The Dark Side of Heaven Read online

  I was counting the seconds off in my head, waiting for the big bang as I continued to crawl away but in the midst of all my panic I heard Charlie shout loudly in his native tongue and then make all sorts of alarming noises of his own behind me like he was fumbling with his hands and feet for something on the tunnel floor. What the hell was he doing? I’ll never be sure but the only thing I could think of was that he’d accidentally dropped the grenade at his own feet and was furiously trying to find it again before it was too late. It would be easy enough to do when you were as exhausted and disoriented down here as we were but I wasn’t that lucky, was I?

  BOOOOOOM!

  Even though I was a good twenty feet away from the main tunnel, the explosion picked me up and tossed me like a rag doll, the devastating energy of the blast having nowhere else to go except down the narrow offshoot shaft and straight through me. I screamed as loud as I could as the pain of the flying shrapnel shredded my skin but compared to the violent detonation enveloping me it was as if I’d made no sound at all. The shock wave propelled me another eight or ten feet along the tunnel until my head smashed into the hard dirt wall of a T-section, stopping my body instantly and knocking me nearly senseless. As I lay there battered and broken, my mind spiraled down into an even darker place than I was already in and I began to fade in and out of consciousness. The last thing I remembered was the horrible stench of burning meat and it took me ten full seconds of helpless agony to realize that the smell was likely coming from me. I was on fire but I was too sore to move and quite honestly, too far gone to care. I closed my eyes, praying for death, and let myself drift away…

  4

  After Tommy’s death I was pretty messed up. Well, let’s be honest, messed up doesn’t cut it; I was batshit crazy. It was like someone had ripped something crucial – a lung or kidney or something - out of my body and crushed it beneath their heel and I wasn’t sure I could live without it. A piece of me was gone; a really fucking important piece that I would never be able to replace. After I saw what I’d done and ran over to see my big brother’s brain leaking out onto the jungle floor I completely lost it. I would have killed myself right then and there – tried to, in fact – but several of my CAP team tore my gun away from me and pinned me to the ground until I stopped screaming.

  One of our medics drilled me with a shot of morphine to calm me down and somehow they got me out of the village and back to base camp where I slept for the better part of a full day. When I woke up, they had me tied to my bed and wouldn’t release me until the doctor had a chance to talk to me and determine if I had completely lost my marbles or not. Apparently I must have convinced him I was okay because I was returned to my CAP unit four days later, a fake smile on my face maybe, but a head and heart filled with nothing but pure hate.

  I was a walking time bomb.

  A demon hiding behind a mask of human’s flesh.

  I wasn’t the only one, though. It’s a common fact that a lot of soldiers under extreme combat situations start to enjoy the fighting and the killing a little bit too much. They no longer fear for their lives and get a head rush equivalent to a drug high whenever the bullets started to fly. That’s what happened to me over the next three or four weeks. I traded one addiction for another, my need for heroin for a deep-seated need for violence. I became an animal; a beast; obsessed with battle, craving the danger and the blood and the guts of my enemies. It might have gone on for months, hell maybe years because there was no way I was going back home to Cleveland and explaining to everyone what I’d done to Tommy, but fate chose to put me back into the tiny village of Ami Ba one rainy night and the shit really hit the fan.

  We’d never found the sniper that had been shooting at us on the day I’d killed my brother and when the bullets started coming out of the village huts at us again I completely lost it. I wasn’t alone either. There was about a dozen of us sick and tired of getting shot at when all we were trying to do was help these slope-headed bastards. I’ll spare you the details, but we hit them hard and fast with everything we had, killing men, women, and yes, even some children. A lot of them were soldiers but nearly all of them – even the kids – were trying to kill us too. About the only ones who weren’t were the Vietnamese woman and her small injured boy that haunt my dreams. They had no weapons and no way of defending themselves. The mother was just trying to hide below the floor of her hut and keep her child safe.

  But I found them…and killed them anyway.

