Free-Fire Zone (10 page)

He is smiling now, too, and smoking and nodding. “We're going to be able to work together just fine, son. You will learn that you get a lot of slack from me, a lot of free-run if you just give me honesty and effort. You will be on a long leash. Free-fire means free-fire now. The brass want body counts. They do not want American body counts. Our job is to make those two wishes come true.”

This is making me smile too hard.

“I see you are smiling. That's a good thing. But in light of this squad's history I don't encourage you to get too giddy there, Rudi. It's a fact of life that the people you think you know, you do not know. The people you think you could never know, you may well know them all too well. What you think is most likely always wrong. Do you see a lesson in there somewhere, private?”

I was really hoping I had left lessons back in high school, which was about fifty years ago now. But I believe I know what he's getting at.

“Don't think, sir?”

“Perfect. You are the perfect soldier, son.”

Wow. Is that the key? I wish I knew that before. I
would have enlisted when I was nine. I'd have General Westmoreland's job by now.

“Unless you have any questions, you can go now, Rudi. But I want you to know that you can come and ask me anything at any time. Communication is key. Understood?”

“Understood,” I say.

“How's the leg, by the way?”

“Good,” I say. “Perfect. Ready to go out and do some stomping.” Then, I turn to go.

“And hey,” he calls just as I get through the doorway.

“Yes?”

“You are the finest Marine in the whole outfit. That's the word, and I believe the word.”

I don't say anything to Silva, because what are you supposed to say to that? I do say something to myself, though, inside. I say:
How much you want to bet he said that same thing to each guy, one by one by one by whoever?
Okay, maybe not
every
one, but still.

As I make my way back to our quarters, I have to shake my head in disbelief at how Cpl. McClean could come away from a conversation with that man thinking that we were going to have difficulties ahead. Makes me realize just how far away I feel from grasping this situation right now.

I hear, as I near the hooch, a lot of commotion. It is angry commotion, and the kind you quick-up your step to see.

I rush around to the side of our hooch, the narrow strip of dirt that runs between it and the corrugated metal wall of the storage building behind us. There's a fight going on. It's between Marquette and Gillespie, and it is furious. I've never seen so many punches thrown in such a short span of time in my life, and I grew up watching ice hockey. Both guys are shirtless, so they can't get a grip on each other. They are slippery with sweat and blood, so there's not much to do but punch.

And they are hammering, while all the other guys stand around them, watching and murmuring low enough to not attract a whole big lot of attention. It's also like hockey in that the authorities will let a lot of this go on without intervening, to let the boys get it out, as long as they're not too public about it. The thinking is they will get it out, and that will be that.

They are getting it out all right. Especially Gillespie. He is taking some hits, but he is dishing out probably two-for-one in the punching, and it seems like every shot he gets through gets there with a fire and precision and hate that is already making him the winner though he has not finished yet with the punishment.

Marquette's forehead is bleeding from a massive gash over his left eye, and his mouth is so pulpy it looks like somebody is force-feeding him overripe tomatoes. Sunshine has a shiner for a left eye, but not much else for damage. As Marquette loses steam and drops his hands some, Gillespie finds new inspiration and throws his whole self behind a vicious left hand that knows just exactly what its mission is.

I am about five feet away, and I can hear the crisp snap as Marquette's nose is broken.

It is, truly, stomach churning, in a way that catches me completely by surprise. My stomach is doing flips and my knees are shaky, seeing one of our own guys destroying another, watching the blood puddle up in the sand between them. The corporals are both loving it, but Hunter looks shocked into numbness.

Squid, though, is a picture of horror. His right hand is covering his mouth, and his eyes are all soupy with near-tears.

The punching stops. With Gillespie, it is voluntary, but for Marquette's part there is no choice involved. There is a brief pause, then Sunshine takes two steps straight back, just in time for Marquette to fall almost right onto the winner's toes.

You know what that was? That was violence. Real violence. More than the other war stuff.

“Yours'll come, Gillespie,” Marquette says from face-down in the mud. He sounds like he's talking through Jell-O and grit and lumpy mashed potatoes.

Gillespie leans down over him, says in a rasp, “Call me Sunshine.”

He turns, picks up his shirt, and leaves without another word, headed, I would guess, for the showers. The corporals huddle-walk in the opposite direction, talking all low and excited. Hunter inches over and crouches down near Marquette as he tries to get up. Marquette makes it to his hands and knees, then just stays there for several seconds until Hunter helps him the rest of the way to his feet. They make their way around to the door of the hooch, where Hunter will for sure be the good man nurse until he can talk Marquette into visiting the good gal nurse.

