I also wanted him to have processesed what had happened to him, to have thought rigorously about it, to have tried to make some sense of it. So I had him essentially reinvent himself through vigorous reading. Up in his trailer in the Ouachitas, he started reading about Vietnam and from that he expanded to reading about war in general and took himself through Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, all the way to Hemingway, Mailer, and the writers of our time. He was hungry for context, and he saved himself from the self-destructive impulses of the darkest parts of his soul by putting the thoughts and experiences of other warriors between him and those black dogs of depression, self-doubt, anger, and loneliness.
Then there was Arkansas. I knew nothing about it, absolutely nothing, except that as I was writing, some politician from down there was trying to become president. I had never heard of him, hardly heard of it.
I originally sited Swagger in and around Berryville, in northeastern Arkansas, not far from Branson in Missouri and the Ozarks. I chose Berryville because the only thing I knew about Arkansas was that a gunsmith-visionary named Bill Wilson had founded a customized.45 automatic shop there, so in some ways Berryville was a kind of capital of gun culture. So I took a trip down there, and no man has ever traveled to Arkansas more full of romantic possibility and hope. But when I arrived, I have to say, I was disappointed. Berryville was fine, but it was set in the middle of something far worse than nowhere: somewhere. The somewhere was called country musicville. It was all twangy and cornpone; the Arkansas I encountered had been trivialized and sentimentalized and, worst of all, made quaint and cute. I just couldn’t see it as a warrior’s birthplace.
Dejected, I drove down 71. My destination was Dallas, where I meant to do some JFK research, as at that point, the JFK assassination was part of the book. I suddenly came upon, totally unexpected and unanticipated, the Ouachitas, a magnificent splurge of mountains roaming east and west across Polk County and Oklahoma. I didn’t know it was in those mountains that Charles Portis had set his magnificent True Grit, but here at last was landscape to match my man. Once I’d found that, I knew I’d found something.
Two other elements I should mention here.
As discreetly as possible, I should point out that on this trip I was not alone. I was with a woman who would later become my wife, and the theme of a man being drawn out of disappointment and solitude and despair by the love of a good woman was something I truly felt and that filled me with hope and joy and pleasures I never thought I’d have. I tried to get that into the book too, in the relationship between Bob and his savior, Julie.
Now, embarrassed, I leave that paragraph to stand alone and move on to another love: rifles. I wanted this to be a rifle book. I was-and always have been, as readers surely all know by now-a gun crank. Gun nut? Is that what you want to call it? Gun buff, gun guy, gunnie, gunner, shooter, Mr. Saturday Night Special, something or other. Well, call it what you wish, but the truth is, the firearm has always, always been a reliable provocateur of my imagination. I even remember when it started. I think it was 1954; I was staying up late, illegally, watching Dragnet. My father was out doing something stupid and ugly and drunken, no doubt. My mother was fretting and feeling sorry for herself, and I was watching Joe Friday and Ben Smith hunt down some kind of killer in the San Fernando Valley. Or maybe it wasn’t the valley; I don’t know: some tract house in a dreary far-flung LA burg. But I do remember when Joe and Ben located the suspect, and under Joe’s instructions, Ben called it in to HQ. Joe told Ben, “And tell ’em to bring plenty of.45s for the machine guns. It looks like he wants to go all the way.”
He did want to go all the way. He came out of the house pistols blazing, there to run into Sergeant Friday, that icon of ’50s righteousness, with his Thompson submachine gun, and Joe spoke for civilization when he blew the guy out of his socks. In any event, the next day I sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil and applied myself and in an hour had drawn a respectable silhouette of a “Fifty Caliber Thompson Submachinegun,” as I labeled it, making it, at.50, bigger than Joe’s! At that point, firearms entered my imagination formally, and I began to read about them, to notice them on TV and in movies, to dream about them-and to draw them. All my schoolbooks were inscribed with detailed side views, copiously labeled: “Thompson submachine gun M-1928,.45 caliber” or “M-1 Carbine” or “.45 automatic.” I conspicuously sought out cap guns that were accurate in their representation, and if I found a cap gun that seemed accurate but whose typology I did not recognize, I tracked it down. In 1956, at the age of ten, I became a subscriber to Guns magazine and drank up every word.
Of course today such behavior would get me a daily Ritalin cocktail (or stronger), a permanent appointment with a shrink, and entry onto the school district’s watch list, but nobody then thought it was particularly weird, and I must say this: it was fun. God, it was a pleasure to lose myself among the sweeps and curves and struts and screws of the various creations, to puzzle over the subtlety of line. It was so strange. In time I became a passingly good draftsman of the firearm from the 90-degree perspective, and even occasionally tilted them to 45 degrees, to suggest weight and solidity. I could draw anything except-true to this day-a Colt Peacemaker. For some reason, Colonel Colt’s genius eluded me: I could never capture the nuance of the curves, the subtle orchestration of the variation between the grip curve, the receiver curve, and the trigger guard curve.
Regardless, that love of guns stayed with me, except for a brief, delusional period in the early ’70s when I called myself a liberal and held myself superior to gun culture. But it always beckoned and I always knew it was my true faith, and one of the things that let me progress from wanting to write to writing was acknowledgment of guns’ deep import to me and their power to stir my imagination to its most expressive. Still, I really had never shot much and hadn’t actually bought a gun until just a few years previous, when I was working on The Day Before Midnight, a gun-rich commando novel.
I knew that to make a sniper real I had to make the rifle real, and to make the rifle real I had to shoot it, clean it, take it apart, carry it, make it a part of my life. So I bought as near as I could get to a Marine sniper rifle. It was a Remington 700 in.308, the police model with a heavy bull barrel, plain-Jane it its bluntness and simplicity, with no aspirations toward style or beauty. (This was also a part of my conspicuous separation from Carlos Hathcock, as he’d done all his shooting in Vietnam with a Winchester Model 70.) I mounted a Leupold 10X scope on it, as had the Marines in Vietnam (though theirs were Redfields, but still 10Xs). And I went out to the Marriottsville Road shooting range about five miles north of my house in Columbia, and I shot… and I shot… and I shot. I learned immediately that everything I’d seen in the movies was fake. I learned, first of all, how hard it was. I learned how subtle it was, how you had to find the strength and yet the suppleness to turn your body to structure, to be tight in some places and loose in others, and you had to take command of your breathing. You had to master your heart and mind, in other words, and if you couldn’t, you’d never be any good at it.