I, Sniper

“He must have done it right away,” said Chandler. “There’s rigor in the limbs, so he’s been gone a long time. Maybe right after he checked in.”

“He knew it was all over,” said Ron. “He had no place to run. Besides, he completed his mission, he got to ninety-seven. He’s the champ again.”

6

As in Vietnam, the rains came. It was the season. They fell almost horizontally, sopping everything, turning the earth to gruel, squeezing mud up and over shoes. It was a penetrating rain, and nobody got away from it or didn’t feel its chill.

Swagger stood apart from the others and watched the box that contained what remained of Carl Hitchcock go into the ground. He hadn’t known Carl, as Carl had finished his sniper’s tour before Bob started his; afterwards, in the melancholy aftermath of a lost war, things turned and stayed strange for the longest time, and the two never came upon each other, though they cut trail often enough.

Then, the odd thing: in slow, steady increments, Carl got big. Being number one, at anything, still mattered in this country, and a book came along, some articles, and soon enough Carl was adding to his pension by standing still for autographs at gun shows and being beloved as the avuncular “Gu

Then, another thing, wholly unpredictable: what might be called “tactical culture.” Because of Carl or in spite of him or completely apart from him-who knew? but for some reason-a fascination with the designated life takers, the sanctioned force appliers, took root. The new man was the sniper, the commando, the CQB professional, the pistol jockey, the long-range hitter. Magazines like Soldier of Fortune and SWAT and Combat Handguns came alive, and serious men consumed reams and reams of paper debating such issues as “9mm v..45 ACP” or “Instinct Shooting: Lifesaver or Fool’s Folly?” The fascination took hold of a certain demographic, some professional, some dreamers, but all obsessed with a kind of ideal warrior in an ideal gunfight. The core of the culture was equipment fetish, and soon enough boutique providers were turning out dedicated sniper rifles, pouches, straps, gizmos of all shapes and purposes, whole lines of tactical clothing, headgear, watches (always black), boots, vests, holsters with elaborately engineered snaps for security on the one hand and quickness of draw on the other. Carl was somehow the professor emeritus of this world, its guru, its revered elder. And it fed him, as he rode sniper chic to a nice enough income with his seminars for law enforcement marksmen, which he put on all over the country. He became at the same time a kind of sniper social worker and spent more than one night talking to someone who’d blown a shot or frozen at the ultimate moment. He counted again. He loved it. Who could blame him? Human nature being what it was, it was more fun to spend a retirement beloved than ignored.

But it had come to this: a civilian graveyard on the outskirts of Jacksonville, North Carolina, a wet fall day, a few disconsolate loners standing about in what appeared to be a crowd but was not, really, as no one pressed close; it was just a group of individuals standing in an almost-crowd. Some generic holy fellow read from the book but added nothing other than God’s pro forma respect for the dead. No one from the United States Marine Corps attended.

How could they? Carl was deranged marine sniper, Carl was combat-shocked vet, Carl was crazed gunman, Carl was disappointed, depressed soldier, in the words of a prominent newspaper in New York that thought it was all right to call marines soldiers. So the Corps sent no one officially, despite all that Carl had given the Corps. That seemed wrong to Bob, but what did he know of such things and the way they turned out.

Again, like a Faulknerian blood curse, an original sin of violence and oppression, the hideous adventure that was this country’s misguided path in Vietnam in the late 1960s reaches out to claim yet more lives. Let it be written, that the tragic marine sniper Carl Hitchcock, once a hero and now an alleged murderer, is the last casualty of that war and that it can kill no more. Let us hope we are at last safe from it.

But let the Vietnam War stand also as a warning to further enticements in far-off lands; there have been a few since. The temptation to solve with violence that which ca

That was the New York Times editorial page.

Bob hadn’t read any others online; he didn’t have the heart to, and it was another of his resentments that Carl had somehow become the platform for the eastern asshole press, and he doubted there was a man in an eastern press editorial room who’d been in Vietnam at all, much less as a marine, and yet somehow they were the ones who felt entitled to sound the words and play the bugle.

He tried to shake it off.

Getting old, all beat and cut to hell.

He still walked with a limp from a bad cut picked up a few years back. His hair was gray, his face bleak, his body old and achy. He’d been shot at a lot, hit a few times, and one of his hips was cold steel, five degrees icier than the weather every single day, always a reminder of how things can go wrong. But all that said, it was true too that he had it made.

He was sort of rich. He owned seven lay-up barns throughout the West and drew a good percentage from each with not a lot of overhead; his wife ran them beautifully. He had pensions from the marines as well as disability pay, so there’d always be enough money. He lived in a beautiful house outside Boise that looked across meadows to mountains. He had a few good horses, a few good rifles, a few good handguns, and a damned comfortable rocking chair on the porch. He had an all-terrain vehicle and a Ford F-150 and a Kawasaki 350. But he was richest in daughters: his oldest had just moved up in her chosen profession to a big newspaper, which made him happy; his other daughter had just won the girls’ Idaho twelve-and-under pony slalom crown at the junior NCAA rodeo in Casper and was only seven. The kid was a true samurai on horseback. That was a day of happiness so pure he thought he’d die of it, but then this terrible week happened that left four people dead and Carl with his brains blown out and everybody and his brother saying terrible things about marine snipers.

In time, the reverend Mr. Minister was done and backed off. One by one, the men filed by, just to see the box close up, perhaps reflect on the boxes he had put men into or the boxes they had put men into or the boxes they had almost gone into themselves. No one said a word. It wasn’t a crowd that would throw a drunken wake and end up in the hoosegow with black eyes, broken teeth, and memories of a great bar fight. In many ways, they were all Carls and all Swaggers: scrawny men with lots of fast-twitch muscles, hair crew cut yet thick, thousand-yard stares, the dignity of the professional military or police, no sense of emotional excess anywhere, no moans or tears. They weren’t quite buying into the crazed marine narrative and felt an urge to pay solemn last respects to a guy who’d done his duty always to the end.