Free-Fire Zone (4 page)

And it stings my eyes and it's the sweat. And the blood. Of course. I look at my hands while the boot stomps are cracking my candy apple head. I'm absolutely covered in that guy's blood. Covered in it. Covered in it and it's melting down all over me from my head right on down over me and it's sticky and thick in the heat. But I could be convinced, with the look of it and the way everything feels, that it's actually seeping out of me, out of the cracks in my skull.

“Are you with us, Cabbage?” It's Hunter. He's slowed way down because apparently I've slowed way down, and the United States Marine Corps never leaves a man behind. Hunter is leaning close to my face. To the awfulness that my bloody face must be.

“I'm with us,” I say. “Sure, I'm with us.”

Hunter's all right. Hunter's a good guy and I like him.

“You sure you're okay?”

“Of course. What do you think?”

“Okay, then congratulations, I guess. First confirmed kill.”

I feel the blood uncake on my lips when I smile. “Confirmed? You think?”

At first I see Hunter pull his face away from me. He has his hand on my back, I now notice, pushing my speed a little. We've definitely dropped off the pace. He's looking at me in a weird, trying-to-figure-it-out kind of way.

Then his face relaxes, and he pats my back. “Uh, yeah, I'd say we can confirm the kill. I can never keep track of the religions they got all over the place here, but if that guy believed in reincarnation then I think you snuffed out his next life and the one after that, too.”

“Good for me,” I say. It comes out just as stupid as it sounds.

“Who's Ivan?” Hunter asks as we near the back of the pack again.

“What?” He freaks me out a little with this.

“Ivan. Before you dropped back I was listening to you whispering and growling and muttering stuff to somebody named Ivan.”

I push Hunter's hand off my back, march a little more quickly so that I reach the company just before he does and he has to bring up the rear now. I'm not going to be last anymore.

I'm not going to be last ever, anymore.

“Ivan's my brother,” I say, even though 'til now I've always been an only child. “He's a killer, just like me. We're killer brothers.”

“Well, Ivan would be proud of ya, Cabbage.”

“He would be, you're right,” I say. “He would, and he will.”

I
hate writing letters. I look at the writing after I've done it and I feel like the stupidest guy ever. I can't help thinking a guy who writes like that should not be allowed to cross the street by himself.

Good thing there are pretty much no streets around here.

And I
have
to write. After the war I might never do it again, but I have to be in contact with certain people right now or it's worse even than being dead.

I have three excellent guys I spend a lot of my time with. Squid and Hunter and Marquette are guys you'd almost want to spend time with even if you didn't need them covering your back with an M-16 every time you went to the bathroom. Gillespie, I don't know about. He's mostly okay, but I get a feeling from him that's different. He's even worse about rules than the rest of them — and that's pretty bad. Can't stand to follow orders. Or maybe he's just selective about who he wants giving them out, which makes Marine life sort of complicated. He thinks everybody above the rank of corporal is as dangerous as the enemy. And whenever you talk to him he smiles, really hard and constant, and it never feels like a smile at all. That's probably the part I don't like most. I would feel a lot better about him if he just let his face tell the truth instead of doing all that grinning. His nickname is Sunshine, but not when he's around to hear it.

But he's all right, Gillespie. As far as guys go. The way I hear it, we're pretty lucky, at this point in the war,
at this spot in-country, that we aren't surrounded by Americans who all want to kill each other. You know how it is when it's really hot in the city for a long time in the summer? How everybody gets on everybody else's nerves and the crime rate goes up and all that? That's what it's like here. Only everybody's armed to the teeth, and it's hotter than wherever else you could be.

But we don't have it all bad at this spot at this time. Chu Lai actually has one of the nicest beaches I've ever seen. And when it's face-melt hot, there's nothing like the beach.

“Maybe if the man could give you the feeling that he knew what he was doing, it would be different.” Marquette is talking. He's leading our little formation as we hit the last part of the road before the sand. It is a little bit comical, our formation. We take our guns with us everywhere, of course, but otherwise, we are traveling light. Except for our boxer shorts, we are a formation of nearly naked guys, with guns slung over our shoulders. It is a beach trip, after all.

“Jupp is worse than useless,” Gillespie pipes up. “I don't know what he's even doing here.”

“Killing time, man,” Hunter says. “Just like everybody else.”

“No,” Gillespie says. “No, no, not like everybody else. Not like me. Not like ol' Cabbage here.
We
keep
getting sent into that jungle and all them creepy little villages and killing everybody like they tell us to and getting shot at. But Jupp, man, he never goes nowhere. Never. He just orders and directs and shouts and assigns. Then he shrinks back into his hooch until it's time for chow.”

We have reached the beach, and we don't break stride. Guns and all, the five of us march right down over the burning sand and straight into the surf, where we continue the discussion in waist-high water.

“Who's got the soap?” Squid asks. This is also a hygiene trip.

Marquette whips the new bar of soap at Squid. It bounces off his chest and falls under the water. We don't have the floaty kind of soap, so Squid has to dive right under after it.

“Good thing he's a sea creature,” Hunter says.

“And how 'bout those corporals?” Marquette says, and now it's pretty clearly become a game of how furious can we get Sunshine.

Sunshine doesn't let us down.

“Slugs!” he shouts, punching the ocean hard enough to send Squid shooting up out of it like he's performing at the aquarium or something. “Those guys … it's like they aren't even here as part of the Marines. Like they're on some kind of separate contract working for
some other operation altogether. It's like they're self-employed.”

“At least they go out,” I say. “They go into the jungle and do stuff sometimes.”

“Yeah, when they feel like it,” Gillespie says.

“Yeah,” Hunter says, “but they do feel like it from time to time. Not like the lieutenant.”

