Free-Fire Zone Read online

  “I killed an enemy soldier.”

  He laughs at me, the kind of laugh with spit in it. That’s not supposed to happen anymore. I’m not in Boston anymore. I am a Marine. They’re not supposed to laugh like that.

  “You killed a piñata,” he says.

  I have my M-16 over my shoulder, like always. Usually, it just hangs against my back and I hardly know it’s there. But now, I feel it. Now, I know it’s there. I’m reaching behind me, feeling for it, gripping it.

  “I am a US Marine,” I say. “Which I guess is more than I can say for you.”

  He laughs again. He has to stop doing that. He has to.

  “You are a US joke,” he says.

  Of all the things that have happened to me, from the fright of my induction notice to the punishment of boot camp, to the shooting and the heat and the killing of the war, nothing has knocked me as sideways as I feel right this minute.

  Fourth grade. Fourth grade, second time. That was when I got to know my friends, my guys, Morris and Beck and especially Ivan. They showed up like angels — tough angels — right when I needed them. These two fifth-grade idiots, Arthur and Teddy, had me on my knees. On my knees in the gutter of Moraine Street among all the stuff from my book bag. They’d dumped all of it out — books, pencils, an oversize eraser that I got from the science museum, and half of a tuna-and-potato-chips sandwich that I was saving for cartoons when I got home ’cause there probably wasn’t much else there. Only now it was stepped on.

  I was praying. I was praying with my hands folded and my knees hurting from pebbles. Arthur and Teddy were forcing me to pray, because that’s the kind of thing that made them happy and I was the kind of guy that asked for it.

  Only when I prayed this time, it worked. They showed up. Like angels. And some people don’t believe in that kind of stuff, but I do — or I did, from the time those guys answered my prayer. Ivan and Beck and Morris chased those jerks away and let them know I was not to be their whipping boy ever again, and that was how we came together forever.

  Only they aren’t here now. And I suddenly feel like I’m on my knees on Moraine Street.

  I’m startled when I feel a quick, hard grip on my hand. I look down, where I had half swung my rifle around front without even realizing it. On my hand, on the gun, I see Gillespie’s hand. I turn to see him staring hard at me, but talking to Marquette, all as we keep walking up the beach.

  “Marquette, man,” Gillespie says, “why don’t you just do your own war your own way and leave Cabbage to do his his way. Right?”

  Marquette looks sideways at Gillespie. It feels tense, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Hey, I can do one of those,” Squid says as we come up on Hunter, who is now admiring his sand angel. Squid throws himself down next to it and begins flapping madly, with his gun at his side.

  Angels with guns. That seems kind of right to me.

  I throw myself down on the other side of Hunter’s angel and flap away with my arms and legs until I believe I have made a proper impression.

  I hop up. Squid keeps pumping, like he wants to indent himself deep enough for the folks at home to see it in the other side of the world.

  “What about you guys?” Hunter says to Gillespie and Marquette.

  “I don’t think so,” Gillespie says. “A Marine in a war zone lying on his back out in the wide open doesn’t sound like the sanest proposition.”

  That appears to have persuaded Marquette, who seems to want to declare the war over right now all by himself. He falls into line with the others, makes his impression, then he and Squid push up off the sand, trying not to disturb their work.

  “Arggh,” Marquette barks, turning awkwardly and contorting his shoulder as he falls sideways.

  Hunter helps him up, and it’s obvious that he’s done some damage to his shoulder. Gillespie laughs, a little low and cruel. Enough to get his message across. Then he leads the march back toward camp.

  Squid follows, then Marquette pretending hard not to be favoring his other shoulder, then Hunter. I linger a few ticks, admiring our sand work. I feel something good about our armed angels, about leaving our mark on the Chu Lai beach.

  And the fact that Marquette actually injured himself in this dangerous operation doesn’t hurt, either.

  Gentlemen, we got work to do,” says Cpl. Cherry.

