Free-Fire Zone (2 page)

L
ieutenant Jupp is our squad leader and for the most part he is not popular, though I like him okay.

“Boiled Cabbage, get over here, now!” he yells at me from across the camp. He speaks the opposite way most people do, in that he screams all his words unless he's very angry. Or unless he has a good reason not to, I guess, like if we're on patrol and screaming gets us noticed and located and dead. He started calling me Boiled Cabbage — or just Cabbage, or BC — practically as soon as he saw me. Never told me why, but I figure it's due to the fact I wear green and I have my helmet on almost every minute because I like the way it makes me feel. And also apparently my face is a kind of boiled red all the time since I arrived in-country.

My mom used to sing this song sometimes, when she was cooking. “Oh, I'm a savage / for bacon and cabbage …” Made me laugh. I miss her bacon and cabbage more than most of the rest of life at home.

“Yes, sir, lieutenant,” I say, as I always say. I'm up off my bunk and out of the hooch as I say it. A hooch is a sort of structure with the frame of a house and the everything else of a tent. Lt. Jupp is across the yard in his own quarters, but I never miss a call. Like a dog to a whistle, the other guys say, but I say it's like a Marine to an order.

I like orders. Good Marines are great at following them.

“Can I give you a job, Cabbage?” he barks as I stand just inside his hooch and he hunches over a small writing table covered in maps.

“Yes, you can, sir,” I say.

“Of course I can. But can I give you a job and be sure it gets done and gets done right and nobody gets accidentally killed or maimed including yourself?”

He's shouting all these words, so all the camp is listening and there are laughs here and there and a few comments, some guys shouting stupid answers pretending to be me.

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“Good!” He barks that one real loud, because when he has only one syllable to get out he likes to get it
way
out. “Private, I would like you to lead the squad out to this spot here on the map….”

Urrrr.

As much as I love following orders, my head gets a lot swimmy at this part. I can't stand reading maps. I mean, every little colored line on a map might just as well be one more thread of choke wire and all of them wrapping around my brain and pulling tight. And so I panic, privately to myself.

“Are you listening to me, private?” he bellows. So maybe possibly the panic's not completely private to myself.

“Yes, sir, I'm listening.” I'm listening with all my might.

We're supposed to go and visit a village about eight miles down the road from Chu Lai, where we're stationed. We've been to the village before, even, a few times. The assignment is simple as simple can be, kind of like my mom sending me to the store for sugar and tea and margarine like she was doing by the time I was five. Lt. Jupp wants us to march down to what we call Co Co Village and hook up with the CAP unit we have living up there. CAP is for Combined Action Program, where whole units of Marines live full-time with real Vietnamese in their own villages. The idea is to keep the Vietcong out, and to kinda keep us in. Even though we're on their side, it's not always sure how much the
South Vietnamese love us being here, so it pays to stay on top of it.

“Candy!” Lt. Jupp says.

“Candy, sir,” I say, because a Marine does not have to understand a thing to repeat it.

“We have come into possession of a shipment of candy. And some flower seeds. And vegetable seeds. And some Captain America comic books and assorted whatnot that we do not particularly need but that will undoubtedly help out the CAP effort down at Co Co. I want you men to deliver these goods, moving along this trail here mostly by the river. Get you some badly needed activity, as well as maintaining that road clean and safe for us between here and there.”

Things have been very quiet in the area lately. Nothing too exciting going on, so we've done a lot more lying around and listening to the war in the far distance than we have soldiering. It won't last, of course, and we're supposed to remain battle-ready and fit, not lazy.

“You won't be coming with us then, sir?”

“No, Cabbage, I thought this is just the kind of beginner operation I would like to see you leading for yourself. Then someday, who knows, we might be able to take your training wheels off.”

It's stupid how excited that statement makes me. I should be embarrassed, is what I should be, but I'm not. Of the twelve of us in the squad, I would be the dead twelfth in a map-reading competition. If you split the next stupidest guy in two, I would come in thirteenth. Heck, our squad is divided into two fire teams and we almost never even see those guys but I am sure every last one of them beats me at map reading. If I went to look for them to find out, I'd just get lost.

But everybody already knows the way to Co Co. Even I know the way. Once the map became part of the deal, my senses went inside-up and outside-down, but I'd be fine out on the road and mapless.

Candy delivery.

At least I'm smart enough to know I should be a little embarrassed. But I'm dumb enough to be proud and excited as well.

He likes me. More than he likes any of the other guys. He favors me and has done right by me from the start, like he wants to try and make some small something out of me while we're here.

I won't let him down.

 

The sounds when I walk back into the hooch could just as easily be coming all the way from seventh grade. I'm
getting bombarded with
oooohhh
s and
hooooo
s and loud, smacking kissing noises. It's enough to make me freeze there in the door frame and flame red all over, just like grade school was six seconds ago and not six years.

“What?” I say to the guys, with my hands held out and my face probably screwed in four different expressions. I love to be part of the squad, love it, and if that means taking some grief, then I love grief. But my faces are surely also telling how confused and a little nervous I am, because some of this is fun and some of it is nasty and, like with everything around here, it's at least a little threatening.

Private Marquette hops up off his bunk and comes right up to me, getting in my face with all that fun and scary all at once as he says loud, “The
candy run
? Cabbage, man, you're leading us on the
candy run
?”

“I guess you heard,” I say.

“King Candy — that should be your new nickname, Cabbage. You far too sweet to be any ol' cabbage. And don't the boss know it.”

“Teacher's pet right there,” Gillespie says, sitting on the side of his bunk with his shirt off and his new Marine Corps
Semper Fidelis
tattoo still glowing sore red on his left pectoral muscle.

Teacher's pet. Me.

