Free-Fire Zone (3 page)

I find myself sitting upright on the ground as the invading army disperses with the spoils of war. Sgt. Culverhouse takes inventory of all the rest of the stuff — the comics, the seeds, and playing cards and yo-yos and soaps and all the assorted items of donation from whatever source sent it. Nothing in our delivery is too hugely necessary for sustaining life, but all of it's designed to improve it just a little bit.

“This'll go a long way,” Culverhouse says as he assigns several villagers the task of moving it all wherever it needs to go. The sergeant speaks in what sounds to me like pretty confident Vietnamese — though it could just as well be a made-up language for all I know. I watch these folks, one older man and three women, interacting with the sergeant in a way that seems warm and polite and grateful and familiar but still, I don't know … foreign?
Foreign
is the word I would use. It's one of the more amazing bits of the war to me, the CAP program, and I can see here how and why it might work. It's practical. It seems like it has good intentions. And with the right people at the helm, people like Sgt. Culverhouse, I could see where it could do our most critical job — what they call “winning hearts and minds” — better than any other approach.

And then. And then, as I look at the interaction again, I think: I could never do this. I could never
understand
such foreign people the way we need to understand them.

I guess that's why I'm not a CAP guy.

Suddenly, the calm and nice gets smacked right off the board by angry shouting, in both English and Vietnamese and possibly in French, coming from a hut about thirty feet away. I get up and run a few steps behind the sergeant as he chases after it. I look back over my
shoulder and notice none of my guys are as curious about this as I am.

They've all been in-country longer than me.

“What, what, what?” Culverhouse shouts as he steps into the hut.

“He knows something, sarge,” the Marine inside snaps. In front of him, kneeling down, is an old Vietnamese man, who looks to me to be snarling up at the Marine. Though he also has his hands folded, like he's praying, or like he's pleading.

The sergeant stands there, taking it in, not appearing overly concerned. I take a step past him, farther into the small circular hut, where I have an equal view of everybody. The man on the ground says something — it sounds French — and the Marine growls furiously before punching the old guy right in the forehead, knocking him over backward.

“He knows what?” I blurt, shocked into butting in where I bet I'm not welcome.

The Marine turns to me, twists his face into a look of total shock at my ignorance. “Well, I don't know yet, do I? That's why I'm smacking him, stupid.”

I turn to the sergeant again. He looks impassive. I turn back to the others in time to see the Marine pulling the man back up into kneeling position. He looks at the sergeant while he does it.

“Who's the melon, anyway, sarge?” Meaning, me.

“Delivery boy from Chu Lai,” he says flatly.

So
that's
what I am.

The Marine smacks the man again, the man goes down again, and when he pulls him back up this time he presses the tip of a small local-type spear into that little cutout between the man's collarbones.

I've seen a few of these spears — Punji sticks — that guys have taken off of VC. Smelled them, too. The VC dip them in some kind of animal waste to give a guy the extra treat of infection along with the puncture.

“Krug,” Sergeant says, “that's probably enough for now.” Then, to me, “Old guy's VC.”

“How do you know that?” I ask.

I realize there's a way you can ask a question like that —
How do you know that?
— that can sound punky, really get up a guy's nose. But that is not how I ask. It is a genuine attempt by one Marine to learn something from another.

Sarge clearly doesn't hear it that way.

“We are professionals,” he says in a way that gives me the first chill I've had since I arrived in this part of the world. “And you are dismissed, private.”

And just like that, dismissed I am.

B
ecause of how slow things've been, I'd hoped to spend a little more time in Co Co. It would be good to learn about the local population, both from the people themselves and from the
professionals
who are putting so much into figuring them out. And, to be honest, I wouldn't have minded stretching out that moment of welcome and appreciation that we got from bringing goodies. For a minute it felt like those old news reels I used to watch of World War II Marines getting all the love from the world wherever they went. That hasn't happened here in this world and in this war as much as I'd hoped.

But the welcome mat is not out. It's a lesson I'm learning quick and hard, that moods change around here without the normal-world kind of warnings. You're a friend — you're a foe on account of a look — a word — a gesture that somehow questions something you shouldn't be questioning and that puts you on the other side of a line you didn't even know was drawn.

“Thank the lieutenant for me,” Sgt. Culverhouse says in a thankless way. I'm walking past my guys, who look confused, then catch on, falling in behind me.

Nobody had really planned on starting another eight-mile hike so soon after the previous eight-mile hike, but after about two seconds nobody looks entirely shocked about it, either. Like I said, they've all been here longer than me.

“Hearts and minds,” Squid says, as we start single-filing back northward.

“We win the hearts while we lose our minds,” Marquette adds. It's the first time I've heard it, but it is obviously not the first time they've said it.

We're maybe getting a little soft, a little casual due to all the lack of activity we've been enduring.
Lacktivity
is the term the guys have been using. But it may very well be an enemy ploy, and if it is it's an effective one because about three miles into the drudge of our march back, we are one hundred percent surprised when we walk practically right into two of our guys.

