Free-Fire Zone Read online

  And my mom’s machine wouldn’t practically take the guy’s whole insides and bring them to the outside, like I’m doing.

  My mom’s other machine is what I am now. Mom’s killing machine.

  The guy falls backward, falls right off my blade onto the seat of his bloody pants because, man, there is blood everywhere. He sits there just soaking in it, soaking and oozing and covering his belly as if he can still hold it all together, hold it all in, which, stupid as I am, even I would never think.

  He’s looking up at me, and I’m looking down at him. This is one tough, tough doomed dude, I’m thinking as I look at him. I can’t see anything in his face really, because I have to admit I have trouble reading these guys’ faces, but I know what we have in common is that he was here to kill me and I was here to kill him and so I win.

  The other thing we have in common for just these few seconds is the blood. I can see the way the blood is pumping out of him, pulsing in small waves while his heart tries to the end to do its job. Good heart, VC man, good heart. And the pulsing is in exact, exact rhythm with my own blood, pulsing puh-puh-puh-puh in my ears and eyes and fingers and neck, so hard I might start oozing all over the place too, so hard it’s breaking like waves in my ears, like it might come rushing right on out my ears.

  Then the guys are all gathered around behind me, and they’re chanting my name, not roaring but whisper-chanting, dangerous jungle style.

  “Ruu-dee, Ruu-dee, Ruu-dee …”

  And it all gets right inside me, cranking me up higher.

  And I do it, do it up higher.

  I do it again, but I go for the neck. I lunge at my enemy, stick my bayonet in just below his ear, and I pump and stab and see and saw until this is like nothing I’ve ever seen, like nobody anywhere has ever seen, more blood than there is anywhere, and my enemy, my victory, is propped up almost sitting-like against a tree and almost without the head that he had before he met me.

  Eventually, the chanting stops. Everything stops, except my mad mental blood pressure which feels to me like it’s thumping the ground and rustling the trees all around.

  “Let’s move out,” Cpl. McClean says kind of solemn-like.

  I look back at the faces around me and I think I’ve done something here, because these are not the faces I ever saw before. I did something. Scared people. Impressed people. Shocked and awed and somethinged people, but I changed them, that’s for sure, and while I never know anything, right this minute I sure know something, and that is that things have changed. Right now. Inside and out.

  I wish for all the world that Ivan was here now. That’s what I’m wishing most, right at this big, big-change minute of my life.

  “I’ll be right behind you, corporal,” I say quietly, through heavy, fast breath that I fight to control.

  He does a bit of a double-take, but just a bit. Then he nods. “Five minutes, private,” he says to me. “We can’t be leaving you behind. Not even you. So you catch up to us in five minutes. That’s an order.”

  I can take an order. Any order, any degree of difficulty, any time, I can take an order. I am a United States Marine.

  “Yes, sir.”

  When the men are just far enough away, I sit. I sit right down, in the pond of blood, next to my defeated enemy soldier, my first confirmed kill that should probably count as more than one because I killed him so much.

  “Sorry,” I say to him. “And thank you.”

  I make a joke to him, asking for my “you’re welcome.” And when I don’t get it I question his manners and ask him if he was raised in a barn, because that’s what my mother always said to rudeness. I say it because I guess I’m hoping a joke will make my hands stop shaking. It doesn’t.

  “Well, I’m gonna have to leave you, soldier,” I say, rolling forward onto my knees. “And sorry, but I’ll be taking this weapon.”

  It’s what you do. No disrespect, it’s just what you do.

  I go to remove the rifle, which is still, amazingly, in that awkward grip of his.

  And more amazingly, it won’t come. I tug again, and his slick purple-red hands move with it. That freaks me out a bit, so I pull my hand away. Then, slowly and gently, I reach in again and raise the gun up.

  And I see. His hands come up with the weapon, because they’re secured to the weapon. They’re tied, strapped with wire, to the gun. The kind of wire they use to bind prisoners’ hands. Then I look down to his bare feet. Which are also bound together with wire, and the wire connected to the tree five feet away.

