Free-Fire Zone Read online

  You gotta stop saying you are doing everything for me. It is great of you to say so, but I don’t want that, man, you understand? You gotta do stuff for yourself, become the soldier you want to be for yourself. If I have helped you in any way to become more of a man and be less afraid and be maybe a little tougher (well, let’s hope a LOT tougher) than you were before you shipped out, then that is enough for me to know. If you serve your country and serve your unit and serve yourself in an honorable and successful manner then that is all that anybody can ask. Do your job the best you can and grow up and then get home again. I am proud of you. I was proud of you when you got on the boat out of Oakland (really, it was only then that I completely believed) instead of the bus to Canada. From this point on you don’t need to impress me any further. Got it?

  Things are going ok here. I’m a sniper, which is good.

  So, I mean it, if you get yourself all killed or injured I will slap you silly ya little jerk.

  Best wishes,

  Ivan

  P.S. I mean it.

  I am laughing out loud now because of course he doesn’t mean it, which is making my leg hurt even more. Which makes me laugh even more because this injury would make Ivan slap me silly — both because of all what he just said, and because slapping me silly was just always something he liked to do. I miss it. It’s time for my medication.

  The hospital at the base at Chu Lai is probably about as fancy as you could expect for being right smack in the middle of everything. It’s kind of like a small airplane hangar with a row of big baby cribs lined up along each side, and long fluorescent strip lights hanging over each one. The nurse who has been taking care of me mostly is named Carolyn and she is very tall and slim with black moppy hair, and while she is a little bit intimidating from my angle she is kind enough to be much smaller than she is.

  “Here ya go, dingbat,” she says, bringing me my little cup of pain pills and another cup of water. I swallow both quickly while she leans on the rails of my baby crib. I find the rails embarrassing, but do enjoy the leaning. She’s called me dingbat from the minute I got here even though she couldn’t even have known yet.

  “When I get out of here would you like to go out with me sometime?” I ask, and I get a rush from just the asking. I can’t even believe I’m doing it. Because that’s just not like me at all, to even be able to talk to a tall girl. Somehow, now it’s easy.

  “You know, I never get asked that,” she says.

  “Really? Wow. That’s great because I would imagine with all the —”

  “See now, sweetie, I was just joking with you there. Know what I mean? There are like fifty million servicemen for every nurse, and by the time I see them they are not only wounded and needy and looking for their mommy, but they are also medicated. So, sweet as you are … I am awfully more popular than I need to be already. But on the bright side, you do have visitors.”

  “Cabbage!” the guys yelp before Carolyn shushes them down. It’s Hunter and Squid and Marquette. Carolyn moves on to the next crib, and they all start giving me the eyes like I’m Mr. Lucky or something. Then all three produce what look like sharpened chopsticks and start poking me with them, hard.

  “Ow, I get it, ow, I get it,” I say, twisting as far away from them as my cage bed will allow me to. “I could go a long time without getting stabbed with sticks again, I can tell you that.”

  “Oh,” Hunter says, “about that. We have decided to change your nickname to Pincushion. How’s that, Cabbage?”

  “No,” I say. “As a matter of fact, you might want to consider calling me Rudi.”

  “Rudi?” Marquette says. “That’s a stupid name. Why would we want to call you that?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I suppose. What are you doing here, anyway? I thought I was GI Joke to you?”

  “You are GI Joke. But you’re our joke. And you got guts, Cabbage, I have to give you that. You ain’t satisfied to sit back and let somebody else do the dirty work, that’s for sure. So, even if you are a dummy, I can appreciate that.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “It’s nice to be appreciated.”

  “You are,” Squid says, and he hands me a coloring book and a box of crayons. It has sixty-four colors in it, which is a lot.

  I look up at him to try and tell if this is a joke gift, but he has such a giant stupid grin on his face I don’t suppose it matters much either way.

  And I don’t even feel like I need to embarrass myself further by telling them how much I still like coloring books when I’m bored. Especially Superman coloring books like this one.

  “Thanks, guys,” I say.

  “So,” Hunter asks, “how’s the leg? I gotta tell you, man, it was pretty disgusting to look at at first.”

  “At first?” I say. “How ’bout this?” I whip back the covers to show off my foot and leg, which are swollen to only about twice normal size now.

  “Ahhh.” All three brave warriors shrink away from the bed, recoiling as if I’ve released a deep-sea monster from under the sheet. Which is not far off.

  The color and texture of the leg is like a relief map of the central highlands, all swirly green and purple bruising, punctuated by splats of stitching and ooze leaking out yellow here and there onto the sheet.

  “Oh, put it away, put it away,” Marquette says, laughing and gagging at the same time.

  When I cover up again they return to my bedside.

  “The shots they give me to fight infection are the worst part,” I say. “Because of the dung they put on the spike tips, man, they have to give me regular injections they shoot right into the wounds. Kinda hurts, kinda a whole lot.”

  “Yeoo,” Squid says.

  “Yeoo is right. Man, I am itching to get back out there. How’s it all going, anyway?”

  “Eh,” Hunter says, “it’s kind of gone back to the way it was before. A lot of pointless patrols, a little bit of shooting into the trees, but nothing like all the fun we had when you were around.”

