WNE-Wanderer King: DeadMansLandWalking

Wild Buffalo CheySun Bulletin

~!~

Pardon Mon-Ami, EaglePkSwan

Parlaz Vouz

'Red Dawn Cattararagus Wings'

~~!~*~!~~

{RedArticWind-DogRoyaleBay}

~ LUCKY HORSE ~ U ~ SHOE ‘J-Nr.’ EWS ~

~~ MY KIEL.LA-DINE DINNER WITH ANDRE ~~

{WAG 3 DOG – ‘WE’ BILLWURTH CAUSE 2 CARE}

With Appreciation from:
~ Lara-Lynn, ConQ’erd, MareMansk ~
To:
~ Trouble – Jaguar Yage – Miguel G-National ~
~ Anderson Cooper - CNN-RT - Planet in Peril ~
~ Prophets ‘Hiroshima’, ‘Nagasaki’ & B.B. Darwin ~

~ Only Accurate Rifles Are Interesting – G.W. Beenis School of Anthropology ~
- Colonel Mike Townsend – Lhaza Tibet Bayonet -

~ Bob put his hand under his jacket and set it on the haft of the .45, because it’s always better to have your gun in your hand than in your pants if it comes to kick-ass time. If he wasn’t shooting or sleeping he was reading Guns & Ammo or Shooting Times or The American Rifleman or Accuracy Shooting or The Shotgun News. ~

~- Colonel William A. Bruce U.S.A (Ret.) -~
President – Chief Operating Officer, Accutech Industries, Inc.
Law Enforcement Technology, Law Enforcement Ammunition
Training Seminars and Firearms Consultation

~ P.R.YDHER - MAYSUN - MI6ZION ~

{Oxford ST-Champ Ruble - God Almonty Stillwell}

{WildcatSnowlyon-RedStarSeal}

THE GHOST OF FREEDOM LOST?
I had a dream the other night I didn't understand. A figure walking through the mist, with flintlock in his hand His clothes were torn and dirty, as he stood there by my bed.

He took off his three-cornered hat, and speaking low he said:

"We fought a revolution to secure our liberty. We wrote the Constitution, as a shield against tyranny. For future generations, the error of the legacy we gave: ‘Democracy’: The Tyranny of Every Ignorant Man and Woman Can Get to Vote, In this, the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

This ‘democratic’ freedom we secured for you, we hoped you'd want to earn to keep. But mindless breeding and ignorant voter tyranny laboured endlessly while you shopped, and your parents were asleep. Your freedom gone-your courage lost-you're no more than a slave; in this, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

You buy permits to travel, and permits to own a gun, Permits to start a business, or to build a place for one. Why is it exactly that no permits are required to breed as many ignorant ‘consumer’ tyrants, as Wall Street’s ‘citizens’ wish? On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent, Although you choose to have no voice in choosing how the money's spent.

Your children attend schools and universities that don't educate. Politicians are required to sell their souls to ignorant and lazy voters, with welfare-state promises, from money ‘we’ imagine grows on liberty trees. As jurors, you wash your hands, as you sit asleep; ignoring jury nullification, while your freedom fighters are slaughtered and crucified, in your name.

You read about the current news in a biased press. You pay a tax you do not owe, to please the I.R.S. Your Money is no longer made of Silver or of Gold, You trade your wealth for paper, so your life can be controlled. You pay for crimes that make our Nation turn from ‘God’ in shame. You've welcomed ‘Satan's’ bar-code number, as you've traded off your name.

You've given government control to those who do you harm, So they can padlock churches, and steal the family farms; And keep our country deep in debt; Harassing your fellow countrymen while corrupted courts prevail.

Your public servants don't uphold a solemn oath they've sworn. Your leaders ship artillery and guns to foreign shores. You ‘citizens’ breed sons and daughters, for cannon-fodder sacrificial slaughter, in wars around the globe, all in your ‘Gods’ name. This burnt-offering sacrificial cannon-fodder slaughter, of the children ‘toys’ bred to assuage patriarchal egos, or as free labour products & old age insurance policies, or perhaps a few as prodigy; but failed to educate and love, we call ‘civilized and humane.’