Squid stands there, like he's petrified. Standing, staring at the stupid bloody mud on the ground. Flies are on it already, which seems both repulsive and perfect to me.

I step over to Squid, push his hand down from his mouth. “Don't be a baby,” I say. “Or, at least, don't let anybody see you being a baby.”

He keeps staring, shaking his head a little. So I grab him by the front tail of his shirt, and I tow him, tugging
him along behind me all the way back to Lt. Silva's hooch. I knock on the door frame. We enter the fog.

“You said I could ask you anything, sir?”

“You can always ask.”

“Could you send Squid home, sir? He has less than two weeks left as it is. He's already done enough and seen enough, and the truth is that I won't be letting him do anything dangerous or useful or anything that will put him within spitting distance of sniffing distance of harm's way, so he's no more use to us and could even be a hindrance, what with me having to look out for him and all. And his dad's not doing so good and he really needs to get back and see him. And … no beating around any bushes, sir?”

“Absolutely none, private.”

“This is frankly not a situation that can benefit the boy at all now.”

Silva lights a cigarette off a cigarette, blows smoke straight up into the air as if there is a free space up there anywhere.

“And if I say you will have to put in twice the effort over the coming weeks to make up for Squid's lost manpower?”

“I say, fair enough,” I say.

Squid says nothing. Doesn't appear quite capable at the moment.

“Rudi, do you think young Squid here might do something drastic if he can't get away from this place ASAP?” He has a comically earnest look on his face as he asks this.

“I wouldn't care to speculate on such a thing, lieutenant,” I say. “At this point, I wouldn't speculate on anything or anyone in Vietnam.”

I
may well go down as the soldier who went through the greatest number of nicknames during his tour of Vietnam.

There is no more play left in this squad, and that is beyond dispute. Nicknames don't come with the same bounce they did before. Even when we call Gillespie Sunshine to his face now, it's not because it's a funny joke — which it is — but more because we're almost afraid not to.

Mine is something wildly different now, and it comes, in fact, from Sunshine.

We are out on patrol, which we do nearly every morning now with Lt. Silva. He refuses to let us hang day after day at the base, getting somehow both bored and tense, like we did before. He does his research, his homework, and somehow manages to get us assignments that more or less straddle the line between dangerous and pointless. Most of the time we visit villages that intelligence suggests are swinging in the
breeze between friendly and hostile. To do this day after day is a guarantee that you don't lose your edge, because dropping your guard is well known to be the express route to dead.

I have never yet worked out a reliable method for deciding which of the local people are innocently going about the business of living and which are hoping to skin me like a rabbit supper. Really, I have seen families floating by on a river in a sampan and they couldn't look any more innocent if they had Winnie the Pooh and Tigger and Christopher Robin on board serving cupcakes. Then, twenty meters downstream, those same people unload a handful of grenades at an American River Monitor like the boat my pal Morris is on and half the crew are dead. Of course, the family winds up dead, too, but that hardly makes it all worthwhile, does it?

It makes you tense, is what it does. It makes you possibly not all the way sane. You have to find a way to deal with it. Every single guy here has to find a way.

I guess I found a way without even knowing it.

“Holy
moly
,” Cpl. McClean says when he kicks at what looks like a suitcase handle sticking out of the dirt. It is just outside a hut, a hut like a hundred other
huts we've seen, in a tiny abandoned village we have just combed for personnel and weapons. He reaches down, brushes away some leaf cover, and we find the handle attached to a door.

Which, we realize, is attached to a tunnel.

“Oh boy, oh boy,” Lt. Silva says. “I have been looking for these things forever. There are said to be
thousands
of miles of these tunnels, men. Mostly up in the central highlands, but all over the rest of the country as well, and yet my luck's so rotten I never ever come across them.”

“Until now,” Hunter says.

“Until now,” Silva says excitedly.

“So what do you suppose is in there?” Cherry asks.

“Anything and everything,” Silva says. “The more extensive ones I've heard about are built over two or even three levels. They got kitchens down there, and bathrooms, workshops for building stuff, and room after room for storing weapons and ammunition. Some of these things are so sophisticated they really contain whole miniature cities, and can serve as delivery depots for stuff arriving here all the way from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia.”