  “What about the corporals? The lieutenant?”

  “Please,” Marquette says, disgusted.

  “Things are kind of tense, kind of worse than before,” Hunter says. “Nobody talks to nobody else. Nobody seems to want to do anything but watch the clock tick off the days, and just get out.”

  “I got two and a half weeks, Cabbage,” Squid says brightly.

  “I know it,” I say, matching his tone but not quite his enthusiasm. I can’t shake the feeling that he was right before — a lot could happen in two and a half weeks.

  “And Sunshine, man,” Hunter says, “he’s darker than he ever was and getting worse all the time. He needs to do a lot more shooting than he’s doing now. Needs an outlet to blow off some very scary steam.”

  “Yeah,” Marquette says, looking partly cloudy himself at the moment. “I’ll tell you what, if somebody —”

  “Hey, dingbat,” Carolyn says, sweeping back in with more company, “you win our Private Popular prize today.”

  Walking right up to me behind her is Lt. Jupp.

  Marquette doesn’t even say anything as he turns and walks out.

  “Okay,” Squid says, leaving next. “Get better, man, and get back to us. I would hate to go home without fighting alongside you one more time, man, and that’s the truth.”

  I don’t know if I have heard a nicer compliment since I’ve been here. Or before that, either.

  “See, ya, Cabbage,” Hunter says, and swoops off.

  “Well, I guess that’s just the loneliness of command,” Jupp says, laughing without laughing. “If I come around every day, maybe the hospital will empty out completely and we’ll be at twice the strength in battle.”

  “Ah, lieutenant, they were just leaving anyway,” I say. “You’d be surprised how quick a talk between grunts can get stupid boring.”

  “Maybe I would,” he says, “maybe I wouldn’t.”

  “And besides,” I say, “I had a lot of serious paperwork to get to.” I hold up my Superman coloring book.
/>
  He smiles, in a kind of sad way I have not seen before. I didn’t want that.

  “How are you, Cabbage?” he says softly. I don’t want that, either. I want him to shout unnecessarily like he always does, because this other thing is making me uneasy. But I know he can’t shout because it’s a hospital.

  “I’m good, sir. Just getting through these last stages of healing so they’ll give me the all-clear to come back and fight for you.”

  He shakes his head. “You are something, private. A lot of men would want no part of coming back after what happened. You know … if you wanted to … this is enough of an injury to send you back to … where are you from again?”

  “Boston. And I don’t want to go there. I am a Marine, sir, and this is where I should be. Well, not here, exactly. I don’t like sleeping in a bed with side rails for one thing. But here in Vietnam, or wherever the fighting takes me, is where I belong.”

  There are a number of little things going on here that would look kind of nice to somebody just walking in but that I am finding not all that great. He’s being really nice, the lieutenant, in an odd way that seems to have him looking over his shoulder as if somebody might catch him at it. And a couple of times already he has patted me on the leg — the good one, not the one with the holes in it — while he’s talking to me.

  “You’re a good kid, Rudi,” he says. “And you are a good soldier. Best in this outfit, that’s for sure. Better than me, I can tell you that.”

  “Oh, jeez, lieutenant …”

  “No, no, it’s the truth. The thing is, with this war being what it is, with this force being what it is, it can be dispiriting. The Marines, frankly, have had to drop their standards lower and lower as this thing has dragged on, to the point where you don’t want to trust anybody with anything. I was different when I first joined up, different when I first came to Vietnam. This is my second tour, did you know that?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t. I heard some guys actually get out of here and then come back again of their own free will, but I don’t expect I run into them too often.”

  “Ha. Well, you’re looking at one right here. But I’ll tell you, kid, and this is important so listen close. I had just about bottomed out these past months, for all the good reasons. I’ve been just hanging on ’til I could be done with this whole insane thing and get back to the real world. In the meantime, I became a bad leader and a lousy fighting man. But you know what? Something about you, Rudi, has made me think I could still do something while I’m here. A man has to have something to drive him on, and I’ve decided you’re gonna be that something, or at least a big part of that something, during the remainder of my tour. I am going to make something of all this.”

  “All this, sir?”

  “All this. This situation. I am going to make something of it. I am going to get back to the fighting man I was. I am going to give it all I have. And before I go, I am going to give you all I have, to help you to become the best fighting man possible. Because I think you have a future in this, Marine. And because in all the time I’ve been here, you have given more of yourself to it than anyone I’ve seen.”

  I can’t do anything but stare at him. I can’t believe what I have heard, and I am a little bit choked up about it. It is beyond the point of weirdness to feel optimistic about war, but he has kind of given me that.

  He salutes me.

  I salute back.

  Then he offers me a firm handshake.

  “Thank you,” he says, then backs away. “See you back on the line soon, soldier.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, still a little thrown. I watch him walk away, all the way down between the lines of big baby beds.

  “So how was that, dingbat?” Carolyn says, passing by and tweaking my big toe on her way to somebody else.

  “It was good,” I say, my voice a little floaty as I dig into my box of sixty-four and open up my Superman book.