Can you and I regain the freedom for which our founding father’s fought and died? Or don't you have the courage, or the faith to stand with pride? Are there no more values for which you'll fight to save? Or do you wish your children to live in fear and be Wall Street Pharoah’s time-less consumer slaves?

Sons & Daughters of the Republic, arise and take a stand! Defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of our Land. Preserve our Great Republic, learn and teach, each day, Mother Earth’s Prodigal Survival Bill of Rights!

Be a torch of Liberty & Freedom burning bright!"

As I awoke he vanished, in the mist from whence he came. His words ring true, we are not free and have ourselves to blame. For even now as our mindless-breeding tyranny of ignorance tramples each God-Given Right, We sit, watch and tremble...too afraid to stand and fight.

If he stands by your bedside in a dream while you're asleep, And wonders what remains of your Rights he fought to keep. What would be your answer when he called out, Is this still...

THE LAND OF THE FREE & HOME OF THE BRAVE?
~ author anonymous ~
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

~~ Day Before Midnight – A-BlueEye-K -- Point of Impact ~~
Point of Impact
by Stephen Hunter

The Shotgun News
Books & Magazines
ART SCOTT: AMERICAN SHOOTER. The true story of the fabled marksman of the thirties who won the National Thousand Yard Match four times in the thirties and forties and twice more in the fifties with his famous TENTH BLACK KING Model 70 .300 H & H MAGNUM. Complete with pictures drawn from family archives and load data. Postpaid, $49.50, or order from James Thomas Albright, P.O Box 511, Newtsville, N.C. 28777, 704-555-0967; Visa, Mastercard.

If it shot or related to shooting or documented shooting, you could find it in The Shotgun News, the urtext of the subculture.
Dobbler was fascinated. Guns everywhere, of every shape and form and description, for every taste and wallet. They could be so cheap and so expensive, so demure and so awesome, so ridiculous and so sublime.
He wondered about the men who worshiped them with such ardency, whose lives were bounded by their complexities or liberated by their possibilities.
What was there to see in all this?
Well, passion for order for one thing. So much of gun culture was about parts, units, systems, things fitting together. There were whole institutions that existed merely to sell parts of obsolete weapons. So there was a puzzle aspect to it, a sense of bringing order to chaos.
Power? The damned things were so absolute in their meaning that yes, there had to be the lure of power. But beauty also. Some of them, he was stunned to discover, were strangely beautiful. He especially liked one called a Luger and another called a New Frontier single action.
And freedom, or at least the illusion of it, by the narrowest of definitions. To Dobbler, freedom was essentially intellectual, but he supposed that to someone in a more primal world, it was physical – freedom of movement, freedom from harassment, freedom from being messed around with. Outdoor freedom. And a man who holds a gun in his hand must feel it passionately. No government can rule you absolutely. Yours is always the last option.
And masculinity. Nothing soft and feminine about guns: they were too direct, too brutal. The phallic business so provocative to Freudians didn’t seem to him to be very helpful; if these guns were penises, their purchasers were too self-oblivious to know or care.
And then again: data. To him a gun was just a gun, but to some of these people it was obviously an endless font of information – a history, a set of specifications, an involvement with a company, usually a corporate entity, a connection to certain traditions, a whole hierarchy of meanings that yielded yet more meanings and had to be deciphered like some runic code. To shoot wasn’t enough: there was something almost Borgesian about the labyrinths the damned things conjured in the imagination.
The clock ticked away and the pages fled by and after a bit, he ceased looking at the display ads from the gun wholesale places, but instead, fascinated, looked to smaller fry: the columns and columns of classifieds, where more oblique needs were addressed. It was like the New York Review of Books personal ads, only for guns and their affiliated phenomena, not sex.

