by Gord Rollo
The Dark Side of Heaven
Gord Rollo
Published by Ashbury Creek Media, 2016.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Down in the Dark: August, 1970
1
2
3
4
5
Destination Unknown: August, 1970
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
The Long Haul: Otherwise Known as Life: August, 1970 - Present Day
25
26
Also by Gord Rollo
The Jigsaw Man
Strange Magic
Valley of the Scarecrow
The Translators
Crowley’s Window
The Dark Side of Heaven
Peeler
Gods & Monsters Vol. 1
Time & Space Vol. 2
Flesh & Blood Vol. 3
Copyright © 2016 by Gord Rollo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance it bears to reality is entirely coincidental.
Published by Ashbury Creek Media
Ontario, Canada
Book & Cover Design by Adam Geen
www.adamgeen.com
Cover Image (Tunnel) from Bryn at
www.beyond-oddities.deviantart.com
DOWN IN THE DARK: AUGUST, 1970
1
Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s pitch black in this section of the tunnel but in my mind I can still easily see the Vietnamese woman’s face. The boy’s too. Yeah…especially the boy’s. He’d recently hurt his right eye somehow and had a fresh red scar running vertically on his face from cheek to eyebrow. His damaged eye was hidden behind a dirty gauze bandage stained brown with dried blood and in need of changing. No matter if I lived to be a hundred years old, I’d never forget the image of his sweaty, innocent little face pleading up at me the moment before I’d tossed the grenade and slammed closed the lid on their pitifully inadequate hiding place beneath the floor of their tiny hut.
I never did hear them scream; nothing but silence from behind the hinged bamboo cover until the explosion, but my shame gives them voice and I’m forced to listen to their anguished sobs and pain-filled shrieks again and again. And though I saw none of it, I constantly picture them huddling together in that cramped space, mother consoling child as best she could in the scant seconds they had left together. Our lives only crossed paths for a few brief moments, but it’s that tragic last instant which is burned into memory, scalded into my psyche, and no matter how far I try to run I can’t escape them. They accuse me, condemn me – haunt me – every moment of every day; which is, after all, why I’m down here in the dark.
The Cu Chi tunnels, Ben Duoc, Vietnam.
It’s terrible down here. Hot. Humid. Big time claustrophobic for sure, but you get used to it. The dirt walls and floor are much harder in these lower levels, packed so solid they scrape my skin raw as I move. It’s like I’m squirming for miles through the twisted intestine of some giant concrete monster. Smells like that too; like bowels: a sickly-sweet odor of shit, piss, and dark nutrient-rich earth. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I probably smell worse.
How far I’m below the surface I have no idea. For a while I was trying to keep a mental map in my head but it was impossible and a colossal waste of time. Fifty feet? Seventy-five, maybe? Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same down here, and regardless of how far I descend into this fucking darkness I know I will never escape the disgrace, the self-loathing that follows close behind perpetually stabbing me in the back with a dagger named guilt. I just want the suffering to end.
Soon.
An explosion sounds nearby, loud enough to make my ears ring painfully. A millisecond later an unseen bullet rockets past my face close enough for me to smell its oily coating and feel its hot breath against my cheek.
Shit! Motherfucker found me again.
Where is he?
I’m so out of it from hunger, thirst, and exhaustion from lack of sleep I didn’t see the flash and can’t tell if the shot came from in front of me or behind. Not good. I don’t know where he is but unless he was just firing off a teaser he undoubtedly knows where I am. My death-wish aside, I wasn’t about to let this scrawny gook be the one who took me out. Screw that. We’d been playing cat and mouse (me being the one that nibbles cheese most of the time) for the better part of two days. My skin color and dark clothing made me virtually invisible but he had the huge advantage of knowing the tunnels. If it’s the last thing I ever do, I’m sending this slant-eyed bastard to Hell.
Naturally, he’s trying to do the same to me.
I drop to my belly and worm-crawl through the dirt, fast as lightning in my minds eye but agonizingly slow in real time. Expecting to hear another crack of the gun, I’m still wondering where the bullet will tear into me when my fingers discover a new shaft in the tunnel heading left. It’s of a smaller diameter, the walls of the shaft touching both my shoulders but at times like this beggars can’t be choosers. I dive in. It could very well be the same shaft my enemy shot from and he could be sitting five feet from me right now. Doubtful though. If he was, I’d be dead by now.
It’s statue time. Stop moving. Stop breathing.
Stop.
Lay chilly and listen…
They train Marines for this shit. Uncle Sam has a whole bag of tricks for special boys like me. For instance, if you want to preserve your night vision in a tunnel, you always close one eye when you fire - the shielded eye will still have night vision. Some of our rats use NVG - night vision goggles, but I never liked them. Man, shit sure looks spooky through those bad boys: A luminescent green background where any sources of light are glaringly bright. Human eyes glow too, like demons from the pit. Fuck that; I tossed mine in the jungle long ago.