  It is first thing in the morning, which is not quite as first thing as first thing used to be. It seems every week we are allowed to sleep in a little later if we feel like it, and if the heat lets us, and if the insects don’t become such whining, buzzing little alarm clocks that staying in bed is no treat at all.

  “What kind of work?” asks Hunter, up on his elbows on his bunk. “I hope it’s not another … hold on, did you say we?”

  “Yes I did, and what’s wrong with that?”

  One by one the guys are rising on their bunks, like a pod of prairie dogs with a coyote on the horizon.

  “Nothing’s wrong with it, exactly. It’s just that you don’t seem all that interested in going out on patrols much.”

  “Well maybe that’s because we don’t go out on sure-thing search and destroys much.”

  “What?” Gillespie says, hopping right up and jumping just about straight into his pants.

  “That’s right, kids: Search. And. Destroy. The kind of mission the big guys get.”

  And just like that, the whole hooch is transformed. We were a whole lot more House of Reptiles before the news, like a bunch of lizards basking on hot rocks. Now, it’s the House of Speed, everybody dressing, pulling on gear, arming up.

  “Stop that,” Hunter says, slapping my deodorant out of my hand. “Who do you need to smell pretty for anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You? To be honest, you’ve all been starting to get pretty rank smelling around here.”

  “Well if you don’t want to get pretty dead smelling, you better leave that deodorant right out of the equation. Charlie can smell that from a mile away.”

  I turn to Cpl. Cherry, who is still standing in the doorway like he’s in charge of supervising dress-up time.

  “It’s true, Cabbage,” he says. “And you better hope your soap isn’t too perfumey, either. The hunter becomes the prey pretty quickly in this jungle.”

  “Hey!” yells Hunter.

  Everybody is laughing now.

  It’s weird. I realize this. We’re as happy as a bunch of school kids on a field-trip day. Morale, which is something we hear discussed a great deal lately, seems to have been repaired with that one phrase: search and destroy.

  It is a whole different thing, the search-and-destroy mission. It means we have intelligence about an enemy installation — we know where they are, and we are supposed to ride in and blow the daylights out of them. It is the opposite of the scouting patrols that once made up the bulk of our duties. On those, there was the overwhelming feeling that, honestly, we were there as much to attract enemy fire as we were to do any real scouting. Because when somebody shoots at you, they tend to give their position away. It isn’t a very comforting feeling.

  Not that getting our guys shot up and blown up and all that was ever the plan, but the Marines are the Marines and we would do whatever it took to get the job accomplished, even if it cost lives.

  Somebody up top stopped feeling that way at some point. Word came down, and the word was: no more casualties. And so we’ve been getting more cautious.

  But while we don’t want to absorb any more casualties, nobody said anything about dishing out any less. In fact, body counts are the way we are keeping score now, and that too has come down from way up. And places where we used to have to go on tiptoe and try not to upset the locals even when the locals already wanted our scalps, well, a lot of those places have been designated free-fire zones now.

  I get goose bumps just thinking that in my head. Free-fire zones.

  Just like search and destroy, free-fire zones are just what they sound like they are — fire freely, gentlem
en, fire freely.

  “Well?” Cpl. McClean says, poking his head in the door behind Cherry. “Everybody tooled up?”

  Barks. Woofs and howls and yips and every other animal noise our talents will allow are the answers to that question.

  “Good, because our ride is here, and the lieutenant is rarin’ to go.”

  All noise stops as quick as if somebody lifted the needle off the record.

  “The who is rarin’ to what?” says Marquette.

  McClean gets a big, mean grin across his face. “That’s right, soldiers. This is an important mission.”

  Marquette claps his hands loudly once, then again, then rubs them together. “You mean this is an easy mission,” he says, and everybody breaks up laughing.

  Sorry, that would be almost everybody.

  “So you don’t need me, then,” Squid says, lying back down on his bunk half-dressed.

  “Everybody!” Cpl. Cherry barks. “We expect to see every one of you outside in ten minutes, ready to saddle up.”