  He wasn’t a real fighter. At least not by the time I met him. He was fodder. Like one of those poor sap goats that villagers will tie up to lure a rogue tiger.

  It was all set up.

  For me.

  I do catch up, within the five minutes, just as ordered. I fall into line at the back, and I’m blowing air because I had to run to make it, so my arrival is not quite the stealthy silent Marine progress we like to make in the jungle. They must know I’m right behind them.

  But you’d think they didn’t. Not a single head turns, not a voice speaks. The guys just walk on as if they don’t notice me or anything special at all about what happened.

  I notice. Drums are beating in my head. They beat-beat-beat just as sure as if we were marching with a military band escort, only the drums beating aren’t those crisp and strict ones like you hear at parades. They’re wild things, tribal things, and they’re making my head hurt and getting louder-louder. I notice it’s the feet. The feet, boots on the ground, the pounding and marching of the men in front of me is making the drums wail and my skull is cracking with it and it’s the heat, too. And I’m sweating now as if I’m a candy apple, I’m dipped in hot caramel, or whatever that red stuff is that they dip the candy apples in but I feel like I’m just exactly that, that apple at exactly that moment when it’s dipped. In the burning hot melted candy.

  And it stings my eyes and it’s the sweat. And the blood. Of course. I look at my hands while the boot stomps are cracking my candy apple head. I’m absolutely covered in that guy’s blood. Covered in it. Covered in it and it’s melting down all over me from my head right on down over me and it’s sticky and thick in the heat. But I could be convinced, with the look of it and the way everything feels, that it’s actually seeping out of me, out of the cracks in my skull.

  “Are you with us, Cabbage?” It’s Hunter. He’s slowed way down because apparently I’ve slowed way down, and the United States Marine Corps never leaves a man behind. Hunter is leaning close to my face. To the awfulness that my bloody face must be.

  “I’m with us,” I say. “Sure, I’m with us.”

  Hunter’s all right. Hunter’s a good guy and I like him.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Of course. What do you think?”

  “Okay, then congratulations, I guess. First confirmed kill.”

  I feel the blood uncake on my lips when I smile. “Confirmed? You think?”

  At first I see Hunter pull his face away from me. He has his hand on my back, I now notice, pushing my speed a little. We’ve definitely dropped off the pace. He’s looking at me in a weird, trying-to-figure-it-out kind of way.

  Then his face relaxes, and he pats my back. “Uh, yeah, I’d say we can confirm the kill. I can never keep track of the religions they got all over the place here, but if that guy believed in reincarnation then I think you snuffed out his next life and the one after that, too.”

  “Good for me,” I say. It comes out just as stupid as it sounds.

  “Who’s Ivan?” Hunter asks as we near the back of the pack again.

  “What?” He freaks me out a little with this.

  “Ivan. Before you dropped back I was listening to you whispering and growling and muttering stuff to somebody named Ivan.”

  I push Hunter’s hand off my back, march a little more quickly so that I reach the company just before he does and he has to bring up the rear now. I’m not going to be last anymore.

  I’m
not going to be last ever, anymore.

  “Ivan’s my brother,” I say, even though ’til now I’ve always been an only child. “He’s a killer, just like me. We’re killer brothers.”

  “Well, Ivan would be proud of ya, Cabbage.”

  “He would be, you’re right,” I say. “He would, and he will.”

  I hate writing letters. I look at the writing after I’ve done it and I feel like the stupidest guy ever. I can’t help thinking a guy who writes like that should not be allowed to cross the street by himself.

  Good thing there are pretty much no streets around here.

  And I have to write. After the war I might never do it again, but I have to be in contact with certain people right now or it’s worse even than being dead.

  Brother Ivan,

  Some days here everything surprises you. Some days nothing does. Have you noticed that? Well no because nothing ever surprises you because you are always ready for everything, right, and if you’re not ready for it then it’s probably worse for the surprise than it is for you.