“Boo,” says Corporal Cherry, catching us so off guard he's already laughing loudly by the time we draw weapons. A normally functioning Marine squad would have shredded him with M-16 fire before he could've stopped us, but we're clearly far from our sharpest selves. And he knows that. He wasn't even worried.

“Jeez,” Gillespie says, panting. “Cherry, man, you could have gotten yourself killed, and maybe us, too, acting the fool like that.”

Cherry just shakes his head at our lameness. He's sitting in plain view, on a boulder the size of a Volkswagen.

“Boo,” says Corporal McClean, from against a tree on the opposite side of the road.

“Jeez again,” says Gillespie.

“Man,” McClean says, “I knew it was bad, but this is beyond bad. You guys could be taken out by a troop of Girl Scouts throwing cookies.”

He is so right.

This is humiliating, even if these two seem to think it's just a laugh.

The mood. The thing I noticed, about the quick shift of moods in this strange and unusual place, is happening to
me
now. I feel it, am completely aware of it as it comes over me. I'm embarrassed and furious and petrified and enraged over what just happened, didn't happen, might have happened.

The guys are all laughing. Big joke, right?

But it's no joke. No joke at all. We're trained fighting men. We were prepared for a purpose, by the most lethal fighting force the world has ever known, and when the moment came we were pathetic.

I am pathetic.

I march. There are two corporals here now and so there is no way I am actually in charge anymore, but so what. Who cares? If we can't keep our heads up, our wits about us, our weapons at the ready, then really, what are we and what matters at all?

“Cabbage,” Cpl. McClean says, catching up to me. I hear the soft
pat-pat
of boots falling in line behind us.

I keep marching, just like I was taught. Crisp, strong, focused.

“What's the problem, Cabbage?”

“I should be dead,” I say. “We should all be dead. You're right. Girl Scouts could take us.”

“Aw,” he says, slapping my back too hard, “don't be so tough on yourself. Lesson learned, right? Guys lose their edge pretty quick when the action falls off. And really, what's the point of staying on alert and all gung ho all the time, anyway? Look around, son. Nobody in all of I Corps is taking this seriously anymore. Just keep your head down and get your year in-country over with. If you kill some Vietnamese, that's a bonus, but what you're really here to kill is time.”

There's so much that's wrong with this. What is he saying? Why is he saying it? Why is he saying it to
me
? There are a lot of quirky personalities in the Marines, in Chu Lai, in I Corps, and in all of Vietnam, but none
of them are quirkier than our corporals. This is the longest conversation I've had with either of these guys, and the first time I've seen them smile. They don't get along with the superior officers, and they could just about spit on us privates, but now I'm suddenly getting the benefit of McClean's vast wisdom and insight. Something ain't right.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we actually were ambushed back there and killed. Maybe this is death.

“Well,” I tell him, “I guess I'm doing it righter than I thought, because so far I'm killing nothing but time here. But I'm really slaughtering that.”

“Ha,” he says. “Don't you worry about that part. Enemy kills practically throw themselves in your path sooner or later around here. Then once you've got that out of the way, you can relax and enjoy yourself.”

Somehow, that doesn't sound at all like the way it should go.

“Thanks, corporal,” I say. “I'll look forward to that.”

“That's the spirit,” he says.

We march in mostly silence for another mile, then another mile. Not sure about the rest of them, but I know I'm now in a state of total readiness. I'd even dare to say no Girl Scouts will be killing me today. I'd even dare to say that if they tried I might be man enough to wipe out a whole troop of them.

“Hold up,” Cpl. McClean says in a hard whisper. He pushes me down into a crouch, goes down himself, and gestures for all the men behind us to get down as well. We have our eyes and ears and weapons trained on the jungle, thick on our right. He taps me on the shoulder and tugs at me to accompany him into the bush. He signals for the rest to stay in position, covering us.

I'm shaking, suddenly sweating sheets of perspiration as we step lightly, silently along what is almost a path but not quite. We're about thirty yards in, and it's getting really thick, and the bugs are eating the flesh right off me. McClean signals a point just ahead where he and I are to split in two directions.

Now, I'm really moisturized. I feel worse than when I was drafted and peed my pants, because at least then there wasn't an immediate threat to my life in addition to the soggy pants.

But I go. I am a soldier. I am a United States Marine and I follow orders and I am here to terrorize the enemy and not to be terrorized by him and if I turned away from this now my pal Ivan would shoot me dead and I'd thank him for it.

“There! There!” McClean screams, and for a second I don't see a thing, other than the whole landscape shaking from my own fear. But then, there he is. I just
about step on him before he jumps up, this VC guy, practically right into my face, practically smashing into my face with his own when he jumps up out of the leaf cover and I have to react, just like I've been trained to.

I stick my bayonet right into the guy's gut. He is staring at me, right there, his eyes so wide and his mouth so open. He's holding a rifle, but holding it really weird like his hands are glued together in the middle of the gun, like nobody ever bothered to even tell him the right way to hold it. Poor guy.

But too bad, poor guy. I pull the blade out of him and stick it right back in. Then again and again and again and again. It's something like a sawing motion, very close to a sawing motion, only the blade comes all the way out and back in again, so maybe the action is more like a sewing machine like my mom's, only giant and lethal.

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.