  Something inside me snapped that night; something exploded inside my head at the same instant my grenade went off in their hut. I couldn’t believe what I had done; couldn’t believe what kind of monster I had become. When I’d killed Tommy I had at least been able to lie to myself that it had been a freak accident in the heat of battle, out of my mind on drugs and therefore not really my fault – but this? No, this hadn’t been an accident. Not even close. I’d looked down into the hole where the mother and son were huddling together and I’d known – truly known – that they were no threat to me but I tossed in my grenade anyway; just for the hell of it.

  Just because I’d wanted to.

  Guilt can do strange things to people. It eats away at you bite by bite until you have to do something about it. You might not want to, but you feel you have to. This might sound overly dramatic, but with me I knew I had lost the right to live but for some reason I just couldn’t pull the trigger with my own gun. I wanted to. Put my .45 to my temple several times even, but I didn’t want mom and dad back home hearing that I’d gone out that way; like a coward. Having a son die in battle trying to defend freedom is one thing; an honorable death that they could eventually be proud of, even if they were hurting now and didn’t understand why the hell he was half way across the world in the first place. Thank the Lord the powers that be would never tell them it had been my stray bullet that had taken Tommy out. At least they were spared that much. But for me to check out by blowing my own brains out and depriving them of their last remaining son just seemed…I don’t know, selfish and unusually cruel. As close to insane as I admittedly was, I still didn’t want to destroy my parents any worse than this fucked up war already had and I couldn’t bring myself to be such a bastard. For their sake, and their sake alone, I needed to come up with a different exit strategy.

  That was when I dreamed up my brilliant plan to volunteer in the Tunnel Rat program. Charlie had been kicking our ass sneaking around under or very feet, infiltrating places we had previously thought were safe and disappearing like ghosts in the blink of an eye when our troops tried to track them down and fight back. Once the tunnels were discovered, the obvious answer was to go to ground and fight them on their own turf but climbing into a dark hole in the earth when you had no idea what sort of nightmares and traps were waiting for you took incredible bravery.

  Either that, or incredible stupidity.

  Me, I was lean and mean, just the way Uncle Sam liked his rats, and I was also damn good with a gun. Two weeks later they accepted my transfer with open arms, never once suspecting that my trip down into the tunnels was never intended to be anything other than a one way ride. A week later I was crawling around in the dark. I can even remember my interview with the psych doctor where I tried to keep a straight face when he asked me if I had any suicidal tendencies.

  I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “No sir.”

  Damn…the son of a bitch actually believed me.

  5

  That you, Tyrone?

  Was someone talking to me? They sounded excited. Or maybe afraid. Might have just been in my head, I wasn’t sure. I heard a few other whispers and sounds but couldn’t make any of it out; just some faint garbled noise.

  It was probably nothing.

  My eyelids were glued shut, presumably with a mixture of blood, dirt, and sweat. When I finally managed to fully open my eyes, the first thing I became aware of was a yellow light shining in my face so bright it was making me squint. It was coming from a place in the new tunnel off to my le
ft about forty feet away and the best way to describe it would be to say it was enormous, like the headlight of an oncoming train. My ears were ringing and my head was spinning so badly I was nauseous but I clearly remember thinking, What the hell is that?

  Back when we were kids, Tommy used to sneak outside and spook me by shining a big ass flashlight into our bedroom window in the middle of the night. He’d tell me stories earlier in the day about how the police were searching for some deranged killer or a crazy religious cult that stole children and then he’d hit me with the light and knock on my window until I screamed my head off for mom and dad. Tommy would get his butt kicked by dad for scaring me like that but apparently he thought it was worth a few whacks on the ass and probably fooled me that same way nearly a dozen times before getting bored and looking for some other means to tease me.

  So for a few confusing seconds I was back in my comfy bed and a ten year old boy again, and Tommy was up to his old tricks but then I smelled the terrible stench of burning flesh and the pain in my battered body jarred me back to reality: Vietnam; Tommy’s death; the helpless woman and boy; the gook in the tunnel; the dropped grenade; the big bang. Yeah, I knew where I was alright, but that didn’t help explain the bright light.

