Free Fire Zone (iv)

from editors Wayne Karlin, Basil T. Paquet, and Larry Rottmann at 1st Casualty Press

Hang on. I first rummaged this collection for something to read. I found The Rabbi, by Barney Currer, and told you about that Jewish story from our Army in Viet Nam. Then I discovered my late neighbor Loyd Little in the index of authors.

I told you about how Loyd is right up my alley, a humorist, a Special Forces sergeant, native Tar Heel who has to have been a friend to other Southern writers I have known around our University of North Carolina. I had never heard of him.

I wrote about his included excerpt Out with the Lions and then started writing about his Cambodia and his Laos novels on their own. I found that my friend Wayne Karlin, 1 of the 3 editors of Free Fire Zone, provides 3 sketches and 2 stories of a helicopter crew such as he served with.

So I wrote up his Medical Evacuation and will move on to Search and Destroy then to each of the remaining 3 in turn, searching out the coherence in his contributions to Free Fire Zone as preliminary to the dozen books he went on to publish as author, and the dozen more he has edited from Vietnamese authors.

So far, so good. An anthology, a bouquet, offers the reader a variety. Pick out your favorite flower, or work of art.

But is Free Fire Zone an anthology? Are you supposed to keep picking and choosing? What are the editors, the florists, up to? The title of the book is singular, not plural. The cover is one photograph wrapping back, spine, and front cover, a single unit.

That photograph shows a free fire zone, a field where Vietnamese men and women of military age grow food such as soldiers eat. Military targets under our rules of engagement, often lit up with artillery and heavy weapons?

Why not see this volume as instead a report like Lieutenant General William R. Peers’ on the incident at My Lai rather than a sampler for your interest to browse? There are no blurbs recommending the works of art not even a publishing category labelling the book as fiction.

The cover does specify Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans, as does the title page. But the imprint on the title page is First Casualty Press, a well-known euphemism. Truth Press, Coventry, Conn.

Coventry is evocative, by the way. The town in my native Connecticut is the home of our revolutionary, schoolteacher, and spy Nathan Hale dead on the end of a rope who regretted only that he had but one life to give for his country. Joan Baez sang the Coventry carol, addressing the massacre of the innocents as one of the mothers of Bethlehem, on her Christmas album as we invaded our ally the Republic of Viet Nam in 1966.

The Irish and then the Germans had bombed the original Coventry, England not long before in 1939 and 1940. First Casualty evokes truth and Coventry evokes the meat-grinder of war. What we have here is an organized, unitary collection addressing the topic given by the title. FREE FIRE ZONE is an American military term used to designate a defined geographical area in which all life is considered enemy.

Any humans or animals in this zone are fair game for all of the organic weapons of the U.S. Armed Forces and are destroyed immediately upon detection. Plant and marine life are also considered hostile, and are subject to repeated defoliation by Agent Orange and other chemical toxins.