Free-Fire Zone (14 page)

“Eagle,” Hunter says, bringing a whole new game into play. “I hear eagle.”

“I hear monkey screech,” Sunshine says.

“I got loon,” I add. “That's a talented bunch out there.”

It helps a little, making light of the terror. But, also, it doesn't. The calls are distant, but somehow all the spookier for it.

All of our cards are now down on the drum staring up stupidly at us while we stare stupidly down at them. And softly softly softly, The Lovin' Spoonful sing up to
us, “Darling Be Home Soon,” and because this makes as much sense as anything, Hunter says, “Go Fish.”

Bang! Ba-bang! B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BANNNGGGG!

It has kicked off, and it has kicked off full throttle and right here in little Co Co Village. The sound, a nonstop wall of shooting, sounds like the rifle range in basic when the whole camp was going at it at once.

Bu-hooom!

And the RPGs are out. It's all happening on our doorstep, a true-life, door-to-door, hand-to-hand battle for this sad little village.

“What do we do?” I ask Sunshine.

The three of us are up and ready and bouncing up and down on the balls of our feet by the door. But we hold on, waiting.

“Let's go!” the lieutenant and the sergeant holler as they fly past the door toward the action.

So, we go.

We make our way hut by hut upward through the village the same way Krug and I went on our patrol. There is a monstrous amount of gunfire happening at the village's far end where Krug was shot, but I'm surprised to find we don't seem to be taking any incoming from the hot spots around the village.

“What's happening?” I ask as we duck behind the last of the “American” huts. What is certain is that all
our guys, CAP and regular grunts, are already going at it heavily with the enemy somewhere up ahead. Every last man is gone out of these huts, even Krug.

Maybe especially Krug.

“Somebody kicked something off,” Lt. Silva says.

“I told my men to hold fire,” Sgt. Culverhouse says. “Krug was being taken care of. It was probably a rogue shooter. I ordered my men to suspend patrols, to let it cool down and let us get to this meeting in the morning.”

“So what happened?” Sunshine says.

“What do you think, soldier?” Culverhouse says.

“Your men waited for you to get around the corner, then they went out hunting.”

Culverhouse puts his index finger on the tip of his nose and presses it flat.

Bingo.

The sergeant heads up-village, still ducking in a hut at a time, but it is obvious where the action is.

We can tell by the trail.

Bodies are appearing in the road. They are hanging out through windows. At least a half dozen uniformed Americans are visible between the spot where we stand and where the remaining soldiers are making a stand seventy yards farther up. Two huts up, there is a
hut completely bombed out with at least ten bodies smoldering about the place. Small bodies, but man, I will never be able to read these people, so I don't know. A hut down the road is a bonfire.

As we near the first American bodies, Hunter points down at Marquette, spread in the road.

“I'm surprised he even bothered to come this far,” I say.

Sunshine points his M-60 at the body, but doesn't shoot. He does better.

“You think this is bad,” he says to the dead man, “wait 'til Lieutenant Jupp gets his ghostly hands on ya.”

But the joke evaporates just that quickly as we take in all the dead Marines.

We don't need orders now. We all run.

Hunter, Sunshine, and I are pouring M-60 rounds into everybody and anybody on the opposite side of the line from our guys, who are squatting, kneeling, lying down on one side of the road, set up in the windows of three huts they have commandeered. They are stepping over dead Vietnamese, pushing them aside. Somebody hurls a body into the street and it's so light it sails almost into the hut opposite.

Just as we arrive, Cpl. Cherry screams like crazy and opens up his flamethrower and instantly sends two
huts shooting red into the sky. Three Vietnamese men with guns come running out completely in flames, and all the firepower of the USMC steps in to do the humane thing and put them so far out of their misery that the pieces divide into thirty or forty small little fires right there in the road in front of us. I see movement, and I shoot it. I see another movement, and I shoot it.

VC? Who can say for sure?

Free-fire zone.

The CAP world was once the very opposite of the free-fire world.

Free-fire.

It is very close to silent in my head now, though everybody everywhere is firing as if any unused ammunition will be turned on us as punishment. The sounds — of explosions and screams, and of that peculiar hot flapping sheet of fire — are all adding up to a kind of silence, as I watch my fingers, my hands, my arms, doing the hard muscular work of killing that person there, and that one and that one until every bit of this job is done and I can stop.

That silence, the one made up of all the sounds, continues and continues and continues long after there ceases to be any movement on the other side of the line. The heat of it all is what finally blows me backward, away from the fight that isn't any fight anymore.

As I walk back to my quarters, to get my good night's sleep before the big meeting in the morning, I finally hear a sound. It's the helicopters, coming to evacuate us all from this place tonight.