  I wanted to get back as soon as I could, and I wanted maybe to get back too soon.

  Squid is walking with me as I make my way out of the hospital and across the big compound that is the Chu Lai base. I could have taken a ride to my quarters, but I am feeling so good, so ready, and so lacking in fitness I figure a good hike is the best thing. Squid, being Squid, decided to come meet me and escort me home.

  Halfway there I am wondering how good an idea this really is.

  “That looks like a lot more of a limp than it was a few minutes ago,” he says, looking down at my leg for answers.

  “That’s ’cause it hurts a lot more than it did a few minutes ago.”

  “You sure you’re all right?” he asks.

  “Well, yes and no. I’m all right, meaning I should be out of the hospital. I’m not all right, meaning my leg is not as great as it was before the alligator bit it. It’s just gotta heal, man, and this is nothing but another stage in that process.”

  Or possibly I pushed to get out of the hospital just a little bit too early. Anyway, there’s no going back, so we go forward.

  By the time we reach the hooch I am as exhausted as I would normally be after a ten-mile hike. There is nobody around, which makes it a perfect time to throw myself down for some rest.

  “What do you think about getting something to eat?” Squid asks.

  “I’m good, man. They gave me a sandwich before shoving me on my way.”

  “Okay then. You want me to stick around? ’Cause if not I think I’ll try and get some chow since lunch is almost over.”

  “Go, man, go,” I say. “Thanks for the escort. I’ll see you later.”

  “Sure thing,” he says, and trots off to the mess.

  It’s funny, but my return here to the hooch, after not even that much time, feels important. Meaningful. Maybe it was the injury. The mission, the killings, becoming a real soldier and a real man. Maybe it was being separated from my squad for the first time, after being separated from my original squad of Ivan, Morris, and Beck. Maybe it was all of those things and more. But I feel like I am needed here, with these men, and I feel like I need them, too.

  I am thinking all this as I drift off, lying on my back, my arm over my eyes, smiling —

  Booo-boooooooom!

  The explosion doesn’t knock me out of bed, but my reaction to it sure does. That blast was close, as in right-around-the-corner close, and I hit the floor and remain there on all fours like a dozy dog for several seconds. Then there is commotion and chaos outside, and I jump up and grab my helmet and rifle and run toward the action along with everybody else.

  My leg is killing me when I get to the scene, but my leg killing me is nothing, man.

  Nothing.

  It’s Lt. Jupp’s quarters. Or it used to be. Now it is a smoldering hole in the ground.

  It’s called fragging.

  It has been around in different forms for probably as long as there have been armies. It is what happens when you put men in battle and under pressure, and you put some men in charge and tell other men they have to do whatever they are told. And all those men are armed and trained and highly dangerous. And some of those men disagree seriously with their superiors and some of those men hate their superiors and all of them have the opportunity to get away with something. Something like murder.

  In Vietnam, it got to be called fragging because it is often accomplished by throwing a fragmentation grenade into somebody’s space. That’s what Lt. Jupp got.

  Fragmented.

  In a way, I feel like I got that, too.

  But he’s the one who’s now in a zillion unpopular pieces, rather than just the one he was in before. He wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t. He wasn’t he wasn’t. He wasn’t a coward or a bully or a monster or a traitor or a dope or a racist or a communist or a clown or an oaf or an ogre or a tool or a waster or a whiner or a diner or a diddler or a fiddler or any of the fifty hundred thousand million other names I’ve heard here, hung on guys who other guys think should be dead. He wasn’t.

  He was loud. And he was worn out.
And he was coming back.

  He was on the right side. He was on our side.

  He was on my side.

  “Do you realize,” asks the very tall and very blond and very slouched man in the chair on the other side of the makeshift desk that is really more of a card table, “how many members of the NIS, among the several hundred thousand service personnel and several million indigenous individuals, are presently in the country of South Vietnam?”

  He is referring to the Naval Investigative Service, which is responsible for looking into possible crimes involving United States Navy and Marine Corps personnel. He is squeezing his great bony temples with his long bony fingers as he asks me this.

  “I would have no idea what the answer to that question is, sir.”

  He squeezes his temples some more. Sweat drains from them, like he is squeezing fresh lemonade from a lemon. I am thirsty.

  “Were you ever on a football team, son? Perhaps in high school or with a Pop Warner league?”

  “No, sir.” I would have thought he could have worked that out for himself already. If the guy knows what a jock looks like he knows it doesn’t look like me. But he does seem awfully tired.

  “Know anybody else who was on a team?”

  “Ivan,” I say. “Ivan was great. He played both ways. All-conference as both a linebacker and fullback.”

  “Swell,” he says. “Good for Ivan. Well, if you look back at that team, those on the offense plus those on defense, that is about how many members, total, of the NIS are here in-country.”

  Wow, I’m thinking.

  “Wow, sir.”

  “‘Wow.’ Yes. So, son, we need to be lean and hungry with our investigations. Right? You understand that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So, did you kill Lt. Jupp?”

  It makes me want to puke to even hear that question.

  “No, sir.”

  “You are aware that he was killed within the hour after you got back to your quarters?”

  “Yes, sir.”