Remington 25… Pre-64, M70 220 SWIFT… Luger…. Military Rifles of Japan, 1989, Third Edition…. Discount Gun Books: All Shipped Free… Great New Book, Winchester, An American Legend Colt Encyclopedia. Felix Honeycutt, 6731 Pilgrim Way, Palm Frisk Village, FL, 20131
~~*!*~~

“How long has it been?” she said.
Since when? He wondered.
“You don’t even know what it’s called anymore? You know. With a woman. Wo-man. Female.”
“Oh, that? I don’t know.”
“A month? A year? Ten years?”
“Not ten years. More than a year. I’m not sure.”
“You could live without it that easily?”
“I had other things to keep me busy.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He paused, considering it.
“I don’t want the complications. Someone said, ‘Simplify, simplify.’”
“Ann Landers?”
“No,” he said earnestly, “it was some old guy called Thoreau. He went and lived by himself, too, as I understand it. Anyway. I wanted to simplify. No wants, no needs, no hungers. Only rifles. Crazy as hell now that I think of it.”
“So you went off and became Henry Thoreau of Walden, Arkansas?” Julie said.
“I was at my best with a rifle in my hand. I always loved rifles. So I decided to live in such a way that the rifle would be all I needed. And I succeeded.”
“Were you happy up there in your trailer in the mountains without any people?”
“I didn’t know it then. I suppose now that I was. I was raised and then trained not to think a lot about how I feel.”
.!.
“Why is it men like you always have to be so alone? She asked.
“Why do you want to live by yourself and contrive situations under which you can go against everybody to prove how smart and tough and brave you are?”
Bob had no answer.
“You see, you make it so terrible for us,” she said. “For the women. Because normal men want to be like you, they learn about you from movie versions of you, and they try for that same laconic spirit, that Hemingway stoicism. They manufacture themselves in your image but they don’t have the guts or the power to bring it off. So they just exile themselves from us, pretending to be you and to have your power, and we can never reach them. Are you aware that Donny was scared every single day? He was so scared. He was no hero. He was a scared kid, but he believed in you.”
“It doesn’t matter if he was scared. He did his job; that made him a man. That made him as much a man as there is.”
“I’d have a little less man, who is alive now and could sleep with me, and be father to the children I never had…
“It doesn’t make much sense. But I was just taught to hurt no man except the man who hurt me and mine. I have no other star to steer by. That and to do my duty as I understand it. If I followed those two rules, I’d be okay.
It was so quiet you’d have thought it was the last second before a nuclear bomb was to go off, ending life on this earth.
Something came into her eyes and onto her face that he’d never seen before; it was pain.
“And I suppose the joke is, none of us care about that kind of man, the kind that you want to be. What we want is the kind that would stick around and be there the next morning. Mow the grass. Bring home a paycheck. That kind of man. And I see how funny that is now,” she said, her anguish suddenly palpable.
“You come in here, and I care for you, patch you up, and hide your car and get myself so deep into this I can never, ever get out, and never, ever have a normal life… and you don’t care. You have to go off. And be a ‘man’.”
After a time, he said, “I didn’t just come here because I had to. I came because I wanted to. A long time ago in Vietnam when Donny Fenn showed me his young wife’s picture, I had a moment where I hated him for having such a woman waiting for him. A part of me wanted him not to make it, and wanted to have you for me. But that passed when I saw what a damn fine man he was, and how he deserved the very very best. And he had it, I see that now.”
She touched him. A woman hadn’t touched him in years, really TOUCHED him so that he could feel her wanting in it. Maybe no woman had ever touched him like that. It had been many years.
“What do you want from me, Sergeant?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It makes going back to it hard. Truth is, I never ever stopped thinking about that picture and the fine woman Donny Fenn had waiting for him.”
“That’s why you kept writing?”
“I suppose it is. And you’d just send ‘em back, unopened.”
“I knew if I opened them, I was lost.”
“Are you lost now?”
“No, I don’t suppose so. I know where I’m headed. I can’t stop it. Straight into catastrophe, and I don’t even want to stop it.”
He drew her to him. In the kiss there was an extraordinary sense of release. He felt himself sliding away, down a drain, surrounded by warm, urgent, healing liquids. He thought he’d slide until he died. He was also overwhelmed by smoothness. Everything about her was smooth; she was smooth everywhere, he’d never imagined that a person could be so smooth.
The explosion, so long in coming, seemed to build until it could not be held back, and bucked out of him in a series of emptying spasms. He was falling through floors toward solid earth, each one halting him for just a splinter of a second; and then he fell through to another one, and then another. He fell and fell and fell, stunned at the distance of the fall and how far it took him from himself.
“My God,” he said.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
~~*!*~~