  It wasn’t a flashlight, either. It didn’t move for one, but it was also far too big to be something anyone could carry around down here in these cramped passageways. My head was all messed up and my eyesight was blurry but it didn’t seem to have that dull artificial quality you get from a flashlight beam either. It looked realer than that, if that makes any sense. What it looked like was sunlight, like an opening into the jungle but that wasn’t possible, was it? I knew I’d been scrambling around down here in the dark without really having the best sense of where I was, but for the life of me I was sure I had been steadily following Charlie downward into the bowels of the tunnels. Could I have been wrong and all this time we’d been dancing this close to the surface? Maybe. The explosion might have collapsed part of the tunnel too, which was why I was seeing sunlight streaming into this section of the shaft.

  That explanation made sense, sure, but it never sat well in my belly. I was lost down here, obviously, but in my heart and in my head I knew I wasn’t close enough to the surface to be near an exit hole. Besides, the Vietcong were smart little bastards and they hid their tunnel entrances well; and usually in concealed places where the sun wouldn’t be shining like this anyway. Of course, that didn’t rule out that possibility a section of the tunnel had collapsed because of the explosion but I don’t know man…it just didn’t feel right to me. I was too far underground for that and I knew it.

  I’m telling you… I knew it.

  I rolled onto my left side and made a feeble attempt to get to my hands and knees. Movement of any kind was excruciating to begin with, my myriad burns, cuts, and bruises causing me to bite my cheek to stop me from screaming but I wasn’t about to let something as minor as pain stand in my way of checking out this unexpected light. Again, Uncle Sam had taught me well and I willed away the agony, locking it away within an imaginary strong box in my mind, the way Marines had always been trained to do. Our bodies were chiseled and tough, but our minds were the strongest weapons we had. That was boot camp bullshit at its best but when push came to shove I suppose there was some truth to it. I took several deep breaths, cleared my thoughts as best I could, and commanded my body to get up and crawl toward the mysterious opening.

  And that’s just what I did.

  Somehow I found the strength and the willpower to start crawling toward the light. Hand in front of hand, knee in front of knee, and thirty seconds later I was crawling out of the darkness for the first time in what seemed like four or five years. It had only been a couple of days, of course, but from the moment I saw what was waiting for me outside of the tunnel, keeping track of time was going to be the least of my worries…

  DESTINATION UNKNOWN: AUGUST, 1970

  6

  Grief is perhaps an unknown territory for you. You might feel both helpless and hopeless without a sense of a "map" for the journey. Confusion is the hallmark of a transition. To rebuild both your inner and outer world is a major project.

  Anne Grant

  Lance Corporal Tyrone Banks crawled out of the darkness on bloodied hands and knees, extremely thankful to feel the cool breeze on his sweaty face again and the smell of fresh cut grass in the air. For a span of five full seconds he was relieved to be free of the claustrophobic crush of the tunnels behind him and able to see his surroundings again, but in the short time it took to raise his eyes to the horizon and get his first good look at the place he now knelt, Tyrone wanted nothing better than to turn around and hurry back into the darkness.

  Something was terribly wrong here.

  “What the…?”

  There were no trees in sight. There was no dense jungle vegetation. No rice paddies either. In fact, there was nothing remotely familiar in the terrain or on the landscape as far as Tyrone’s eyes could see that even hinted at belonging in Vietnam. There wasn’t much of anything to see here; just a flat grassy field with a big lake off to his right and a wide dirt road snaking off into the distance to the right. Way off in that direction Tyrone could see a wisp of smoke rising into the sky that might have been coming from a roadside fire or maybe some unseen hut or house but from his vantage point, the Marine just couldn’t tell. It even smelled different here; gone was the hot humid jungle air thick with the aroma of spices, oil, and gun smoke; replaced with a cooler wind that carried a hint of something foul, something rotten perhaps.

  Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, was the first thought that crept into the Marine’s confused mind but there was no humor in the thought, no joke; it was quite simply the truth.

  But how could that be?

