Free-Fire Zone by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online Page B

ARVN soldier. The door at the back is bottom-hinge, open and waiting for me like a small up ramp onto the expressway.
    Lt. Jupp is standing at the entrance like a greeter, or like he owns the thing personally. He is smiling at me. “Ready for the big time, Cabbage?”
    â€œYes, sir,” I say.
    I stand at the back, looking in before I mount the ramp. The guys on my fire team are inside, sitting, lined up on benches mounted along each wall. Everywhereelse, floor to ceiling, under the benches and against the walls, firepower is packed and stacked. There looks to be enough artillery in this vehicle for each man on board to take out a small city himself. I don’t even want to think about what would happen if a rocket somehow hit this rolling munitions depot.
    We have mortar and 3.5-inch rocket launchers. We have Claymore anti-personnel mines and M-60 machine guns, M-79 grenade launchers, and — from what I can read on the sides of the crates toward the back under the benches — every type of grenade from white phosphorus to fragmentation and beehive shells that sound like gigantic murder bees when they come shooting out of the launcher.
    I must be staring stupid at it all because next thing I know Cpl. Cherry is snapping his fingers in front of my face, and everybody laughs out loud.
    â€œRight!” Lt. Jupp bellows like he likes to. “Is everyone here? Time to move out!”
    The rest of us have all boarded the vehicle, squeezed in on the benches. The ARVN driver has started it up. And we all look back in the direction of our hooch.
    â€œWell?” Lt. Jupp barks, about to climb up.
    Come on, Squid, man. Come on.
    â€œCome on,” Hunter says, low but audible. “Come on….”
    Jupp is up. He’s about to close the back door.
    Then Squid comes barreling out of the hooch, still pulling his clothes and his gear all together, like he just made the decision ten seconds ago.
    â€œSquiiiiid!” Hunter yells, and all the guys whoop and cheer and hoot at him as he runs to catch up and finally just tumbles into the back of the vehicle, where Sunshine and I pull him all the way in and the trap is shut and we are on our way to the action.
    â€œWhat a stink wagon!” Marquette yells almost as soon as the door is pulled up. “Man, this is a stench.”
    He could not be more right about this. I mean, these guys smell. They — and I suppose possibly me — always smell. But now we’re sealed up in a small space, rolling along at a good clip — top speed for this machine is about forty miles per hour, which is pretty much flying for a tanklike beast — and bouncing all around and into each other. We’re laughing and roaring and reeking, in a way that hasn’t happened before. I don’t quite recognize it.
    â€œThe testosterone in this thing is thick enough to cut with a bayonet,” Jupp declares.
    â€œI tried to put on deodorant,” I say, “but I wasn’t allowed.”
    â€œThat would do you no good now, Cabbage,” he says, bellow-laughing. Lt. Jupp’s loudness is magnified,a lot, inside these aluminum walls. But for the moment and for once nobody seems bothered. “Jeez, if somebody lights a match in here we’re all barbecued.”
    I laugh along with everybody else, even as I am thinking about what I heard about the M-113. That despite the armor and the speed and all, with the fuel tank built right below where we’re sitting, we’re vulnerable. If we run over a land mine we will indeed be fried alive.
    I’m surely not the only one who knows about that and I am just as surely not the only one who doesn’t care. We are achieving something really unusual in my so-far limited wartime experience: a united sense of purpose. Nobody’s telling us we can’t win. Nobody’s telling us to back off or lay low or stay in bed. We’re going to the action and we’re going guns a’