In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.
And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.
“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”
He snorted.
“I seem to be doing okay.”
“I’ll say,” she said.
They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.
The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.
The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, or in the mountains or desserts, maybe Arizona or South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.
“What are you thinking of?” She asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”
He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.
“Something from the Marines.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up; maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to. I have to be able to let go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose the edge.”
She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.
“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”
~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~ ~~*!*~~

{Geronimo Phoenix Green}

ONE River

by Wade Davis

~ Yage is taken often by some, infrequently by others. It is a most violent purge and often acts as a vomitive. Extremely bitter. Some say the after effects are an exhilaration and feeling of ease and well-being; others that it is a day of discomfort and headache. The bark of yage is scrapped off and small pieces are heated in water. The water is drunk. People take it alone or in small groups in houses, often with a sick person who is to be cured.

The curandero takes yage to see the proper herb or herbs the sick man needs. Usually taken alone, but in Puerto limon it is taken sometimes together with the bark of another vine – the chapropanga. It is said to be almost the same leaf, but a harder and stouter vine.

Schultz was not sure what to make of this, but two themes intrigued him. First was the realization that the healer embraced yage as a visionary medium and as a teacher. The plant made the diagnosis. It was a living being, and the Ingano acknowledged its magical resonance, as reflexively as he accepted the axioms of his own science.

Second, at the same time there was evidence here of pure empirical experimentation of a specificity he had never before encountered. If yage alone felt like the slow turning of the sky, the addition of chagropanga caused explosions of passion and dreams that collapsed one into another until finally, in the empty morning, only the birds remained, scarlet and crimson against the rising sun.
Schultz had no interest in measuring the penises, breasts, or skull size of the Kofan. Nor did he want to take their land, profit from their labour, or transform their souls.
He was alone and unarmed. He was a botanist who respected their knowledge of plants and who revered their forest. He described the Kofan leaders as “friendly, helpful, intelligent, trustworthy, and dedicated.”
These leaders are gentlemen, and all that is required to bring out their gentle manliness is reciprocal gentle manliness. Until the unsavoury veneer of western culture surreptitiously introduces the greed, deception and exploitation that so often accompanies the good of ways foreign to these men of the forests, they preserve characteristics that must only be looked upon with envy by modern civilized societies. ~
~~*!*~~

Point of Impact
by Stephen Hunter
~
It was technically the Fourth Battalion (Air-Ranger) of the First Brigade (Air-Ranger) of the elite Acatatl Division – but everybody called it Panther Battalion.
In April of 1991, the unit some 250 men, a tough blooded jungle-warfare-center-trained elite of the Salvadoran Armed Forces, had been pulled from front-line anti-guerilla duty in the mountains for an intensive course in psychological warfare techniques…. Through an elaborate scheme of diverted funds, this RamDyne outfit had gotten the contract. And for a month in an isolated jungle area, RamDyne operatives, veterans of some of the gaudiest special operations in history, had schooled the young Latinos in interrogation techniques, population control, intelligence gathering, ambush and counterambush, sniping and countersniping, a whole crash course in the dirty nitty-gritty of low-intensity warfare.
But there was a weird chemistry loose in that encampment.
“Unconfirmed reports insist,” read the FBI investigation, which was forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee but never put on the record as being too sensitive, “that American trainers exhorted these young soldiers with voodoo rituals, thought-control processes and animal sacrifices that went well beyond the range of normal professional military training.” The honcho appeared to be an ex-Green Beret lieutenant colonel named Raymond Shreck, of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a heavily decorated veteran of Korea…
~~*!*~~

{Miracle-Copper-Buddy~~Rock-Lake-Paw}

..

