Free-Fire Zone

by Chris Lynch

  “Not with your buddy Sunshine looking out for you,” Sunshine says, smiling.

  “Listen to me, Sunshine….”

  All the humor falls away like a five-hundred-pound bomb off a B-52.

  “Don’t call me that. You hear me?”

  I think at this point if Marquette called him Sir, Your Majesty, or Handsome, Gillespie would still threaten his life.

  And no matter how badly Marquette would like to get himself injured and exempt himself from our mission, it is very clear he doesn’t want it bad enough to let Gillespie do the honors now.

  “Yeah. I hear ya.”

  “Now, it’s a lovely morning. Too late to go back to sleep now, what with the hike we gotta take and all. Let’s you and me go find that key, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Marquette says glumly. “I guess.”

  Sunshine has a spring in his step as he exits the hooch. Marquette is stepping with a lot more care and caution.

  “Don’t you worry,” Sunshine says to him, “I did a little freelance night patrol out here, cleaned up any little hazards that were lurking around between here and, oh, say the latrine. Shocking, how dangerous a place this can be, don’t ya think, Marquette?”

  “Yeah,” he says, sounding more depressed every second.

  “Good thing we’re moving out of this neighborhood, huh? I can guarantee I’ll keep you absolutely safe from harm between now and then.”

  Hunter and I laugh and slap palms at the great morning floor show, then, as if we’ve heard a bell go off at the same time, we both settle right back down.

  Sunshine said it. We’re moving out.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I ask Cpl. McClean, even though it’s the kind of question that’s really the opposite of a question.

  He has a flamethrower strapped to his back. And so does Cpl. Cherry.

  “Yup,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s been requested, that’s why.”

  Holy moly.

  As it turns out, we’re all loaded for bear. Everyone packs his own M-16, of course, but is also equipped with a variety of grenades and Claymore mines. In addition, each of us is weighed down with an extra weapon, either a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher or an M-60 machine gun, and all the extra ammo that goes with it. Because we’re headed to a village and not a bivouac situation out in the field, we don’t have to waste rucksack space on silly things like food or any more than one canteen of water each.

  Good thing, too. As it is, this is the heaviest pack I have ever marched with.

  “Are we taking over a country by ourselves?” McClean asks Silva as we start down the road.

  “Just being cautious,” the lieutenant answers crisply. And with finality.

  It is, as they mostly are and should be, a pretty quiet hike. The sun’s beating madly, right down through the canopy as we walk single-file along the trail we know better than any other in our whole area of operations. I’m not quite sure how much talking we would do today even if we could. I, for one, don’t feel like chatting.

  Silva-McClean-Hunter-Cherry-Marquette-Sunshine-Me. That’s our formation for the march, and I have to believe Marquette is the most uncomfortable man in Vietnam at this moment. He did not want to be here, does not want to march, is just as nervous as anybody about the assignment.

  And scariest of all, he’s listening to Sunshine’s thumping bootsteps right behind him.

  I like my position. I once thought of rear guard as last place, but that’s not right. Rear guard is important. Rear guard suits me. March along, looking straight and left and right like everybody else, then every so often do a complete scan of the terrain behind us. I don’t get nervous about being the last line of defense with no backup. In fact, it revs me up, sharpens my senses, makes me smarter.

  Thump-thump-thump-thump, the rhythm of the day gives me strength. No words. I love no words. Eyes on the prize and shut up, that’s what I like. I’m in such a groove after the first twenty minutes, I’m practically meditating.

  And not thinking about something I should have been thinking about.

  The spot. It comes up on us with no warning. Because why should there be any warning? It’s a sweaty green dense patch of jungle just like a zillion other sweaty green dense patches of jungle, and while I don’t sense it as we approach, I surely sense it every which way when we pass close by it.

  My deathplace birthplace.

  It’s where it happened. We all march on, nobody noticing but me. Because it’s mine, and means nothing at all to anybody else despite the guys here who witnessed it and the guys here who set it up.

