Former Green Beret Don Pugsley wrote to me at great length about communications procedures from A camps. Charles H. “Hap” Hazard, a Sun artist and former Army intelligence enlisted man, translated a lot of stuff into Vietnamese for me, very helpfully. Dr. Jim Fisher introduced me to Dr. Charlie Partjens, an orthopedic surgeon, who discussed the physical realities of an old bullet with me. Bill Ochs, former Army sergeant, discussed something of far more intensity: the trauma of his own hip wound, acquired in action in RSVN. I really appreciate his willingness to let a stranger invade his privacy like that.
I should also thank authors who have come before me. Peter R. Senich, the Thucydides of sniper warfare, came out with The One-Shot War, a history of Marine sniper operations in Vietnam, just as I was beginning. Then Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg published Inside the VC and the NVA, which was very helpful for tough little Huu Co, senior colonel. Of course I’ve drawn from Charles Henderson’s Marine Sniper, and Joseph T. Ward’s Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam, as well as the standard history texts. I never spoke to any Marine snipers, however, because I needed to be free to envision Bob Lee Swagger as I wanted him to be, warts and all.
Last, in the professional realm, I must thank my brilliant, wonderful agent Esther Newberg of ICM and my great editor, Bill Thomas, of Doubleday. And something finally for the book’s dedicatee, John Burke, who was the great Carlos Hathcock’s spotter in Vietnam, and didn’t make it to DEROS. I never knew him but his story so moved me that I had to find a way to cast it into a book, and he became my Donny Fenn. So in a way this whole thing — this book and the three that proceeded it — all came from his sacrifice. Thanks, Marine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHEN HUNTER spent two years in the United States Army and since 1971 has been on the staff of the Baltimore Sun, where he is now the film critic. He is the author of nine other novels, including Dirty White Boys, Point of Impact, The Master Sniper, and Tapestry of Spies, and the nonfiction book Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem. He is the father of two children and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.