the hip by a rifle bullet fired from over a thousand yards. His friend and spotter Donny Fenn slid down the embankment to get him. The next bullet hit Donny in the chest, blew through to his spine. Bob lay out there all morning with his dead friend in his arms, until they could call in artillery on the suspected sniper position. It ended his war and it ended his career in the Marine Corps. He was invalided out of the service in 1975, after three years’ painful rehabilitation. It ended his competitive shooting, too. Competitive shooting is an extremely formalized sport, involving positions of great physical discomfort, while wrapped tightly in leather shooting garments for maximum body control. With his hip wired together, Bob was never able to achieve those formal positions with the same degree of intensity.

“You could say, I suppose, that Bob Lee Swagger gave everything to his country, and in return, it took everything from him. His heroism was of a sort that makes many Americans uneasy. He wasn’t an inspiring leader, he didn’t save lives, he didn’t rise in the chain of command. He was simply and explicitly an extraordinary killer. Almost certainly for that reason, he never got the medals and the acclaim he deserved.

“What followed, one can almost predict. He was married, but the marriage fell apart. A career in real estate sales outside Camp Lejeune collapsed, he tried to go back to school but lost interest. He was into and out of alcoholism clinics in the mid to late seventies. In the eighties, he seems to have come to some sort of provisional peace with himself, and with his country, if only by withdrawing. And one can only imagine what the excessive patriotic hubris of the Persian Gulf victory has done to increase his isolation and his bitterness. He lives in a trailer, alone, in the Ouachita Mountains, a few miles outside of Blue Eye, subsisting on his Marine disability pay and what’s left of the thirty thousand dollars his pal, an old country lawyer named Sam Vincent, won for him in a lawsuit against Mercenary magazine in 1986. Alone, that is, except for his guns, of which he has dozens. And which he shoots every day, as if they are his only friends.

“You can see, of course, his ready fund of resentment, his sense of isolation. All these things make him vulnerable and malleable,” said the doctor. “He’s the man we’ve been taught to hate. He’s the solitary American gun nut.”

Bob knew, as the gun jolted into his shoulder and the sight picture disappeared in a blur of recoil, that the perfect shot he’d been building toward all these hours was his. It was as if the image at the second when the lockwork of the Remington bolt had delivered striker to primer were engraved in his mind and he had fractions of a second to analyze at a speed that has no place in real time; yes, the rifle was held true; yes, the scope, zeroed onto two hundred yards with a group size of less than two inches, was placed exactly where he wanted it; yes, the trigger pull was smooth, unhurried; yes, he was surprised when it broke; yes, his position was solid and no, no last second twitch, no flicker of doubt or lack of self-belief, had betrayed him.

Yes, he’d hit.

The animal, stricken, bucked ferociously in its sudden shroud of red mist. Its great antlered head spasmed back as its front legs collapsed under it and it crashed to the ground.

Without unshouldering, Bob flicked the bolt, tossing a piece of spent brass, ramming home a new.308, and reacquired the target. But he saw immediately that no follow-up was necessary. He snapped the safety on, lowered the rifle and watched Tim thrash, his bull neck beating against the sleet and dust. The animal could not accept that it had been hit or that its legs no longer functioned or that numbness was spreading through it.