ONE River
by Wade Davis..
~
The other monolith of note was a six-foot columnar guardian statue, a warrior bearing a club across his chest in one hand and clasping a stone in the other. Above his head loomed a spirit being, protective and domineering. Again in each of the cheeks was a prominent bulge. Though more realistic than the “happy face,” the carving nevertheless shared the essence of the jaguar. The nostrils flared, the eyes glaring.
“It has to be coca,” I said as I ran my hand over the surface of the statue. There was no mistaking the resemblance of the stone cheeks to the face of a modern coquero. We looked around and soon found yet a third monolith with an obvious representation of coca chewing, this time a warrior guardian with a single quid held in the left cheek.
“What you’re looking at is the jungle coming into the mountains,” Tim said,
“the place of fear and the place of healing lifted into the highlands by the imagination of these people.”
“It looks like the whole place is tripping,” I replied foolishly.
“Reichel-Dolmatoff sort of thinks they were,” Tim said, referring to the Colombian anthropologist.
“The jaguar was sent to the world as a test of the will and integrity of the first humans. Like people, it is both good and evil. It can create and it can destroy. The jaguar is the force the shaman must confront. To do that he takes yage. That’s when things get interesting.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“If the shaman can tame the jaguar, the energy may be directed for the good. But if the dark aspect of the wild overcomes, the jaguar is transformed into a devouring monster, the image of our darkest selves. Either way the shaman and the jaguar become one and the same. Reichel-Delmatoff would say that the jaguar spirit must be mastered by everyone if the moral and social order is to be preserved. The wildest of instincts, like the impulses of the natural world, must be curbed if any society is to survive. That may be what these stones are all about.”
“You mean in guarding the dead, the statues reveal what it means to be alive?”
“Right. They also show the consequences of failure.”
We continued to wander over the site and came upon a large trough-shaped sarcophagus carved in stone. Beside it was a short but dramatic statue. The figure held a trophy skull in its hands and had a ferocious expression that suggested it had most definitely enjoyed ripping the head from the torso of its enemy.
“Whoever lived here didn’t have a lot of time or patience for compromise,” Tim said.
“They knew what they believed, and they knew it was true because the plant revealed it to them. That’s the key. And I think that’s what Burroughs came looking for; that’s what he wanted to find. Conviction. But he thought it would somehow be pleasant, like another kick.”
“You mean taking yage.”
“Yeah. Yage is many things, but pleasant isn’t one of them.”
~!~

