166Myth, Spit, and the Flickswanting to know how he was wounded, he sheepishly tells them that he shot himself while on the way to the shower. Unlike the story of Hager wounded foot, which serves to make a larger political point, Bob wound was dramatized as simply a dumb accident, and his embarrassment about how he got it is a major element of his character at this point in the m. Not having lived up to his own self-styled macho image, Bob begins �acting out� as a studly tough guy around his buddies and his wife, eventually threatening to kill Sally. At st glance, it would appear that the discrepancies between what Salt got from Hager and what he actually wrote for the screenplay were simply due his picking and choosing what he wanted out of the interview. But he constructed �Bob� less from what Bill Hager had said about himself than from what Hager wife said about him. Salt learned about Terry Hager in his October interview with Bill. About a week later, he began interviewing Terry and, from the available records, it appears he spent more time with Terry Hager than any other single interviewee. Terry and Bill had gotten married when she was sixteen and Bill was in Vietnam. The marriage took place by proxy in Las Vegas, and it is the basis for the scene in Coming Home where Sally and her friend Vi go bar hopping after Vi receives a letter from Dink, her boyfriend in Vietnam, saying he wants to get married. By 1974, when Salt interviewed Terry, she had left Bill and was ending an involvement with another Vietnam veteran, Richard. Richard was a paraplegic.10 At the beginning of Salt interview with Terry Hager, they ramble a bit about paraplegics, the loss of manhood, and the adjustment that paraplegics have to make with respect to sexual dysfunction. It soon becomes clear that, for Salt, speaking about the physical paralysis of paraplegics is a way of speaking metaphorically about the psychological and emotional paralysis of all Vietnam veterans. It is almost as if Salt has already decided that the returning veteran in his script has to be a dysfunctional character and that, in order to write the character, he has to be able to imagine his prototype, Bill Hager, as being disabled. The conversation between Salt and Terry slides so imperceptively from talking about physical impairment to talking about what
