dollars, and the thirteen-year-old behind the cash register up front displayed no sense of irony at the sight of a man buying a box of six-five Carc in Dallas, Texas.
Back in the room in the Econo Lodge, Bob opened the box, took out the twenty cartridges, and brought one close to his eye. It looked like a small blunt-nosed missile, all gleaming and reflective in the fluorescent light. The bullet was abnormally long, given the length of the case, and spoke of the nineteenth century with its blunt tip, which was the latest thing in the 1890s.
He looked at it from a dozen angles, trying to uncover its secrets. It was a lynchpin of sorts, close enough to the original to stand in for the bullet that LHO had nominally used.
Though it was the magic bullet, today it didn’t look magic, just comically old-fashioned, with that rounded “meplat,” the technical term for bullet point. He recalled the number of wounds it had inflicted, hitting the president high in the back, passing through him, hitting Governor Connally, passing through him, passing through his wrist and smacking his leg, all without doing much damage to itself. From a certain angle that bullet—Warren Commission Exhibit No. 399—did look as “pristine” as the one three inches from Swagger’s eyes. But Bob recalled that from other angles, it became clear that the base of the bullet was severely mangled, crushed out of round by some impact, with core lead extruded from the interior by the impact. It was far from pristine but at the same time suspiciously intact.
Swagger had a melancholy fund of knowledge on what bullets did to bodies, his own and others’. To him, it was not nearly so mysteriouswhen he considered that the bullet did not strike bone until it left the governor’s body, when it struck his wrist, fracturing it, by which time it had slowed considerably from its initial muzzle velocity of two thousand feet per second and lost most of its power to crumple or break when colliding with hard structures.
Swagger couldn’t get away from the old-fashionedness of it. It was old-fashioned by the standards of 1963. It was eighty-two years old in theory and design when it struck the president. Lots of folks missed that; it was just another bullet to them.
Another way to look at the bullet was to consider its origin and purpose. Too many fools had written about the event without reference to those two issues. Too many fools thought a bullet was just a heavy piece of lead screwed into a cartridge and sent arbitrarily on its way. In fact, even in 1891 bullets and their design and performance were among the most overengineered items in the human inventory, thought about hard and mathematically; long before men had indoor plumbing or hot running water, they had substantive mathematical treatises on ballistic performance, principles, and laws. Ballistics were always the first thing the state’s mind turned to, not the last.
That bullet, like the one in its brass casing in his hand now, weighed 162 grains and consisted of copper gilding of unusual thickness over a lead core, 1.25 inches in length with a round nose. It was designed after great research and experimentation to perform a certain military job, which the Italian general staff believed would be of importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was nothing arbitrary about it. It wasn’t designed just “to kill” but to kill a particular enemy in a particular environment.
It occurred to Swagger that to understand WC399, he had to understand the military realities of the Italian army in 1891, when the round was adopted as the standard infantry cartridge, during the general European upgrade of that era from single-shot muskets to magazine-fed bolt actions, such as the Mauser K98, the French Lebel, the British Enfield, and eventually, the American Springfield.
Who was the Italian general staff planning to fight, and in what environment? The Italians have never been
Back in the room in the Econo Lodge, Bob opened the box, took out the twenty cartridges, and brought one close to his eye. It looked like a small blunt-nosed missile, all gleaming and reflective in the fluorescent light. The bullet was abnormally long, given the length of the case, and spoke of the nineteenth century with its blunt tip, which was the latest thing in the 1890s.
He looked at it from a dozen angles, trying to uncover its secrets. It was a lynchpin of sorts, close enough to the original to stand in for the bullet that LHO had nominally used.
Though it was the magic bullet, today it didn’t look magic, just comically old-fashioned, with that rounded “meplat,” the technical term for bullet point. He recalled the number of wounds it had inflicted, hitting the president high in the back, passing through him, hitting Governor Connally, passing through him, passing through his wrist and smacking his leg, all without doing much damage to itself. From a certain angle that bullet—Warren Commission Exhibit No. 399—did look as “pristine” as the one three inches from Swagger’s eyes. But Bob recalled that from other angles, it became clear that the base of the bullet was severely mangled, crushed out of round by some impact, with core lead extruded from the interior by the impact. It was far from pristine but at the same time suspiciously intact.
Swagger had a melancholy fund of knowledge on what bullets did to bodies, his own and others’. To him, it was not nearly so mysteriouswhen he considered that the bullet did not strike bone until it left the governor’s body, when it struck his wrist, fracturing it, by which time it had slowed considerably from its initial muzzle velocity of two thousand feet per second and lost most of its power to crumple or break when colliding with hard structures.
Swagger couldn’t get away from the old-fashionedness of it. It was old-fashioned by the standards of 1963. It was eighty-two years old in theory and design when it struck the president. Lots of folks missed that; it was just another bullet to them.
Another way to look at the bullet was to consider its origin and purpose. Too many fools had written about the event without reference to those two issues. Too many fools thought a bullet was just a heavy piece of lead screwed into a cartridge and sent arbitrarily on its way. In fact, even in 1891 bullets and their design and performance were among the most overengineered items in the human inventory, thought about hard and mathematically; long before men had indoor plumbing or hot running water, they had substantive mathematical treatises on ballistic performance, principles, and laws. Ballistics were always the first thing the state’s mind turned to, not the last.
That bullet, like the one in its brass casing in his hand now, weighed 162 grains and consisted of copper gilding of unusual thickness over a lead core, 1.25 inches in length with a round nose. It was designed after great research and experimentation to perform a certain military job, which the Italian general staff believed would be of importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was nothing arbitrary about it. It wasn’t designed just “to kill” but to kill a particular enemy in a particular environment.
It occurred to Swagger that to understand WC399, he had to understand the military realities of the Italian army in 1891, when the round was adopted as the standard infantry cartridge, during the general European upgrade of that era from single-shot muskets to magazine-fed bolt actions, such as the Mauser K98, the French Lebel, the British Enfield, and eventually, the American Springfield.
Who was the Italian general staff planning to fight, and in what environment? The Italians have never been
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