Point of IMpact
by Stephen Hunter
~
In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.
And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.
“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”
He snorted.
“I seem to be doing okay.”
“I’ll say,” she said.
They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.
The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.
The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, or in the mountains or desserts, maybe Arizona or South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.
“What are you thinking of?” She asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”
He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.
“Something from the Marines.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up; maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to. I have to be able to get go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose the edge.”
She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.
“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”

~~~~~~~ *!!* ~~~~~~~

[1]
{Sean ST Cloud}
{PrinceCheyCrater--WolfCrossing}
~
It was November, cold and wet in west Arkansas, a miserable dawn following on a miserable night. Sleet whistled through the pines and collected on the humps of stone that jutted out of the earth; low overhead, angry clouds hurtled by. Now and then the wind would rush through the canyons between the trees and blow the sleet like gunsmoke. It was the day before hunting season.
Bob Lee Swagger had placed himself just off the last climb that led up to Hard Bargain Valley, that flat splurge of tabletop high in the Ouachitas, and he sat in perfect silence and perfect stillness against an old pin, the rifle across his knees. This was Bob’s first gift: the gift of stillness. He acquired it naturally, without instruction, from some inner pool where stress never reached. Back in ‘Nam he was something of a legend for the nearly animallike way he could will his body reactions down, stiller than death.
The cold had fought through his wool leggings and up and under his down vest and begun to climb up his spine, like a sly little mouse. He gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to let them chatter. Now and then his hip throbbed from a wound from long ago. He instructed his brain to ignore the phantom ache. He was beyond will. He was in some other place.
He was earning Tim…
You see, he’d tell you, if you were one of the two or three men in the world he talked to – old Sam Vincent, say, the ex-Polk County prosecutor, or maybe Doc LeMieux, the dentist, or Vernon Tell, the sheriff – you can’t just shoot an animal. Shootings the easy part. Any city dick can sit in a stand, drink hot coffee and wait till some doe goes prancing by, close enough to touch, and then put out the muzzle of his Warl-Mart rifle and squeeze-jerk the trigger and blow a quart of her guts out and find her three counties away, bled out, her eyes still somehow beaming dumb pain.
You earned your shot, Bob would tell you, by letting whatever was happening to the animal happen to you and for however long. Fair was fair, after all.
…
Tim was TOUGH, Bob knew, and that was the kindest word he had for anybody, living or dead.
Bob was in his seventeenth hour of sitting. He had sat all night in the cold; and when, about four, sleet had started, he still sat. He was so cold and wet he was hardly alive, and now and again a picture of another time would come up before his eyes but always, he’d shake it out, keeping himself set on what lay ahead 150 yards.
Come on, you old bastard, he was thinking, I’m earning you.
Then he saw something. But it was only a doe and her fawn and in their lazy, confident, stupid animal way they came down the trail from the hill and began to move on down to graze in the lower forest, where some lucky city fool would certainly kill them.
Bob just sat there, next to his tree.
~~*!*~~

[2]
{Shibumy Buddy Cloud}
~
Dr. Dobbler swallowed, trying to read the mystery in Colonel Shreck’s eyes. But as always, Shreck sat there with a fierce scowl masking his blunt features, radiating power and impatience and somehow scaring everybody in the room. Shreck was scary. He was the scariest man Dobbler had ever known, scarier even than Russel Isandhlwana, the dope dealer who had raped Dobbler in the showers of Norfolk State Penitentiary in Massachusetts and made the doctor his punk for a very, very long three months.
The planners of RamDyne Security sat in front of the darkened room; the brutish Jack Payne, the second scariest man in the world, sat across the table; and that was all, such a tiny team for the immense and melancholy task that lay ahead of them.
On a small screen, four faces had been projected, now glowing in the dark. Each represented a hundred other possibilities; these men had been discovered by Research, investigated at length by Plans, watched by the pros from Operations, and then winnowed to this sullen quartet. It was Dobbler’s job to break them down psychologically for Colonel Raymond Shreck’s final decision.
Each of the final four had a flaw, of course. Dr. Dobbler pointed these out. He was, after all, still a psychiatrist, if now uncertified. Flaws were his profession.
“Too narcisstic,” he said of one. “He spends too much on his hair. Never trust a man in a seventy-five dollar haircut. He expects to be treated special. We need somebody who is special but has never been treated special.
As for Number 2, “Too smart. Brilliant, tactically brilliant. But always playing the games. Always thinking ahead. Never at rest.”
Of the third, “Wonderfully stupid. But slow. Exactly what we need so far as certain qualities are required, and experienced in the technical area. Obedient as a dog. But slow. “Too slow, too literal, too eager to please. Too rigid.”
Jack Payne was a dour, nasty-looking little man, tattooed and remote, with blank, tiny eyes in his meaty face. He was enormously strong, with a pain threshold that was off the charts. His specialty was getting things done, no matter what.
“The details are impressive,” Dobbler was saying. “He killed eighty-seven men. That is, eighty-seven men stalked and taken under the most ferocious conditions. I think we’d all have to agree that’s impressive.”