Confirmed kills.

Co Co Village. Confirmed.

I
never was good with letters anyway, so this is better.

I've stopped writing letters to my pals. It's hard to make yourself understood by writing letters, when you're a guy like me. Even to your best pals. They can't understand.

So I keep it simple now. Everybody always told me that, anyway.
Just keep it simple, Rudi.

So I don't write letters now.

I write numbers.

R
udi doesn't write. Ivan doesn't write. Morris writes, but two of the three guys I saw practically every day of my life since I was nine have disappeared from my sight and sound. Despite the fact that we all four have flown to the opposite side of the world to be in this together. We haven't dispersed to the four corners of the earth. We have all dispersed to this same sweaty corner. We stood up to everything together when the biggest threat we faced was having some tough guy look at somebody sideways. Now that the threat is having a tough guy fixing you in the crosshairs of his assault rifle or laying a booby trap to blow all your limbs off, we can't manage to keep in regular contact.

Rudi said all along he wouldn't write to me. Said he was afraid of how I would judge his letter writing.
Afraid.
The numbskull was preparing to slog his way with the US Marine Corp through some of the bloodiest fighting the world has ever seen, and he was afraid of my editorial eye.

But then, he broke down and he wrote. Which was good.

But then, he just stopped. Which was very bad. Better if he just never started than if he started and stopped again. Makes me worry.

Ivan. He never said he wouldn't write. Never said he would, either. I'm not surprised, I guess. Nothing would surprise me about Ivan.

You would think Ivan and I are about as opposite as friends can get, and you'd be essentially correct. But there's more to us than that. If you cut us open and counted our rings you'd find there's a lot more alike about us than different. Like most people, I fear and respect Ivan, which is pretty much exactly what he would like to hear. But I also
know
him, which he might find a little less welcome of an idea.

He is, more than anybody I have ever met, the true sensitive brute. He's the only person I know who could, and would — and has — beat the daylights out of a guy for hurting his
feelings
. I would strongly suggest to the North Vietnamese that they not hurt Ivan's feelings.

It's hard to explain Rudi and me. Hard for me, that is — Rudi'd never be able to manage it. Probably the thing that says the most with the least about us is that, when Rudi was threatened with getting kept back — for a second time — toward the end of seventh grade, he didn't tell his hero, Ivan, or his unofficial nanny, Morris. He came to me. He had to get respectable grades for the final two months of the year, homework and exams, in science and math. Not only did we work side by side like the Wright brothers hammering thoughts into that head of his. Not only did I basically do approximately seventy percent of the homework assignments just to ensure he made the minimum. Not only did I give countless hours of time that could have been spent thinking about Evelyn DelValle.

On top of all that, I did C-level work. I hated myself for two months.

And we are the only two people who know about it, to this day. By mutual agreement.

And then there is Morris.

Morris is at the other end of the communication scale. He is a Navy man, radioman, and self-appointed guardian angel for our group. Morris is the guy who holds the four of us together. It was his idea to make the one-for-all-and-all-for-one pact that if one of us was going to Vietnam then we all were. And it was his stated aim right from the start of this great and awful experiment that he was going to watch over the rest of us. First from his ship, the USS
Boston
stationed off the coast. And now, in a different way, over the airwaves and from a much smaller boat, a river monitor. He's the friend monitor, on the river.

The reality, though, is somewhat different. We all know that, if anybody's watching over anybody else here, it's the Air Force. And that's me. I'm flying over everybody, and watching.

And I don't much like what I see. Because what I see is danger and destruction in all its variety and in every direction. This country is gorgeous — I mean,
gorgeous
— to the point where I spend half my time thinking I could come back here and live once the war is over.

If there's anything left of it, when the war is over.

What I would like to see is the four of us. Together again. Morris — of course, Morris — has a grand plan to make this happen. Not just eventually, when we get home. But soon, here in Vietnam.

It's a long shot, but if it is possible to get something accomplished by pure will and goodness, then Morris is the guy to get it done.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will proceed with fighting this thing.

 

Maybe part of the problem is that they make war
sound
so cool.

I was delivered by Hercules to Phu Cat.

That is a true factual statement, and every time I say it, it gives me a small flutter of thrill because I've never said anything that sounded so slick in my life. It sounds far cooler than “a plane dropped me off in South Vietnam,” which would be civilian-speak for the same operation.
I was delivered by Hercules to Phu Cat.
The guy who can say that about himself gets style points just for living, and I can say it.

There is a lot of that kind of thing, in the military generally, and in the United States Air Force specifically.