  As the two corporals head on out, Squid just lies motionless.

  I make my way over to his bunk, crouch down beside him. I feel Hunter hovering over my shoulder while the other guys go on as if nothing is the matter.

  “What are you doing, man?” I ask Squid.

  “Sleeping this one out,” he says.

  “You can’t do that,” I say.

  “I’m gonna try.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Hunter says.

  “I thought this was all over,” Squid says. “We haven’t been doing nothing. I liked it. I told my dad it was over. I only got a month left, and I know how this stuff works. We see no action for ages, then I stick my head out there and get it shot off, just in time to go home. Just like the movies.”

  “It’s not like the movies,” I say. “Nothing here is anything like any movie I ever saw.”

  “Shut up already,” Marquette says. “Let him stay if he’s gonna be like that. We don’t need him.”

  “I only got a month left. I don’t want to search and destroy nothin’. I only got a month left, guys.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I think you mentioned that.”

  “I want to see my dad.”

  I mentioned that Squid is a good guy. He is probably the guy who is liked best in the squad, mostly because he never does a thing that anybody could get bothered about. He has never balked at an order, a request, a suggestion, even.

  Not ’til now.

  “Get up, Squid,” I say.

  “Easy, Cabbage,” Hunter says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Leave him there,” Marquette says. It’s not that he’s siding with Squid. He just doesn’t care. He is out the door with a slam.

  “Get up, Squid,” I say.

  “Listen, Squid,” Hunter says. “Did you hear that even Jupp is coming with us? You know what that means?”

  “It means he’s gonna order me to go, and I don’t care.”

  “No, it means if he’s out there with us this mission must be such a sure thing that you’ll be in more danger here on your bunk than out there with us.”

  Gillespie laughs out loud at that.

  I can’t laugh right now. It’s a good line, but it ain’t funny.

  “You and your dad can be whatever you want to be a month from now,” I say, leaning maybe a little too close to Squid’s face. “But right this minute you are a United States Marine. And you have received an order. We follow orders.”

  He just lies there, staring up at me with his scaredy eyes and his stupid squid-shaped skull.

  “You can do this,” I say.

  He attempts to roll over, away from me.

  Like a cobra, I react, snagging him by the tee shirt with both hands and pulling him around my way.

  I feel Hunter’s hand let go of my shoulder.

  “Hunter,” Squid says, kind of sad, kind of desperate, kind of infuriating. I hear the door slap shut and know Hunter’s left.

  “Gillespie,” Squid pleads, proving just how desperate he is.

  “The man’s right, Squid,” Gillespie says, the door squealing open again. “You are a Marine, man.”

  We’re alone now, and the pathetic look on Squid’s face is making me demented. I find myself staring at him hard, staring into his eyes. I get close to his face again, trying to, I don’t know, smell what’s inside him? I pull him still closer, and I see how afraid he is — really honestly afraid.

  Of war.

  Of not seeing his dad again.

  Of me.

  How far have I come, from home, from that life?

  I get this surge of power, of strength, of rage at Squid’s weakness, and I think: How awful to be like that. How sickening.

  “What would Ivan say to this?” I scream in his face, practically spitting on him. His features fold up into that pre-cry scrunch, and that is beyond the last straw.

  Smack. I slap poor decent Squid right across the face.

  Just like I was General Patton or something.

  Then I drag him out of his bunk, over to his locker. I pull a fresh shirt out and start wrestling it right onto him.

  “All right,” he says, his voice cracking but somehow at the same time strong. “All right, all right,” he says, then, catching me totally by surprise, he blasts me right in the chest with an explosive two-handed shove that sends me backward, into and over Gillespie’s bunk and onto the floor.

  When I get up, he is buttoning his shirt about as aggressively as a person can do that and looking at me with blood in his eyes. I am on my knees at the side of Gillespie’s bunk like I am saying my bedtime prayers.

  “Guess I’ll see you outside, then,” I say.

  He just glares at me, continues suiting up, and I head out.