  That, right there, in that small thicket, against that tree.

  March, march, march, sweat, march …

  I killed a man for the first time, right there, and I swear it could have happened six seconds ago. I am heart-racing like a jackrabbit as I turn my head to look, like he’s right there, looking back at me, trying to hold his guts in, trying to pull away from the tree, from the wires cutting into his ankles and his wrists while I was cutting into his abdomen, and then his throat.

  It could be happening right this second, with the way I am outsweating everybody by ten, outbreathing, outpulsating, outmarching —

  “Hey, nutso,” Sunshine says to me in a whisper-growl.

  I have walked right into him, stepped on the heel of his boot and found myself with my nose all but stuck in the muzzle of the M-60 he has slung over his back.

  “Sorry,” I say, “sorry, sorry.”

  We’re a half mile farther down the road before I stop checking over my shoulder every three seconds. He would have every right. To come after me. Every right.

  But if he did, I’d kill him all over again. That’s just how it is.

  Uneventful. Despite what was going on in my head part of the way, that’s how our march to Co Co village turns out.

  “And let’s hope that’s how the whole two weeks go,” Lt. Silva says as he shakes hands with our host, Sgt. Culverhouse.

  “Two weeks?” Culverhouse says, surprised. “Lieutenant, I like your optimism, but at this point every time we go two hours without our head count dropping that’s a cause for celebration.”

  We are standing in the spot outside the sergeant’s quarters where we have stood before, dropping off candy and comic books and other goodies to the locals and winning the hearts and minds of this village. But it feels like a different place. No kids have come running out to greet us, no old men or women pass by going about the business of just being folks. The village itself, the terrain, is not what it was but instead a dried and stripped-down poor faded version of a place that’s been gradually trampled into dust. It’s dusty, is the big difference. And motionless.

  “Where are your numbers going?” Silva asks.

  Culverhouse motions for us to follow into his quarters. Inside there is a bed that’s pretty large by military standards, a small kitchen with a bamboo table and four chairs. There is a desk with a chair in a living area with two bamboo three-seater couches. We spread ourselves around as Culverhouse takes the seat behind the desk, like a judge ruling over his court.

  Lt. Silva lights up and offers the sergeant a cigarette, which he declines.

  “Pretty plush, as these places go,” Silva says.

  “You outrank me, so it’s all yours. I can be packed and out of here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Silva says. “But I’m just a guest. So, about your numbers?”

  “Aside from the casualties? We’ve had desertions. And people stopped volunteering for this program some time ago because it got a reputation as a kind of suicide mission. So we’ve had an attrition problem. We lost people who never got replaced. Until eventually the numbers got a little uncomfortably low and, like jackals, Charlie started to sniff us out. Farm country,” he gestures in a circular motion all around. “We’re surrounded by farms. Which was great when we had the locals on our side.”

  “But if you don’t have them …”
<
br />   “Staging areas. Hiding places and launch pads. We are under siege here, lieutenant, on three sides. That road you just came up is the exception.”

  There are low groans coming from members of our party. Until Lt. Silva stands up and lays a very impressive mass scowl on the room.

  “So, I have to ask,” Silva says, “what are we supposed to do?”

  Sgt. Culverhouse suddenly pulls down a face like he’s pulling down a dark window shade. He looks immediately sadder and more tired than before he had heard that inevitable question. He gets up out of his desk chair and comes around to the lieutenant with his fingers scissoring for that cigarette.

  “We are going to achieve peace with honor.”

  Guys here really seem to hate that phrase.

  “Leave with our tails between our legs,” Cpl. Cherry blurts.

  “No, no,” the sergeant says, dropping down with a thump back into his chair. “That’s what you guys are for. You guys and your firepower make it possible for us to proudly leave with our tails up in the air.”

  “Sheesh,” Lt. Silva says.

