He serves three tours in Vietnam, working with Special Operations, and earning the nickname "Bob the Nailer" for his uncanny ability with a rifle.
His most notable engagement occurred when a battalion of the North Vietnamese Army were closing on a lightly defended Special Forces base.
Swagger and his spotter, Lance Corporal Donny Fenn, delayed the battalion for two days until air support could arrive, killing more than 80 enemy troops before his ammunition ran out.
He became an alcoholic to numb his depression, which resulted in the break-up of his second marriage to Susan, and he retreated to a hermitic existence on family land near Blue Eye.
With the help of Nick Memphis, an FBI agent assigned to the case, and attorney Sam Vincent, an old friend of Earl Swagger, Bob Lee clears his name and destroy the people who set him up.
In this novel, Swagger travels to Japan to return a samurai sword recovered by his father in World War II to its rightful owner, but quickly finds himself wrapped up in yet another deadly plot.
The seventh Bob Lee Swagger novel, Dead Zero, released December 28, 2010, and is set in the current Global War on Terrorism.
A Marine sniper named Ray Cruz, on an assassination mission, is betrayed, and in the time after, the target, Ibrahim Zarzi, also known as "the beheader", becomes a prospective Afghan presidential candidate.
The loss of his wife and disappearance of the baby, it is theorized, motivated Swagger to take a third tour of duty, this time as a sniper, and establishing his legend.
Other elements in Dead Zero new to the Bob Lee Swagger novels are the inclusion of private security contractors and their presence in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
The term "dead zero" in sniper and precision shooting usage refers to the desirable state of affairs where after several trial shots (called "ranging shots") the horizontal part of the cross-hair on the reticle has been adjusted for the distance and elevation of the target, and the vertical part of the cross-hair has been adjusted for windage, and so the crossing of the two in the field of view of the shooter corresponds to the anticipated point of impact.
Bob and Nick Memphis uncover his secret work as an FBI agent during which he was involved in hunting down several famous bank robbers in the year 1934 as well as his downfall from success.