“And some of them are just little ol' burrows under little ol' nothin' villages,” Marquette says flatly.

“And some of them are that,” Silva says.

McClean pulls up the lid to reveal a wood-framed hole about eighteen inches by eighteen inches. And very, very dark.

“Pretty inviting,” says Sunshine.

“Indeed,” says Silva.

Now, here's how it is with me, how it's been since basically the explosion, the shift in command, the fight, the whole change of scene here: I don't talk much. I've decided it's a soldier's job to take orders, to listen about twenty times as much as he talks. And so I will exchange information, I will communicate in a helpful and professional manner, but beyond that … the idea of just talking to the other guys, without a specific reason, never appeals to me much. I'd just as soon keep to myself. I'm not rude or impolite, not mean or snarly. I would say even that in my way I might be the best mannered man in this outfit. Like a silent and gentle monk, most of the time.

My nickname for the past two weeks has been Private Monk.

Hunter, I would consider a friend. I talk to him here and there without a compelling reason to. I would bet just about anything that Hunter hasn't killed anybody he wasn't supposed to. As for all the rest up and down that line?

I couldn't tell you a thing for sure. But I would imagine that whatever they have done, each one of them would tell you they believed they did the right thing, for the right reason. And they'd believe it, no doubt about it.

“This has to be investigated,” Lt. Silva says about the tunnel.

A few things are obvious right out of the chute. Sunshine, Marquette, and Silva are definitely too big for the job, and probably McClean as well. That leaves me, Cherry, and Hunter, and Cpl. Cherry wouldn't go into a tunnel if you filled it with water and set him on fire. Possibly no corporal in the entire corps would, from what I've been able to gather.

Here's another thing I'm aware of, as I look at Hunter go a bit whiter at the prospect of the tunnel: It is time for me to speak.

“Lt. Silva, as I understand it a man cannot be sent down into one of them tunnels unless he volunteers to do so.”

Silva smiles. “You understand correctly, private.”

“I'm going down that tunnel, sir. Like yourself, I've been hearing about these tunnels for a long time without encountering one. And like you, I am very excited at the discovery. But unlike you, lieutenant, I am built for the job.”

Now Hunter smiles, though he tries not to.

“Are you calling me fat, private?” Lt. Silva says.

For a second I panic, then I calm as I see Silva grinning like a skeleton head with a cigarette clenched between his teeth. There isn't any fat on him. He's just big.

“I do believe that's more words than Private Monk has spoken all month,” Sunshine says.

“Come on, come on,” I say, and find a weird kind of franticness come over me, an itch to get down that tunnel. “Let's get me kitted out for this job, men,” I say.

“Right,” Silva says. “We need a light, a pistol, a knife …”

I get more excited with every item he lists. I'm getting some kind of mania coming over me, rushing from the ground up. Heart's pounding, head's spinning, but there's nothing bad about what's happening to me because I'm seeing right now with a clarity I haven't had for a long time, if ever.

I am supposed to be doing this, right now. I was meant for this. I feel as correct about going under the ground in the next few minutes as if I was some kind of giant diamond-head drill bit gonna bore all the way to the center of the earth.

And I think it shows.

“Look at this boy, wouldja?” Sunshine says. “Who is this guy? This is a whole other-dimension Rudi we are seeing here. Second-dimension Rudi. Rudi 2-D, that's who we have here.”

I like it as soon as I hear it.

I like it more than all my other names combined.

Rudi 2-D. That's who's going down into this tunnel. The original Rudi never could have done this in a million years. The original test-failing, fight-losing, pants-wetting, dead-weight loser Rudi could never have done this, ever, ever. In any life. Ever.

And what's more. What's more? Most other people couldn't do this, either. Not on their best, bravest day.

“Thanks, man,” Hunter says as he secures the flashlight to my chest with some white medical tape. When I am in there crawling, this will act like the headlight on an underground train.

“No problem, man,” I say. “Happy to do it.”

“I didn't even know that thing about needing volunteers for this. That true?”

“True, but I would've done it anyway.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn't have. Even if they ordered me. I'd have let them court martial me first.”

“Ah,” I say, shoving him away, “no, you wouldn't.”

He just grins, and I figure, yeah, he probably would have.

Sunshine has detached his bayonet and shoved it into my hand. He is grinning and shaking his head at the same time. “Go get 'em,” he says.

Lt. Silva detaches his own sidearm from his hip, checks the clip, then slaps it back into place before handing it over. “Some guys get all the fun,” he says.