  “Ya,” Culverhouse says. “I know, sheesh. The CAP program was a good program. The best. It was working. We were winning the hearts and minds of the people, until we just started running out of steam. It’s a shame, a real shame. So, what we are left with is this. A couple of our remaining Vietnamese partners, the Popular Force soldiers, will be here in the morning. The PF guys, by the way, are useless at this point, which is a huge part of our problem. There is absolutely no way of telling whose side they are on. Anyway, they will be here in the morning, along with the regional chieftain of the surrounding area, to discuss our departure. Our hope is that we can convince them that although we won’t be here on-site anymore, that we are right down the road. You guys will stand around like mafia types to illustrate this. Hopefully, they get the message that we could come back any time we wanted — or any time they wanted — so they don’t absolutely have to go over to the VC. We’re not completely giving up on them.”

  “Wow,” Silva says, hearing the same exhaustion we can all hear in the sergeant’s voice. “I’m on your side, and even I don’t believe you.”

  The sergeant nods and shrugs at the same time. “All there is to do between now and then is to maintain our presence, walk regular patrols — within the village boundaries, we don’t go out anymore — and enjoy the scenery, boys.”

  Before there’s any more talk of enjoying the scenery, we get set up in our quarters. The seven of us are divided into three huts roughly the same size as the sergeant’s setup, right near his at the edge of the village. The rest of the CAP Marines are divided over a few more structures clustered nearby so that the total American presence huddles together just at the spot where you’d enter the village — or just where you’d bolt from it. It’s like the last few houses on a street that’s gradually being abandoned by the neighborhood.

  Lt. Silva has a place to himself while the corporals and Marquette take one place and me, Hunter, and Sunshine take another.

  Unpacking basically amounts to selecting a bunk, taking our big artillery and laying it under the bed, then lying down, each of us with an M-16 either nestled beside him or placed right across his chest. My roommates and I have our afternoon rest just this way.

  “This little vacation can’t be over quick enough for my liking,” Hunter says.

  Sunshine sighs deeply. “There is an air of futility settled over this whole thing, isn’t there?”

  “Doesn’t feel good,” I say, “that’s for sure.”

  “Right, gentlemen,” a voice snaps through the room. We all jump up, rifles ready, and see the grunt at the door. It’s Cpl. Krug, the CAP soldier I met way back when he was giving some old VC guy a going-over. “Who’s first up for patrol?”

  We are pairing with the established guys, doing the rounds every couple of hours. Gives us a chance to get to know the place, while it gives them the opportunity to start kissing it good-bye.

  Since Krug and I are old pals, I figure this is my turn.

  “I thought I trusted these people, I really did,” he says as the two of us saunter down what you would call the main strip of the village. We walk very slowly, and turn left and right regularly like a pair of cuckoo-clock birds, looking into every window and alleyway.

  “I guess that’s over with now?” I say.

  “Ha.” He spits out a laugh. “The worst of all are those PF rats. They played us great. Fellow soldiers, yeah right. They were playing all sides for what they could get. Those are the guys, if they just let us have a shot …”

  I find myself very aware, now, of all the people I do not see outside. Two women pass by, carrying empty buckets in the direction of the small stream running alongside the edge of the village. Off in the distance two older men, hunched, are heading for the farm on the hill up the road. I see nobody else. Small heads appear in windows then disappear so quickly I can’t even tell if they are adults or not. To be honest I might not be able to tell even if I got a longer look. I believe at this point I will wind up leaving this country without the ability to reliably tell the ages of the locals within a margin of error of twenty years. And I don’t even know what I think about that.

  “Yeah yeah, keep staring!” Cpl. Krug shouts as one more head slips from view in a window in a half-collapsed hut on the far lip of the village. We stand there for a minute, looking out past our imaginary boundary, into the rolling countryside beyond. “There,” he says, pointing to one fenced-in field with two buffalo standing like sculptures. “And there. And that one and the one up top there.”

  “What are those?”