There was a pause.
“I killed eighty-seven men in an afternoon,” Jack said.
Jack had been stuck in a long siege at an A-team camp in the southern highlands, and in the last days the gooks had thrown human wave attacks at them.
Dobbler was trembling, Jack could see. He still trembled when the colonel addressed him directly sometimes. Jack almost laughed. He smelled fear on the psychiatrist. He loved the odour of other men’s fear.
But Dobbler pressed ahead. “This is none other than Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, USMC, retired, of Blue Eye, Arkansas. They called him ‘Bob the Nailer’. He was the United States Marine Corps’s second leading individual killer in Vietnam. Gentlemen, I give you the great American sniper.”

~~*!*~~
[3]
{Dillon ST Kivo}

..
On the screen, the four faces vanished; and then Bob’s young face suddenly appeared.
“He’s twenty-six, on his third tour of Vietnam,” said Dr. Dobbler.


“It’s June tenth, 1972. He’s just officially killed his thirty-ninth and fortieth men, though unofficially the total is far higher.”
The slide showed a raw young face, lean and sullen. The eyes were slits, the skin tight, the mouth a hyphen; there was something somehow Southern in the bone structure. He looked mean, too, and very competent, without a lick of humour, with no patience for outsiders, with a willingness to fight anyone who pushed him too far. A boonie hat was pressed back on his head, revealing a thatch of crewcut. He wore rumpled utilities with globe and anchor inscribed on the pocket, and trapped proudly in the joint of his left arm so that it lay along the length of his forearm and was cupped in his hand at the trigger guard and comb was a black, heavy-barrelled rifle with a long telescopic sight.
Dobbler looked at the boy on the screen: it was the same expressionless face you saw on the white-trash tough guys, the human tattoo museums and born-to-kill bikers and assault-with-intent pros who did their time in the joint as easily as a vacation, whereas he himself had nearly died from it. That was the first shock of a cultured man: that in such savagery, some people not only survived but actually thrived.
“Please note, it’s not Robert Lee Swagger, his father named him Bob Lee – he gets quite angry when people call him Robert. And he likes to be called ‘Bob’, not Bob Lee. He’s very proud of his father, although he must only vaguely remember him. Earl Swagger won the Congressional Medal of Honour on Iwo Jima in World War Two and was an Arkansas state trooper, killed in the line of duty in 1955, when Bob was nine. The boy’s mother returned from Little Rock to the family farm outside Blue Eye, in Polk County, in western Arkansas, where she and her mother and Bob managed a threadbare existence.
“Bob is, in many ways, a child of the embarrassing Second Amendment, and he fits the profile of other great American gun heroes – both Alvin York and Audie Murphy come to mind.
“In 1964, having graduated from high school where he got – this is perhaps not as amazing as it seems – excellent grades, Bob turned down a college scholarship and instead joined the United States Marines, just in time for the Vietnam War.
“He did a tour in 1966 as an infantry lance corporal and was wounded twice; he did one in 1968, during Tet, as a recon patrol leader, doing a lot of dangerous work up near the DMZ. In 1971, at Camp Perry, Ohio, Bob Lee was the national-thousand yard century rifle champion. It got him noticed. He returned to Vietnam in late 1971 to the Scout-Sniper platoon, Headquarters Company, Twenty-Sixth Regiment, First Marine Division, operating outside Da Nang.”
He clicked a button.
The tele-screen displayed a business card with a neat block of print under the silhouette of a telescopic rifle.
It said:
WE DEAL IN LEAD, FRIEND.
~~SCOUT-SNIPER PLATOON ~~
~ HEADQUARTERS COMPANY ~
~ FIRST MARENES ~

“The line was stolen from Steve McQueen in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. It was his platoon’s calling card, part of the First Marine’s Psywar operations in its region, left in prominent places in the area where Bob and his men were operating, usually in the left hand of corpses dropped by a single bullet in the chest. Scout-Sniper of the First was the most proficient unit of professional killers this country had ever sponsored, at least on an individual basis. In the six years it operated, it is said to have killed over one thousand seven hundred fifty enemy soldiers. Itself, it only counted forty-six men in its ranks over those years. A sergeant named Karl Hitchcock, with ninety-three confirmed kills, was highest; Bob, five years later, was second, with his eighty-seven; but there were several other snipers in the sixties and more than a dozen in the fifties.
“As for Bob, I’ll only sketch the high points. He evidently did a few jobs for the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, liquidating hardcore infrastructure people, Vietcong tax collectors and regional chieftans and the like. So he is not unfamiliar with the operations of professional intelligence agencies. But his common targets were rank-and-file North Vietnamese regulars operating in the area. They even had a huge reward out for Bob, over fifty thousand piasters. But most astonishingly, he and his best friend and spotter, a lance corporal named Donny Fenn, once ambushed a North Vietnamese battalion which was rushing toward an isolated Special Forces camp. The weather was bad, and the jungle was triple canopy, so air support or evacuation was impossible. It was out of range of artillery. A thousand men, heading toward twelve on a hilltop. But Bob and his spotter were the only other friendly forces in the area. They tracked the North Vietnamese, and began taking out officers one at a time over a forty-eight-hour stretch in the An Loc Valley. The battalion never reached the Green Berets, and Swagger and his spotter made it out three days later. He killed over thirty men in that two-day adventure.
Even Payne, who tried never to be impressed, had to suck in some air.
“Cocksucker can shoot a little,” he said
~~*!*~~