I nod at him. Silva would do this, and so would Sunshine. That's it.

I am sitting on the edge of the hole, about to be lowered down, when a thought flashes in my head, because I am still — at least for another second, until I drop down under the ground of this country on the opposite side of life from my life — I am still one little small part the sad Rudy-Judy from Boston:

Morris would never do this.

Beck would never do this.

Arthur and Teddy and every other fathead who threw my books and pencils and tuna sandwiches on the street would never do this no matter even if they weren't fat.

I am the only one who would do this.

Me and Ivan.

Ivan and me.

Lt. Silva and Sunshine grab me firmly by the wrists and begin lowering me into the hole. The others stand guard, over them and over me, but still keep looking
back to steal glances. They have me gripped pretty well as they lean in, lean over, lean down, and my vision sees the regular blue and green world rise, then shrink, then become an eighteen-by-eighteen window straight to sky.

The men holding me are extended all the way down. I, too, am extended all the way, hanging on to them, reaching for bottom with my toes.

I have no idea right now, in this mystery shaft, where bottom might be.

“Let me go,” I say to the men.

“You feel floor?” Silva says.

“Just drop me,” I say. “I'm sure it's here somewhere.”

After a two-second pause, which probably involves shrugging, they drop me.

Yeoww.
I feel the rush of my organs surprising themselves by surging up through my body, then grunt as I crash to the earth. I figure there was about a six-foot drop between where my feet dangled and where they land. The bump and the surprise of it mean my legs collapse under me when I hit. But I can't even execute a proper fall, since the shaft is too narrow. It's like crash-landing inside a barrel, and I wind up in a semi-crouch.

“Okay?” Silva whispers, and we both know even this much communication could get a guy killed.

“Yeah,” I say, and that's the end of that. I can't see anything, so I feel all around me, the moist ancient-scented dirt crumbling in my hands until, in the space behind my knees, I feel where this vertical road turns onto the horizontal one. I twist and torque until I get myself into position, and I'm in.

I lie still for several seconds, listening. Listening for anything at all. I have the semiautomatic pistol in my right hand, and the knife in my left. I don't turn on the flashlight — my neck beam — until I am convinced nobody's going to be staring right at me when I do.

But I feel this much: There is life in here. I can feel this place breathing.

I reach in, like I am about to pinch my own Adam's apple, and snap on the light.

There
are
eyes staring right back at me.

I gasp, and try like a maniac to crawl in reverse. Rats. Rats, rats, which are unpleasant and disgusting when you see them entering the subway at Park Street Station at night, but are
horrors
when they are four inches from your face with fifteen feet of Southeast Asia hanging over you.

I can see one, two, three of them up close, and detect movement farther down, but when I back away like a panicked cockroach it is clear that I am more bothered by the situation than they are. They sniff and stare in
my direction, but it doesn't seem like anybody is looking to make any false moves. That's what they would say in the gangster movies,
nobody make any false moves
, and since I always found that funny on Sunday afternoon TV, I am going to hang on to that thought while I make my way through this.

Once I am reasonably sure that the situation is as calm as it could be, I reverse direction — and all human impulse — working my way deeper into the tunnel. Right into the teeth of the rats, you might say.

My flesh tingles as I go.
No false moves
,
guys
. They spread along the edges, up the walls, over my back. That was a false move. That was a very false move. But I push on.

I crawl on my belly for what is probably two hundred yards. The rats get routine, even when I can't see them. It is their place. At least it means, if the rats are here, then the snakes probably aren't. There is a famous joke here, that there are about a hundred different varieties of snake in Vietnam and ninety-nine of them are poisonous. The other one swallows you whole.

But rats make a good snake early-warning system.

Which is why I get real worried when I realize the rats are gone. All of a sudden, like their mother called them all home for supper, they aren't anywhere to be seen or, more importantly, to be felt.

There is no air down here. I am burning up, but practically liquefying at the same time with the humidity. The only reason I can breathe at all, I imagine, is that there are vents located throughout the system, because these guys thought of pretty much everything. I have even heard that they have small chimneys cut up through the terrain for when they do their cooking. Of course, all of these ingenious airways are also making it possible for all these mosquitoes and spiders and ants and I don't want to think about what elses to be sharing the space with me at this moment.

My skin all over is getting caked with earth. It's starting to feel like I have a coating of soft clay plastered over me, making my pores feel all plugged, making it even harder to feel like I can get a good breath.