The first plot was stolen-coldly and treacherously-from a book called Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal, which I never read, because if I did, I knew I’d steal more than the premise. Some Britisher wrote it and no other book, and the premise was brilliant-contained, resonant, full of fun things like retribution and righteous violence. A British army sniper is given a mission in Africa to take out a particularly nasty, obnoxious dictator. After he is dispatched and unrecallable, Whitehall affects a rapprochement with the nasty politician. Since nothing can be done to retrieve the sniper, he is betrayed. He is captured and disappears into the cruelty of the small dictatorship’s prison system, for presumably appalling treatment unto execution. So it goes in the realpolitik of the world.
Five years later, the dictator, now a proud British ally, arrives for a state visit in London. One night at British Intelligence HQ, a message arrives in code five years old. Deciphered, it appears to be from the betrayed sniper. I will complete my mission, he advises. Complications ensue.
I would move the story to America, to Washington, with an old ’ Nam sniper, USMC to the hilt, as the fall guy. I saw it exactly: a reluctant colleague has to hunt him down, but at every turn the old guy is smarter, faster, more creative. In fact, it’s so good I may yet do it, though this time the older Bob will be the pursuer, not the shooter, and the shooter will be some young man out of three tours in Iraq, two with the Marines and another with private contractors. Only this time, I hope to have the moral strength to offer to pay royalties on the stolen bit of genius.
The other plot I was thinking about was vaguer, but at least it was my own. It was inspired by a story that had appeared in the Baltimore Sun magazine, by an old-boy reporter named Ralph Reppert, on a new theory of the Kennedy assassination. Like many-in fact like all-such theories, it was wrong, but the article had an arresting image. A rifleman stands on a platform in desolate, empty country (as had happened to Rep’s subject at the H. B. White Ballistics Laboratory in Maryland). Before him, on a certain angle at a certain distance, is a convertible automobile, traveling at a precise speed. In the backseat are four dummies in a certain arrangement, signifying human targets. He must fire three shots in 6.3 seconds and hit the target in the rear right of the head. Rep’s subject knew of course that he was replicating the behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald, but my imagination took off from the idea that the shooter had been conned into the tower and only by recognizing the angles and the speed and the nature of the shooting problem that confronted him did he realize he had been cast in the Oswald role and that the whole thing was meant to gull him into certain predictable behaviors.
In the end, I chose that, if only because it was mine, and began without much more of an idea. I just started typing and whenever I reached a stalling point, I invented a gunfight or a new major character. I had no idea I was changing my life forever, and for the next few years it seemed like the biggest mistake I ever made.
Point of Impact was a bitch to write-so many cuckoos to hide, and they had to pop out at just the right time. The book just got worse and worse. I wrote a two-hundred-page sequence set in the bayous of Louisiana and realized it had nothing to do with anything. I junked it. Ugh. Since I am congenitally lazy, seeing all that work disappear was a particularly crushing experience. I don’t know where Nick Memphis came from; he was on no outline or note-to-self before the moment he appeared in the book. I don’t even know where the name came from, and I have no idea what the derivation of “ Memphis ” would be. Is he an Egyptian or a Tennessean? I have no idea. He just showed up on a particularly desperate evening and kicked his way into the book and wouldn’t leave. A good thing too.
The book’s editor, a brilliant pro at Bantam named Ann Harris, later confided to me that she’d been really unimpressed with the first hundred or so pages of manuscript, until Nick arrived. Then, she observed, it picked up considerably, became more pointed, more incisive, more vigorous in its writing. Everywhere Nick appeared, the book worked; everywhere he didn’t, ZZZZZZ.
And I know why ZZZZZZ was the appropriate response. It was all Bob Lee Swagger’s fault.
Bob Lee, of course, drifted in from Charles Henderson’s Marine Sniper, which told the story of the great Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock. Henderson ’s book is well written and gripping, of course, but it is more than that: it somehow communicates the psychological weight-you might even say spiritual weight-that a sniper carries everywhere. He is, after all, not the designated marksman but the designated killer. He is the one who sees through a 10-power magnifier the impact of 168 grains of metal going at 2,000 feet per second, the tiny hole it drills as it enters, the dam it breaks as it exits, followed by the slow, graceless tumble to earth. I was fascinated by that act, and I was horrified by it, but most of all I was horrified by my fascination with that act.
The facts on Carlos Hathcock were straightforward: career Marine NCO from Arkansas, two tours in ’ Nam, the first as an MP. It was during the second, after he had won the Wimbledon Cup (that is, the national thousand-yard shooting match), that he became a sniper and achieved ninety-three kills. He became known as the leading sniper in Vietnam (it turned out, much later, that he wasn’t); he also, at least according to Henderson, pulled off some special-ops missions, such as taking out a VC general and, on one occasion, ambushing a VC platoon and killing everyone in it, both brilliant feats of arms. But he suffered two grievous wounds during his year of hunting men. The first was psychologicaclass="underline" he lost one of his most gifted spotters, a young man named Johnny Burke. Then he himself was burned seriously when a vehicle he was in detonated a mine. Heroically, he helped get men out of the wrecked and blazing thing even though he was hurt. Later-and why later? another story-he was granted a Silver Star for the effort.
So there was Bob Lee: from Arkansas, professional Marine NCO, a supremely brave and efficient sniper with a couple of spectacular feats of arms that became legendary, then seriously wounded in mind-his lost spotter-and body-the burns. I saw him in a bitter exile, alone and aloof, a recovered drunk, and I knew the emotional trajectory of the book would be his eventual reentry into society, his discovery of love, his engagement, his realization that there were still things worth fighting for. All that was in the first aimless, tortured draft.
And it was awful.
Bob was not alive.
The problem, I realized eventually, had to do with what artists call the “living line” as opposed to the “dead line.” A “dead line” is a tracing. It renders a reasonable facsimile of the shape of a thing, but it represents no engagement of the imagination of the artist. It is not spontaneous, surprising, independent. It’s just dumbly there; that’s all. And that’s what I had, this crude tracing of Carlos Hathcock laboriously inserted into an unruly thousand pages of manuscript. (I am sparing you the tales of my technical tribulations and the disk I managed to embalm in jelly as I struggled through my first book written on computer, so there is some mercy in the world.) Bob Lee had all of the Carlos benchmarks, but he was as cold and dull as a stone.
People say to me: “Bob Lee Swagger? Carlos Hathcock, right?” Well, yes and no. The key to Bob Lee Swagger turned out to be not all the places he intersected with Carlos Hathcock, but all the places he deviated from him. It was in the act of breaking away from Carlos Hathcock that he became a freestanding portrait of a complex man, worthy and capable of sustaining an elaborate narrative.
As I reimagined him, I came up with a figure that I suspect the actual Carlos Hathcock wouldn’t recognize. I saw him as a kind of Faustian intellectual of war. He had seen things and done things and learned things that no man before ever had. But it was at great cost: his self-removal from society, his self-inflected deadness of soul. I gave him outward manifestations of these turmoils: he became an ex-drunk, and his drunkenness (I know a little about this) had not been the merry, charming kind full of bon mots and toasts and scintillating wit; no, it was dark, surly, violent, self-lacerating, maybe even killing. And thus his greatest victory hadn’t been over the North Vietnamese (I gave him a score of 87, because I wanted it clear to people who knew these things that I wasn’t offering him as “better” than Carlos), but over himself, in putting that behind him.