“First time I've ever been called
that
, I can tell ya,” I say, as truthful a thing as I'll say all day.

 

Since being stationed in Chu Lai, I'd have to say my experience of the war hasn't been quite what I pictured in terms of the personnel and command structure.

People sort of do what they feel like, much more of the time than I would have guessed.

“Do you think the corporals might have wanted to join us?” I ask as we start down the road — the mighty five of us who decided to march.

Right behind me, the guy we call Squid gives me a shove in the back with what feels like the nose of his gun. His head is squid shaped, but he's still one of the better guys.

“Since you've been here, Cabbage, have the corporals wanted to do anything?”

“Well,” I say, “no. But delivering candy is a pretty decent job, and the weather's okay, and it's been really boring lately…. Hey, Squid, stop with the poking. You're gonna wind up shooting me.”

“Sure, kid. Anyway, the corporals have a fun job today. They get to play with our prisoner.”

We actually captured a guy a few days earlier. Though it's hard to even really call it
capture
since he
more or less staggered into camp and found our hooch at random. He was delirious, unarmed, and just took an empty bunk for himself.

“What're they doing with him?” I ask.

“Questioning him,” Gillespie says. “This is the first day he's been able to speak. He's gotta be a nobody, though, or the real interrogation boys would keep him for themselves.”

I'd like to interrogate somebody, no matter how much of a nobody he is. Any job they let me do I'm gonna do, because I want to learn everything about this profession, do everything it's possible to do within it.

Right now, what there is to do is march. It's a well-worn southerly road we travel, with the two kinds of Vietnam War basically split fore and aft of us. Behind us, beyond Chu Lai, then past Da Nang and the city of Hue, lies North Vietnam and the North Vietnamese Army and the kind of straight-up war America's been fighting for a long time. There are tanks and planes and lots and lots of grunts in open firefights.

In front of us, and all the way down through the whole of South Vietnam, is the other thing. Or other
things
. It starts out simple enough: We're fighting alongside the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN, against the communists.

That's the only thing I can tell you for sure about the war in the South. And honestly, I can't even tell you that for sure.

Because it's nothing like any movie war I've ever seen, where one side fights the other side from their own side trying to take the other side. Here, if there was a traffic cop, say, directing war traffic, that cop would be like the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
when he was nailed up on that pole at the crossroads.
Well, if you want to fight the North Vietnamese Army, you'll want to go this way
, he would say, one arm pointing up in the general direction of Hanoi.
Or, if you want to fight the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam — the Vietcong — try this way
, and then about seventeen million arms would shoot out from his other side and point every single which way all over the place. They'd be pointing at the trees, the rice paddies, the villages, the little sampan boats, into tunnels, or into the city at the young local man sitting right next to a Marine sipping tea in a café.

For one thing, that kind of fighting is very different, scattered and secret and sly and scary.

For another thing, “Liberation of South Vietnam?” I thought that's what
we
were doing? Liberate them from who?

The march is without incident — but then, it seems like the most disastrous ones always start that way. All the horror stories I hear from guys who come and go — and they come and go from our base every day — are ones where it's creepy quiet and then some horror happens. The
bang-bang
-shoot-'em-up stories play out a lot simpler.

I have about fifty pounds of candy on my back, and that is a story I never figured I'd bring back from this place. By the time we make it all the way down the road, the march has eaten up over two hours and the guys behind me have eaten up probably eight pounds of candy from my pack. The trail, predictably and thankfully, was quiet. Nobody shot at us, we didn't shoot at anybody else, and as we sweep into Co Co Village, the candy is safe and sweet, and we are popular.

“Gentlemen,” says the CAP unit leader, Sergeant Culverhouse. He's been expecting us, and as always we're a welcome sight. It's a kind of perfect relationship we have with these guys. Like Santa Claus we sweep in, drop off treats, then sweep out again without ever asking for anything in return.

The kids of the village have caught on to this as well, and they rush up and surround us as we begin to empty our packs of the goodies.

There are so many kids under the age of five in this village, I sometimes wonder if it's a tiny little society of their own. Of the half dozen or so times I've been here, I've seen up close maybe twenty-five adults, and three or four times that many little ones. Of the adults, none seem to be fighting-age males. Instead, the place is populated with women and old guys. There's a whole company of Marines stationed here, but really, if the locals decided to revolt, all but about three of our guys could just stay in bed for it.

Being popular, by the way, is nice.

When the kids figure out which bags have treats, the best kind of mayhem breaks loose. The sergeant backs away, like his post is being overrun and he's surrendering. Three little boys, barefoot and shirtless, lead a pack of maybe a dozen kids. They swamp Marquette, topple him, and tear open his bag while he laughs away on all fours. They make short work of him, realize he's carrying nothing but seeds and powdered plant food, and drop him like yesterday's news. One by one, our little detail of five gets the same rough treatment until the jig is finally up and the two of us carrying the mother lode, me and Private Hunter, get the full ransack.

I can't help laughing my head off as I get completely brutalized by these little guys and gals. I'm watching Hunter surrender to both the rough stuff and the
laughter and it just makes me laugh more. The other guys stand around over us, like the old days in the school yard when a fight was on, and cheer the little ruffians into more and more of a frenzy.

“And wait 'til the little beasties get some of that sugar into them,” Culverhouse says.

“It won't make them fat, that's for sure,” Hunter says.

That's the truth. There's not one ounce of extra meat on any of these kids, but I swear I couldn't get up now if they didn't want me to. There's strength in these hard little bodies that I don't think I ever knew when I was that small. They're tough and determined, and despite the Christmas-ness of what's going on, there's not a whole lot of laughs on their side. This is a serious operation, I realize as the last of the kids clear out the last of the goodies, and serious is how they're taking it.