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Free Fire Zone Chapter 1; Beginnings, page 4
*** Well, here I am, thought Jake, as he leaned his head back and stared out at the endless and eternal sky leading him to a new life. Maybe I should have split, who knows? He turned to look over his shoulder at row after row of guys. He knew many of them, some good buddies already. Roosevelt Turner was his seat mate, a tall, skinny black from Lumberton, North Carolina. His first encounter with Rosey was at the Reception Station while they were standing naked in a long line waiting to be weighed.
Rosey laughed, his white teeth sparkling. He was from a poor family of tenant farmers who hardly eked out a subsistence from long hours and hard work in the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina. Many a day, from the time he was 10, Rosey got up before dawn and headed out with his two brothers, usually a cousin or two and a few others, whoever happened to be around. They'd slept on a pallet in their tenant house, had no running water, no inside toilet, nothing. They went to the fields, owned by someone else, cropped the tobacco, put it in the drags, pulled by an obedient mule and by early morning, the juice coming off those dew filled leafs reached their stomachs and they were sick as dogs. Anybody with one eye and half sense would have to know under any circumstances tobacco would kill you. I can't believe I'm on my way to Vietnam, sitting here beside this whitey who ain't ever done a lick of work in his life, Rosey thought. "Yeah, me, too, I could probably do as good in the Army as I would on the outside. I been workin' in a lumber yard, but they ain't no future in it. Sides, I might like this killing," he said with a big grin.
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Beginnings; page 1
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