They won't let Sunshine relax today. This seems kind of dangerous, and I take a plunge underwater when I see his head go all purple.

“— if they would let me!” he's screaming when I come back up. The other guys are laughing, and the way the one bar of soap is being tossed around, this feels — really, really weirdly — like one of the more social gatherings I've been at here. Nobody even looks up as a helicopter from the base
thup-thup
s past above us, drowning out Gillespie's rant. Well, almost drowning it out.

One by one we all get cleaned up and cooled off and one by one we migrate out of the water and up to the beach. I see Hunter up there, making snow angels in the sand, which I suppose should be called sand angels.

“Almost over anyway,” Marquette says, catching up to me in the shallows.

“Huh?”

“This,” he says, gesturing at Vietnam. “There's not much left of it. You can feel it. Nobody's really even
trying anymore because everybody knows we're wasting our time. These third-world peons are making us look stupid. If I was Jupp, I'd stay in my bed all the time, too. Not because I'm a lazy coward like him, but because I'm too smart to waste my time and maybe my life on a war that nobody but a moron thinks that we might win at this point.”

I keep walking, splashing, then padding on the wet sand that goes from cool to hot in three steps.

“
I'm
trying,” I say, working in more ways than one to be cool. “I'm trying, like I've always been trying, like I'm gonna keep on trying until somebody tells me it's over. And yeah, I believe we can win.”

Funny enough, Private Marquette of the United States Marine Corps seems unimpressed by my statement of dedication to the cause. In fact, he seems kind of irritated.

“Good for you, Cabbage. Good for you, hero.”

I keep walking toward the angel. Behind us, Gillespie is still raving to Squid about the military command structure.

“Is there something wrong with that?” I say to Marquette, and I have to admit this is the angriest I've been at any time in Vietnam. Even when I killed somebody, I wasn't this angry.

“No, nothing wrong with that at all, Cabbage.” I
don't like my nickname right now. For the first time, the way he's saying it, I don't like it at all.

“Good,” I say, and I say it strong because I feel like I accomplished something there.

“I mean,
somebody's
got to kill all those dangerous, unarmed, bound-up little prisoners for us. You keep up the good work, and we'll all sleep better.”

Controlled fury. That is what a Marine is supposed to harness. He is not supposed to lose control of his emotions because that's when he makes bad decisions.

I am a Marine. I am a very good Marine.

“I killed an enemy soldier.”

He laughs at me, the kind of laugh with spit in it. That's not supposed to happen anymore. I'm not in Boston anymore. I am a Marine. They're not supposed to laugh like that.

“You killed a piñata,” he says.

I have my M-16 over my shoulder, like always. Usually, it just hangs against my back and I hardly know it's there. But now, I feel it. Now, I know it's there. I'm reaching behind me, feeling for it, gripping it.

“I am a US Marine,” I say. “Which I guess is more than I can say for you.”

He laughs again. He has to stop doing that. He has to.

“You are a US joke,” he says.

Of all the things that have happened to me, from the fright of my induction notice to the punishment of boot camp, to the shooting and the heat and the killing of the war, nothing has knocked me as sideways as I feel right this minute.

Fourth grade. Fourth grade, second time. That was when I got to know my friends, my guys, Morris and Beck and especially Ivan. They showed up like angels — tough angels — right when I needed them. These two fifth-grade idiots, Arthur and Teddy, had me on my knees. On my knees in the gutter of Moraine Street among all the stuff from my book bag. They'd dumped all of it out — books, pencils, an oversize eraser that I got from the science museum, and half of a tuna-and-potato-chips sandwich that I was saving for cartoons when I got home 'cause there probably wasn't much else there. Only now it was stepped on.

I was praying. I was praying with my hands folded and my knees hurting from pebbles. Arthur and Teddy were forcing me to pray, because that's the kind of thing that made them happy and I was the kind of guy that asked for it.

Only when I prayed this time, it worked. They showed up. Like angels. And some people don't believe in that kind of stuff, but I do — or I did, from the time those guys answered my prayer. Ivan and Beck and
Morris chased those jerks away and let them know I was not to be their whipping boy ever again, and that was how we came together forever.

Only they aren't here now. And I suddenly feel like I'm on my knees on Moraine Street.

I'm startled when I feel a quick, hard grip on my hand. I look down, where I had half swung my rifle around front without even realizing it. On my hand, on the gun, I see Gillespie's hand. I turn to see him staring hard at me, but talking to Marquette, all as we keep walking up the beach.

“Marquette, man,” Gillespie says, “why don't you just do your own war your own way and leave Cabbage to do his his way. Right?”

Marquette looks sideways at Gillespie. It feels tense, but he doesn't say anything.

“Hey, I can do one of those,” Squid says as we come up on Hunter, who is now admiring his sand angel. Squid throws himself down next to it and begins flapping madly, with his gun at his side.

Angels with guns. That seems kind of right to me.

I throw myself down on the other side of Hunter's angel and flap away with my arms and legs until I believe I have made a proper impression.

I hop up. Squid keeps pumping, like he wants to
indent himself deep enough for the folks at home to see it in the other side of the world.

“What about you guys?” Hunter says to Gillespie and Marquette.

“I don't think so,” Gillespie says. “A Marine in a war zone lying on his back out in the wide open doesn't sound like the sanest proposition.”

That appears to have persuaded Marquette, who seems to want to declare the war over right now all by himself. He falls into line with the others, makes his impression, then he and Squid push up off the sand, trying not to disturb their work.

“Arggh,” Marquette barks, turning awkwardly and contorting his shoulder as he falls sideways.

Hunter helps him up, and it's obvious that he's done some damage to his shoulder. Gillespie laughs, a little low and cruel. Enough to get his message across. Then he leads the march back toward camp.