  When I get outside, I see my guys about fifty yards away, piling into the rear of an M-113 armored troop carrier. This machine is usually part of the Army’s gear but more and more are being turned over to the South Vietnamese forces, the ARVN. We are working with our foreign allies today.

  I hurry to catch up, and when I reach the vehicle I get a kind of rush of excitement since I’ve never been in one before. It’s something between a truck and a tank, with all the armor plating made of aluminum to keep it light and fast. The corporals are standing like security guards at each side of the open back of the vehicle, and sitting up top manning the machine gun is an ARVN soldier. The door at the back is bottom-hinge, open and waiting for me like a small up ramp onto the expressway.

  Lt. Jupp is standing at the entrance like a greeter, or like he owns the thing personally. He is smiling at me. “Ready for the big time, Cabbage?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  I stand at the back, looking in before I mount the ramp. The guys on my fire team are inside, sitting, lined up on benches mounted along each wall. Everywhere else, floor to ceiling, under the benches and against the walls, firepower is packed and stacked. There looks to be enough artillery in this vehicle for each man on board to take out a small city himself. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if a rocket somehow hit this rolling munitions depot.

  We have mortar and 3.5-inch rocket launchers. We have Claymore anti-personnel mines and M-60 machine guns, M-79 grenade launchers, and — from what I can read on the sides of the crates toward the back under the benches — every type of grenade from white phosphorus to fragmentation and beehive shells that sound like gigantic murder bees when they come shooting out of the launcher.

  I must be staring stupid at it all because next thing I know Cpl. Cherry is snapping his fingers in front of my face, and everybody laughs out loud.

  “Right!” Lt. Jupp bellows like he likes to. “Is everyone here? Time to move out!”

  The rest of us have all boarded the vehicle, squeezed in on the benches. The ARVN driver has started it up. And we all look back in the direction of our hooch.

  “Well?” Lt. Jupp barks, about to climb up.

  Come on, Squid, man. Come on.
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  “Come on,” Hunter says, low but audible. “Come on….”

  Jupp is up. He’s about to close the back door.

  Then Squid comes barreling out of the hooch, still pulling his clothes and his gear all together, like he just made the decision ten seconds ago.

  “Squiiiiid!” Hunter yells, and all the guys whoop and cheer and hoot at him as he runs to catch up and finally just tumbles into the back of the vehicle, where Sunshine and I pull him all the way in and the trap is shut and we are on our way to the action.

  “What a stink wagon!” Marquette yells almost as soon as the door is pulled up. “Man, this is a stench.”

  He could not be more right about this. I mean, these guys smell. They — and I suppose possibly me — always smell. But now we’re sealed up in a small space, rolling along at a good clip — top speed for this machine is about forty miles per hour, which is pretty much flying for a tanklike beast — and bouncing all around and into each other. We’re laughing and roaring and reeking, in a way that hasn’t happened before. I don’t quite recognize it.

  “The testosterone in this thing is thick enough to cut with a bayonet,” Jupp declares.

  “I tried to put on deodorant,” I say, “but I wasn’t allowed.”

  “That would do you no good now, Cabbage,” he says, bellow-laughing. Lt. Jupp’s loudness is magnified, a lot, inside these aluminum walls. But for the moment and for once nobody seems bothered. “Jeez, if somebody lights a match in here we’re all barbecued.”

  I laugh along with everybody else, even as I am thinking about what I heard about the M-113. That despite the armor and the speed and all, with the fuel tank built right below where we’re sitting, we’re vulnerable. If we run over a land mine we will indeed be fried alive.

  I’m surely not the only one who knows about that and I am just as surely not the only one who doesn’t care. We are achieving something really unusual in my so-far limited wartime experience: a united sense of purpose. Nobody’s telling us we can’t win. Nobody’s telling us to back off or lay low or stay in bed. We’re going to the action and we’re going guns a’ blazin’, and it might not last long but as of now this unit of the USMC has got Semper Fi spirit and God help whoever gets in our way today.