BOOK REVIEW: Stylish but wrong on guns

I, SNIPER: A BOB LEE SWAGGER NOVEL

By Stephen Hunter Simon & Schuster, $26, 418 pages

Reviewed by John Weisman

There are few novelists who can write as lyrically and vividly as retired Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter about the damage a 168-grain Sierra hollow-point MatchKing fired from a 7.62 rifle at a distance of 340 yards can do as it enters the human body.

“The missile flew unerringly through viscera without the slightest deviation and had only lost a few dozen pounds of energy when it hit her in the absolute center of the heart, exactly where all four chambers came together in a nexus of muscle. The organ was pulped in a fraction of a second. Death was instantaneous, a kind of mercy, one supposes, as Ms. Flanders quite literally could not have noticed her own extinction.”

Pure poetry, if you like that kind of stuff - which I do.

The Ms. Flanders to whom Mr. Hunter refers is the first of four victims of spot-on-perfect shootings. The common thread is that all the deceased were involved in the radical political-cum-antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Some more than others.

Joan Flanders, for example, is the ultraprogressive scion of a famous American acting clan. Her political consciousness was accelerated after she was photographed aboard the carriage of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. Reviled by millions, she subsequently married and divorced a loudmouth media mogul and made millions from a series of exercise videos. The parallel to “Hanoi Jane” Fonda and her real-life ex, “Mouth from the South” CNN founder Ted Turner, are unmistakable.

Second and third victims are Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, a couple of academics from Chicago who were involved in the radical politics that included bank robbery and bombings. The real-life parallels? The Weather Underground, whose 1970s operations included bombings and a Brinks armored truck robbery. Strong and Reilly are offed in - what else? - their Volvo. The final corpse is Mitch Greene, a left-wing political comic in the Mort Sahl vein. Greene is snuffed during a book tour.

The FBI’s guilty party of choice is a former Marine Gunnery Sgt. named Carl Hitchcock, “the most famous sniper in America.” Hitchcock had 93 kills in Vietnam and for a while was regarded as that war’s pre-eminent sniper. However, Hitchcock wasn’t in fact top of the heap. Another Marine, Chuck MacKenzie, was discovered much later to have had 96 kills. The way the cops see things, Hitchcock, deprived of his fame, falls into depression and starts taking revenge on former antiwar celebrities.

Hitchcock is tracked down. He is discovered in the closet of an Econo Lodge in Grand Rapids, Mich. Dead. Hitchcock has shot himself with the murder weapon. The FBI examines the evidence and is just about to report “case closed” when a fly appears in the forensic ointment.

That fly is Bob Lee Swagger, retired Marine sniper and hero of more than a few of Mr. Hunter’s previous novels. Gunny Swagger casts enough doubt on Hitchcock’s guilt to reverse “case closed” to “case drags on.” This development angers Joan Flanders’ ex, a political heavyweight billionaire named T.T. Constable, who wants to keep his name - and his ex’s - out of the gossip columns.

Here, too, Mr. Hunter is trying to parallel history, although less successfully. The best-known sniper from the Vietnam era was a self-effacing gunnery sergeant named Carlos N. Hathcock. Carlos, with whom I spent time in the 1990s, had 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam. But he wasn’t No. 1. That honor went to another Marine, Sgt. Chuck Mawhinney, who had 103 confirmed kills.

Right up until his death in 1999 from multiple sclerosis, Gunny Hathcock devoted much of his time and depleted energy toward the inculcation of young snipers in craft and theory. He and his wife, Jo, lived in a bungalow in Virginia Beach. It was a hub for SEAL sharpshooters, SWAT cops from as far away as Richmond or Washington and Marines from just about anywhere. All were welcome.

I know Mr. Hunter is writing fiction, but I wish he had stayed away from trying to make readers think he might be writing about Carlos Hathcock. Because in doing so, he diminishes the memory of one of the most modest, generous patriots of the 20th century.

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