Operation Rolling Thunder. How does that not grab you? It grabs me, and I don't even want to be here. How about Operation Arc Light? Steel Tiger? Barrel Roll, Eagle Thrust, Bolo, Flaming Dart? A guy's got to feel charged up knowing he is flying as part of something that sounds so sure of itself and potent, doesn't he? Especially if he goes riding in on, say, an F-4 Phantom, a Super Sabre, or a Thunderchief. If you're dropping tonnage on people from a B-52 Stratofortress it's a wonder those people don't just surrender out of sheer awe and intimidation before the bombs even hit the ground.

But, they don't.

It's almost the scariest part of the whole war. And that is saying something, with all the scary, scary parts of this war. Nobody over on their side appears to be quitting or even thinking about quitting, no matter how much we shoot and blast and bomb and torch their coast, their highlands, their riverbanks, their open plains, and their jungles.

I know this, because I'm seeing it. Because I'm doing it.

I'm fighting my portion of the war from the sky, aboard a C-123 “Provider” aircraft, which right away defies the notion that the military doesn't have a sense of humor. What the Provider
provides
is Agent Orange, one of a range of defoliants we use to burn the life out of the vegetation of this dense and lush place. Without the vegetation, the enemy cannot hide out there and move supplies around and kill our guys at will. I understand the aim. The aim, anyway, I understand.

We always get shot at. Always. Operation Ranch Hand involves flying big aircraft, slowly, at low altitude, into areas that are by definition hot with enemy combatants. I know, where can I get some of that, right?

My father and my mother and my sisters all thought I was an idiot for giving up my student deferment to volunteer to fight in Vietnam. We are a university-proud family. I think my dad graduated from Tufts when he was about twelve or something. I have one cousin who went to a technical college back in Boston and the family only speaks of him in hushed tones, like he went to the Walpole State Prison rather than the Wentworth Institute of Technology.

“We're not better than anybody else, Hans,” I said when explaining my enlistment to my father. He's always been Hans to me. He, like most everybody, calls me by my last name, Beck.

“Hnnn,” he said.

“What does that mean? Hnnn?”

“It means don't do it. Don't be a foolish kid, Beck, because you are not a foolish kid. It is nice that you have friends, and that you are loyal to those friends …”

Hans is not the type of father who leaves spaces in his speech casually.

“But …?”

“The universe has better plans for you, Beck.”

“Better than it has for the other guys, is that it?”

The bigger the pause, the less the casual.

“Hans? Honest, now. Please.”

“Fine, maybe it has other plans for Morris. But war has
always
been the plan for Ivan. If war didn't exist, it would have to be invented to give him something to do. As for Rudi …” He sighed, exhaling long enough for three lungs. “He's a good boy.”

“He's a good boy, right. They're all good boys. I'm a good boy.”

“You are,” he said, and there was a slight crack in his normal certainty about everything, always. “You are a good boy, my boy.”

“And we good boys made a pledge to one another and good boys keep their word to one another, don't they, Hans?” What occurred then was not a pause. It was a stop. My dad leaned forward, looked at the floor, clasped his hands together with his index fingers upright like he was going to do
Here is the church, and here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people
.

“I am not antiwar, son,” he said as if he was having his blood drained off at the same time. “I am anti-
you
in
this
war.”

I had no strong comeback to that.

“We are a family of logic,” he went on. “Sense is what we believe in, and this makes no rational sense. This … is kids' stuff. I'm sorry, but this — pledges and promises and bad decisions, it's all boyhood dreaming and nothing to do with the real world.”

We are a family of logic. It is one of the things I am proudest of. Which is why, again, I had no comeback here that would explain this well enough.

“I know,” I said. “I understand. Still, I have to go.”

“I know,” he said. “I understand. Still, I had to try.”

We shook hands. My father is a hugger. It was the saddest moment of my life when I had to trade that in for a handshake. Then we agreed that we were both too cowardly to tell my mom and sisters so weeks went by before suspicious-looking mail came for me and my mother stood there in my bedroom doorway, the letter in one hand and her other hand pointing determinedly up through the ceiling and the roof and the sky, to the sky beyond that sky.

“You should not be over there fighting. You should be up there, on Apollo missions to the moon.”

I came very close to pointing out that all those astronauts started out just where I was starting out. But my mother has sharp debating skills and I didn't want to hear about how the Vietnam War was not the Korean War. The quickest way to get killed would probably be to doubt your mission before you start it.

Instead, I went for optimism, and my University of Wisconsin–Madison scholarship which was being held for me while I served.

“Madison will still be there when I come back, Ma,” I said.

Which did not turn out to be the comfort I had intended, since it hinted at things being or not being, people coming back or not. Which set off all kinds of everything.

That is how I still see her all the time. Frozen there, wheezing, weeping, her fears spilling onto my rug, her finger pointing to her hopes in the sky.