  I’m almost like your equal now so what do you think of that?

  See, because this is a letter and not a faceto-face I can tell you that and not be scared that you are going to murder me. I should have wrote to you all the time back home, would of saved me a lot of beatings right? Ha ha.

  But you know what? It’s almost like I am not scared. Of anything. Even you.

  Do you feel like you could do just anything here, Ivan? I mean more than even before since you could always do whatever you wanted to? I mean, do you feel like you could do whatever not just because there seems to be no laws here but also because you just feel it? Feel it, I mean. That you could do anything if you needed to. Or even if you didn’t need to you could do it anyway? Do you know what I mean? You know what I mean. I don’t know if Morris would know what I mean and I am surely sure Beck wouldn’t know what I mean but I think you know what I mean.

  You would be proud of me here, Ivan. You would be so proud of me that I am proud just thinking about how proud of me you would be. Does that make sense? Doesn’t matter, right because things don’t have to make sense here.

  Except it does. It all does. Everything here has started to make sense to me. More than anything ever did anywhere. And I owe all that to you. I owe all that I am to you. I might be in Canada if it wasn’t for you you know that? Of course you know that. Only you know and I know certain stuff isn’t that right Ivan?

  I dedicated one to you, buddy. A kill. Just so you know. I bet nobody ever did that for you before I bet that. I just thought of it, it came into my head and it was right. For Ivan, I said, to Ivan. Like you are a god. Like you are. How does that feel? Well there is more where that came from. Lots and lots and lots more cause I feel like I could kill this whole country by myself if I got the order to. I am great at that. I have never been great at anything almost never even been pretty good at anything but I am great great great at taking orders no matter what they are. But don’t worry I will leave some for you.

  Some guys here are no good at taking orders and I hate that. I can’t stand or understand that. Don’t you hate that?

  I’m different you know. You wouldn’t recognize me. I am so different a man now and I am never going back. And I am gonna keep paying you back for this for all you done for all you made of me.

  Be proud of me okay? Just do that.

  Your brother,

  Rudi

  I have three excellent guys I spend a lot of my time with. Squid and Hunter and Marquette are guys you’d almost want to spend time with even if you didn’t need them covering your back with an M-16 every time you went to the bathroom. Gillespie, I don’t know about. He’s mostly okay, but I get a feeling from him that’s different. He’s even worse about rules than the rest of them — and that’s pretty bad. Can’t stand to follow orders. Or maybe he’s just selective about who he wants giving them out, which makes Marine life sort of complicated. He thinks everybody above the rank of corporal is as dangerous as the enemy. And whenever you talk to him he smiles, really hard and constant, and it never feels like a smile at all. That’s probably the part I don’t like most. I would feel a lot better about him if he just let his face tell the truth instead of doing all that grinning. His nickname is Sunshine, but not when he’s around to hear it.

  But he’s all right, Gillespie. As far as guys go. The way I hear it, we’re pretty lucky, at this point in the war, at this spot in-country, that we aren’t surrounded by Americans who all want to kill each other. You know how it is when it’s really hot in the city for a long time in the summer? How everybody gets on everybody else’s nerves and the crime rate goes up and all that? That’s what it’s like here. Only everybody’s armed to the teeth, and it’s hotter than wherever else you could be.

  But we don’t have it all bad at this spot at this time. Chu Lai actually has one of the nicest beaches I’ve ever seen. And when it’s face-melt hot, there’s nothing like the beach.

  “Maybe if the man could give you the feeling that he knew what he was doing, it would be different.” Marquette is talking. He’s leading our little formation as we hit the last part of the road before the sand. It is a little bit comical, our formation. We take our guns with us everywhere, of course, but otherwise, we are traveling light. Except for our boxer shorts, we are a formation of nearly naked guys, with guns slung over our shoulders. It is a beach trip, after all.

  “Jupp is worse than useless,” Gillespie pipes up. “I don’t know what he’s even doing here.”