  If this wasn’t Vietnam, then where the hell was he? He’d entered Charlie’s extensive network of tunnels a few clicks east of Ben Duoc, having found one of the many tiny entrances hidden within the scattered leaves of a massive Bamboo tree. He’d have never found it except that the one lip of the lid was sticking up just a fraction of an inch and when he’d rubbed his hand across the ground to sweep away the wet leaves, the entire lid had popped off in his hands. Tyrone was no expert on geography and certainly wasn’t fooling anyone into thinking he knew everything about the country he was trying to help defend but one thing was for sure; Tyrone knew for a fact the tunnel network that he’d entered a few days back had been surrounded for fifteen or twenty miles in any direction by thick, rain drenched jungle. There was no way – no possible way – he’d crawled so far away under the surface of the earth to have travelled out of the terrain he’d been humping through for months on end.

  Christ, the whole country was a damn jungle…wasn’t it?

  Looking skyward brought another shock to the system. It was a somewhat hazy yet cloudless day but no matter which direction he turned his head he couldn’t find the sun. It was bright enough out that it seemed to be midday or early afternoon at most, but overhead the sky was empty, a shade of murky golden yellow Tyrone had honestly never seen before. Why was there no Sun in the sky? Where could it have gone?

  Still on his knees, Tyrone grabbed a fistful of dirt and crushed it between his fingers. The soil was bone dry and much darker than the dirt and mud he’d been used to slugging through. Bringing his fingers to his nose, he smelled that same cloying odor of rot and decay he smelled in the air.

  “What the fuck is happening?” Tyrone said, his words louder than intended, a trace of fear creeping into his tone. “This shit can’t be real.”

  But it was. It had to be. What other explanation was there?

  Then suddenly Tyrone knew the answer. It was simple really, and he was surprised it had taken him this long to realize it. The solution had been staring him in the face since the moment he’d woken up and seen the light at the end of the tunnel.

  He was dead.

  It was a good thing he was already on his knees or the r
eality of his situation would have stolen the strength from his legs. The grenade that Charlie had dropped at his feet earlier had killed both of them, two caged birds with one mighty stone. The explosion had hurled him along the offshoot passageway and Tyrone could clearly remember smelling his flesh burning as his body lay in agony at the T-section of the tunnel. He thought he’d passed out but evidently he’d died from his wounds and his soul or conscience or whatever had woken up find this place; wherever that was. It seemed far-fetched and too surreal to be true, but under theses bizarre circumstances death was the only solution that made any sense.

  Okay, he thought, forcing himself to take a deep breath, struggling to keep his sanity in check. Where the heck am I then? Heaven? Hell?

  Tyrone had absolutely no idea.

  Gingerly climbing to his feet, the Marine took stock of his own appearance, trying to focus and make some sense of this unexpected turn of events. In his heart he was hoping he was wrong and perhaps was just knocked senseless by the explosion in the tunnel and all of this was just a strange dream or a wicked, trauma-induced hallucination. When he pinched himself, he couldn’t detect anything different about his skin. He still felt real; alive for lack of a better word, and his aching body still felt the sting of all his recent scratches, cuts, and burns.

  As he’d suspected, his Marine cams, or utility uniform as they were called, was ruined, his dark green and black shirt much worse for wear than his baggy pants, most of it burned right off his back and hanging in tatters. Thankfully he had his .45 caliber auto in its leather shoulder holster and still carried a U.S. Marine’s best friend, a 12 inch all-purpose Ka-Bar strapped to his belt. The hand gun made him feel safe but the Ka-Bar comforted him even more. It had been designed for in-close hand-to-hand combat but every Marine knew it had been designed and ruggedly built to be a versatile survival knife to pry, dig, or cut anything he needed, and could also be used to break a few heads if the need ever arose. Inside his pants pockets, Tyrone found three clips for his .45, two of them full, and a tiny flashlight that for some unknown reason he hadn’t dared to use while within the tunnels and needed it most. He also found a half-eaten Hershey’s chocolate bar, a handful of Binoctal heavy duty prescription pain meds, and small multi-use Swiss Army pocket knife that had several useful tools and attachments beside the most obvious cutting blade one.