13. Bob Lee Swagger (Stephen Hunter)
Stephen Hunter was already well on his way to become my favorite suspense writer before he created his ultimate hero, Bob Lee Swagger in his 6th novel, 1993’s Point of Impact (read the book, forget the awful Mark Wahlberg movie, Shooter, that was based on it).
Bob Lee, a Marine whose exploits as a sniper in Vietnam earned him unwelcome fame and the nickname “Bob the Nailer” is Stephen Hunter’s homage to the American warrior. You know, the small town guy who answers his country’s call to duty without a second thought and who puts down America’s enemies through true grit and ingenuity, but whose background and resume would have the nation’s elites looking down their noses.
Through seven novels Bob Lee has taken down a variety of threats, foreign and domestic, from backwoods criminal gangs, to rouge mercenaries, from Samurai sword-wielding Yakuza, to Spetznaz snipers. Along the way, Hunter has used him to encapsulate his feelings about the American fighting man—throwing in lots of fun gun lore, to boot.
The theme of the elite “narrative” resonates throughout the Swagger series, from the first book to the most recent, Dead Zero. While the New York Times worries that we have trained killers wandering around the country on a hair trigger, just waiting to explode and shoot us from clock towers, Hunter thinks we should be grateful these heroes live among us.
In I, Sniper, Hunter describes the “narrative” explicitly:
“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide ‘these are the lies we tell today.’ No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual non-rigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s their way of arranging things a certain way what they all believe in without ever really addressing it carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They know Communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They knowSaddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was f—-ed up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. …The story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair’s made-up stories and Dan Rather’s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin-stroy anybody who makes them question all that. …”
Unlike Matt Helm, Bob Lee has been allowed to get older throughout the series, to the point that I was sure I, Sniper was his swansong. Of course, every Bob Lee Swagger seems like it should be the last, as he typifies the American warrior beginning with George Washington, who when the fighting is over, just wants to go back to his ranch and be left alone.
However, in Dead Zero, Hunter came up with an ingenious way to keep the Swagger saga alive, in yet another story about Beltway types who are outsmarted by a Marine sniper.
And that just may be the best news a thriller reader could get.
Next: A Vietnam “tunnel rat” defies victimization cliches and fights for justice.