  “Killing time, man,” Hunter says. “Just like everybody else.”

  “No,” Gillespie says. “No, no, not like everybody else. Not like me. Not like ol’ Cabbage here. We keep getting sent into that jungle and all them creepy little villages and killing everybody like they tell us to and getting shot at. But Jupp, man, he never goes nowhere. Never. He just orders and directs and shouts and assigns. Then he shrinks back into his hooch until it’s time for chow.”

  We have reached the beach, and we don’t break stride. Guns and all, the five of us march right down over the burning sand and straight into the surf, where we continue the discussion in waist-high water.

  “Who’s got the soap?” Squid asks. This is also a hygiene trip.

  Marquette whips the new bar of soap at Squid. It bounces off his chest and falls under the water. We don’t have the floaty kind of soap, so Squid has to dive right under after it.

  “Good thing he’s a sea creature,” Hunter says.

  “And how ’bout those corporals?” Marquette says, and now it’s pretty clearly become a game of how furious can we get Sunshine.

  Sunshine doesn’t let us down.

  “Slugs!” he shouts, punching the ocean hard enough to send Squid shooting up out of it like he’s performing at the aquarium or something. “Those guys … it’s like they aren’t even here as part of the Marines. Like they’re on some kind of separate contract working for some other operation altogether. It’s like they’re self-employed.”

  “At least they go out,” I say. “They go into the jungle and do stuff sometimes.”

  “Yeah, when they feel like it,” Gillespie says.

  “Yeah,” Hunter says, “but they do feel like it from time to time. Not like the lieutenant.”

  They won’t let Sunshine relax today. This seems kind of dangerous, and I take a plunge underwater when I see his head go all purple.

  “— if they would let me!” he’s screaming when I come back up. The other guys are laughing, and the way the one bar of soap is being tossed around, this feels — really, really weirdly — like one of the more social gatherings I’ve been at here. Nobody even looks up as a helicopter from the base thup-thups past above us, drowning out Gillespie’s rant. Well, almost drowning it out.

  One by one we all get cleaned up and cooled off and one by one we migrate out of the water and up to the beach. I see Hunter up there, making snow angels in the sand, which I suppose should be called sa
nd angels.

  “Almost over anyway,” Marquette says, catching up to me in the shallows.

  “Huh?”

  “This,” he says, gesturing at Vietnam. “There’s not much left of it. You can feel it. Nobody’s really even trying anymore because everybody knows we’re wasting our time. These third-world peons are making us look stupid. If I was Jupp, I’d stay in my bed all the time, too. Not because I’m a lazy coward like him, but because I’m too smart to waste my time and maybe my life on a war that nobody but a moron thinks that we might win at this point.”

  I keep walking, splashing, then padding on the wet sand that goes from cool to hot in three steps.

  “I’m trying,” I say, working in more ways than one to be cool. “I’m trying, like I’ve always been trying, like I’m gonna keep on trying until somebody tells me it’s over. And yeah, I believe we can win.”

  Funny enough, Private Marquette of the United States Marine Corps seems unimpressed by my statement of dedication to the cause. In fact, he seems kind of irritated.

  “Good for you, Cabbage. Good for you, hero.”

  I keep walking toward the angel. Behind us, Gillespie is still raving to Squid about the military command structure.

  “Is there something wrong with that?” I say to Marquette, and I have to admit this is the angriest I’ve been at any time in Vietnam. Even when I killed somebody, I wasn’t this angry.

  “No, nothing wrong with that at all, Cabbage.” I don’t like my nickname right now. For the first time, the way he’s saying it, I don’t like it at all.

  “Good,” I say, and I say it strong because I feel like I accomplished something there.

  “I mean, somebody’s got to kill all those dangerous, unarmed, bound-up little prisoners for us. You keep up the good work, and we’ll all sleep better.”

  Controlled fury. That is what a Marine is supposed to harness. He is not supposed to lose control of his emotions because that’s when he makes bad decisions.

  I am a Marine. I am a very good Marine.