Black Hornet

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Back in basic, which turned out to be fully a fifth of my military career, there was a guy named Robert, a gangly young man from Detroit so black he seemed polished. We were all out on the range one afternoon. They’d hauled an old World War II tank out there, and we were supposed to step up to the line, assemble a molotov cocktail and lob it into the tank through the open hatch. My own toss, most of our tosses, missed pretty sadly. Then Robert toed up there. He stood a few seconds looking off at the tank and hefting the bottle, getting the weight of it. Then with an easy overhand, he dropped his cocktail squarely into the tank: just like a man walking through a door. His perpetual smile jacked up a half degree, no more. “Sort of thing come in handy back home,” he said.

I remembered that, I think for the first time since it happened, when I read about the sniper.

His name was Terence Gully and he was twenty-three. He’d been in the Navy, but things hadn’t gone well for him there. Discrimination, he told friends, ex-employers, would-be employers, people on the streetcar or at bus stops. So at eleven A.M. on a bright fall day Gully had lugged a.44-caliber Magnum rifle and a duffel bag full of ammunition up an old fire escape onto the roof of The King’s Inn motel half a mile from City Hall, taken up position in a concrete cubicle there, and opened fire. Tourists and office workers on lunch break started going down before anyone knew what was happening. A Nebraska couple staying at the motel on their honeymoon, returning from breakfast. A couple of motel employees. A police officer who’d heard the first shots and rushed over from City Hall.

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