In the end, I chose that, if only because it was mine, and began without much more of an idea. I just started typing and whenever I reached a stalling point, I invented a gunfight or a new major character. I had no idea I was changing my life forever, and for the next few years it seemed like the biggest mistake I ever made.

Point of Impact was a bitch to write-so many cuckoos to hide, and they had to pop out at just the right time. The book just got worse and worse. I wrote a two-hundred-page sequence set in the bayous of Louisiana and realized it had nothing to do with anything. I junked it. Ugh. Since I am congenitally lazy, seeing all that work disappear was a particularly crushing experience. I don’t know where Nick Memphis came from; he was on no outline or note-to-self before the moment he appeared in the book. I don’t even know where the name came from, and I have no idea what the derivation of “ Memphis ” would be. Is he an Egyptian or a Tennessean? I have no idea. He just showed up on a particularly desperate evening and kicked his way into the book and wouldn’t leave. A good thing too.

The book’s editor, a brilliant pro at Bantam named Ann Harris, later confided to me that she’d been really unimpressed with the first hundred or so pages of manuscript, until Nick arrived. Then, she observed, it picked up considerably, became more pointed, more incisive, more vigorous in its writing. Everywhere Nick appeared, the book worked; everywhere he didn’t, ZZZZZZ.

And I know why ZZZZZZ was the appropriate response. It was all Bob Lee Swagger’s fault.

Bob Lee, of course, drifted in from Charles Henderson’s Marine Sniper, which told the story of the great Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock. Henderson ’s book is well written and gripping, of course, but it is more than that: it somehow communicates the psychological weight-you might even say spiritual weight-that a sniper carries everywhere. He is, after all, not the designated marksman but the designated killer. He is the one who sees through a 10-power magnifier the impact of 168 grains of metal going at 2,000 feet per second, the tiny hole it drills as it enters, the dam it breaks as it exits, followed by the slow, graceless tumble to earth. I was fascinated by that act, and I was horrified by it, but most of all I was horrified by my fascination with that act.

The facts on Carlos Hathcock were straightforward: career Marine NCO from Arkansas, two tours in ’ Nam, the first as an MP. It was during the second, after he had won the Wimbledon Cup (that is, the national thousand-yard shooting match), that he became a sniper and achieved ninety-three kills. He became known as the leading sniper in Vietnam (it turned out, much later, that he wasn’t); he also, at least according to Henderson, pulled off some special-ops missions, such as taking out a VC general and, on one occasion, ambushing a VC platoon and killing everyone in it, both brilliant feats of arms. But he suffered two grievous wounds during his year of hunting men. The first was psychological: he lost one of his most gifted spotters, a young man named Johnny Burke. Then he himself was burned seriously when a vehicle he was in detonated a mine. Heroically, he helped get men out of the wrecked and blazing thing even though he was hurt. Later-and why later? another story-he was granted a Silver Star for the effort.

So there was Bob Lee: from Arkansas, professional Marine NCO, a supremely brave and efficient sniper with a couple of spectacular feats of arms that became legendary, then seriously wounded in mind-his lost spotter-and body-the burns. I saw him in a bitter exile, alone and aloof, a recovered drunk, and I knew the emotional trajectory of the book would be his eventual reentry into society, his discovery of love, his engagement, his realization that there were still things worth fighting for. All that was in the first aimless, tortured draft.

And it was awful.

Bob was not alive.

The problem, I realized eventually, had to do with what artists call the “living line” as opposed to the “dead line.” A “dead line” is a tracing. It renders a reasonable facsimile of the shape of a thing, but it represents no engagement of the imagination of the artist. It is not spontaneous, surprising, independent. It’s just dumbly there; that’s all. And that’s what I had, this crude tracing of Carlos Hathcock laboriously inserted into an unruly thousand pages of manuscript. (I am sparing you the tales of my technical tribulations and the disk I managed to embalm in jelly as I struggled through my first book written on computer, so there is some mercy in the world.) Bob Lee had all of the Carlos benchmarks, but he was as cold and dull as a stone.

People say to me: “Bob Lee Swagger? Carlos Hathcock, right?” Well, yes and no. The key to Bob Lee Swagger turned out to be not all the places he intersected with Carlos Hathcock, but all the places he deviated from him. It was in the act of breaking away from Carlos Hathcock that he became a freestanding portrait of a complex man, worthy and capable of sustaining an elaborate narrative.

As I reimagined him, I came up with a figure that I suspect the actual Carlos Hathcock wouldn’t recognize. I saw him as a kind of Faustian intellectual of war. He had seen things and done things and learned things that no man before ever had. But it was at great cost: his self-removal from society, his self-inflected deadness of soul. I gave him outward manifestations of these turmoils: he became an ex-drunk, and his drunkenness (I know a little about this) had not been the merry, charming kind full of bon mots and toasts and scintillating wit; no, it was dark, surly, violent, self-lacerating, maybe even killing. And thus his greatest victory hadn’t been over the North Vietnamese (I gave him a score of 87, because I wanted it clear to people who knew these things that I wasn’t offering him as “better” than Carlos), but over himself, in putting that behind him.

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.