  “Those are VC hyena packs. Established, committed, just waiting for us to get weak enough or to fade away entirely so they can swoop in. These people ain’t never coming over to our side, never listening to what we have to say. We shouldn’t even be talking to them at this point. We should just mortar and rocket and strafe the life out of ’em on the way out the door. After all we did for this community, it’s an insult to the effort to leave the whole show to the VC after we’ve gone. And I can tell you, every last man here feels the same.”

  Sounds pretty extreme to me.

  But it doesn’t sound wrong.

  Cpl. Krug executes a neat heel turn, and we’re headed back to our end of town again.

  “How was that, then?” Sunshine asks over the card game he’s playing with Hunter.

  “Swell would be the only word to do it justice,” I say. They have a small transistor radio going, and somebody delivered bowls of rice and some kind of cubed meat while I was out. If you didn’t know what we, maybe, know, you might think this wasn’t such a bad little holiday right here. “I might consider buying a vacation home in this community after this is done,” I say.

  “Not me,” says Hunter, taking it all as seriously as possible. Fair enough.

  “Who’s next?” says another corporal standing in the doorway, just as grim and unsmiling as the last.

  And the next.

  And the next.

  By the time it is my turn to patrol again, it’s dusky, and Krug is standing in the doorway, drumming his fingers impatiently on the frame.

  We walk the same walk, see even fewer people, have possibly the same conversation all over again. There are no lights coming on in the huts, no candles or flashlights or anything. The frogs and night birds and other wildlife are getting into voice, though, so it’s almost as if the place has twice the life it did in the daytime. Which wouldn’t be hard.

  Crrr-racck! A single rifle shot fractures the evening air. I feel the bullet whistle right past me.

  “Yaaaaahhh!” Krug screams, cupping a hand to the side of his head just below his helmet. Absolute gushings of blood are pouring out through his fingertips and down the side of his face. I grab him by the shoulder and haul him down the middle of the village, like we are in some arcade game where every last person in the village is allowed to have a shot at us.

  We are mot
oring wildly until we see the medic, a Navy Corpsman, running out of one of the huts with a roll of gauze already in his hand. There are three other grunts around him, covering me and Krug as we run the village gauntlet. Nobody is shooting at us now, though, and I can’t even tell if anybody is bothered enough to come to the windows or doors to gawk. When we reach the men, the Corpsman slaps the whole roll of gauze onto the side of Krug’s head and they wrestle him inside.

  “He shot my ear off!” Krug says as he staggers into the hut.

  I go to follow, and one of the CAP guys stops me with a hand like a traffic cop. “We got it, private,” he says flat as the ocean. “You should get yourself back inside.”

  And just like that I find myself outside, alone, in this strange, strange, strange place. I take a couple of walking steps in the direction of my quarters, and then I run full out.

  Hunter and Sunshine are waiting and basically drag me into the hut.

  “What’s happening, man?” Sunshine says.

  “Sniper,” I say, breathless. “Jeez, you know, it’s just a guy with a gun, but is there anything really scarier than a sniper, man?”

  “No,” they say together, “no, no.”

  “Anyway,” I say, “one of them shot that guy Krug’s ear off. The medic is working on him now. Say, whose turn is it for patrol?”

  “Wait, first, where’d the shot come from?” Sunshine snaps. “Was it inside the village or out?”

  I start to give him an answer, but then realize I haven’t got one. “I don’t even know, man. Could have been inside.”

  “Ahhh,” they both say, backing away with their hands up like captured prisoners.

  Lt. Silva appears in the doorway. “You all right?” he asks me.

  “Sure. Don’t think I’ll sleep very well here tonight, though.”

  “Yeah,” he says, nodding and smoking. “I’m going to go talk to the sarge. Whatever happens, don’t anybody go outside without direct orders from me. Understood?”

  “I understood it before you even said it,” Hunter says, and the three of us head back into the corner, where we sit on bunks, try and play cards while we listen to the radio.