No, right now I can’t see shit – not this deep – but I can hear just fine. I have to. My life depends on it. I open my mouth wide, inhale deep, but exhale out my nose, hard and fast. Then I swallow and listen. It’s another cool trick, a way to divert pressure and fully open your ear canals to increase your hearing acuity for a few precious seconds. It works too.
I hear him.
2
The United States mighty war machine had been getting its ass kicked by the Vietcong for years now, and most of the soldiers knew they were fighting a senseless, losing battle, regardless of what President Nixon was spewing out to their families and friends half a world away. But they fought anyway - sure, partly because they believed in freedom and rallying against communist oppression and all that other jazzed up political bullshit, but mostly they fought to stay alive. To have a chance; even a slim one, that they might get their asses out of the rice paddies and back home to America in one piece. I didn’t share that dream anymore. Not since the night I’d killed the defenseless mother and her poor little boy…and several weeks before that, my twin brother.
You heard me right. My brother.
Tommy was two minutes and twenty seconds older than me, or so we w
ere told, identical twins inseparable since the day we came kicking and screaming out of the womb. We didn’t do the whole ‘dress exactly the same’ routine you see so many twins doing nowadays but that probably had more to do with our parents not being able to find two sets of identical hand me down clothes at the local Goodwill thrift store. Didn’t matter though; no matter what rags we were wearing, we were best buds. He meant the world to me and I followed him everywhere back when we were young. Ironically, it was him who ended up following me to Nam, voluntarily enlisting the day after he heard that I had. I honestly think he did it because he believed he could protect me and that we’d skate through whatever Charlie could throw at us and we’d head back home to the States big time heroes.
Yeah, right. Tyrone and Tommy Banks…heroes? Doubtful. We were just two punk ass skinny black kids from Cleveland, Ohio. Tommy and I had just turned eighteen. What the hell did we know about war?
It didn’t go down the way we’d hoped.
Not even close.
Marine boot camp at Ft. Benning, Georgia, was horrendously tough on our minds and bodies but it was pretty exciting too. Neither of us had travelled very much and we’d never fired a rifle before but it turned out that we had a natural knack for it; me maybe a tiny bit more so than Tommy, but he was damn good too. Once we made our way to South Vietnam – via a pit stop in Okinawa, Japan - our sharpshooter skills landed us in Da Nang under the watchful care and massive shadow of Gunnery Sgt. William Matheson, a 260 pound giant of a man who’d once been a star linebacker with Penn State back in the early 1960’s. Tommy and I had even watched him play on T.V. a few times back in the day and we were in awe of his physical size and how fast he could move for such a big man. Anyway, it fell on Matheson’s broad shoulders to continue our on the job marksman training and keep our raggedy asses from getting killed; at least until Uncle Sam had gotten his money’s worth out of us.
We were sharpshooters but all Marines are trained as infantrymen first and foremost. Trained to get the job done, no matter what was asked of us. We spent the first three months out on regular patrols, getting soaked to the bone humping through the constant downpours and being scared shitless getting our first taste of hardcore action. You can fire all the assault rifles you’d like in basic training, but it doesn’t even come close to preparing you for the first time someone fires a clip of AK-47 rounds at your head or the first time you hear the dreaded THUMP sound of a 60 mm mortar shell leaving the tube and heading your way.
We kept our heads down though and did what we were told, slowly finding our soldier legs and not doing anything stupid. Gunnery Sgt. Matheson took a shine to us and seeing as we were twins anyway, he labeled us T and T2, giving us nicknames that signified we were no longer fresh meat in his; and therefore the rest of the platoons, eyes. I was T2 by the way, not that it matters. We even had our buddies shave our new identities into the stubble of hair on the back of our heads so they could tell us apart. It was a cool bonding moment, but just as we were starting to really settle into the daily grind, Tommy and I were transferred to China Beach to be part of a Combined Action Platoon (CAP) where we were given lessons in Vietnamese culture and a crash course in their language. Each CAP would have around 10 – 15 Marines, usually a navy corpsman, and a platoon of Vietnamese Popular Forces. The basic idea was to enter the various villages, befriend the local population, and offer medical supplies and protection against their northern enemies. On paper, these CAP’s would win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese villagers and had the potential to turn the tide of the war.
Didn’t happen though.
The villagers didn’t trust us, and there were far too many Vietcong or Northern Vietnamese Army sympathizers and spies living among the locals for our plans to work. Instead of walking into town and villages as the saviors we had been taught we were, we’d have to sneak in on full alert always on guard for the presence of booby traps or snipers stationed in the houses or trees. Even the women and children weren’t to be trusted; the shots fired or the bomb detonated by one of them just as likely as it was from a trained soldier. The result of this constant tension and strain beat the shit out of us; mentally and physically, and like most of our brothers-in-arms Tommy and I started taking far too many of the drugs readily available to us. Marijuana was everywhere, even growing wild in the jungles as we walked on by. We’d drying it out, crush it up and make home-made joints by rolling big wads of it inside toilet paper. Heroin was available, and so was opium, and you could buy hash from the local fisherman or prescription painkillers like Binoctal – 20 tablets for a dollar – from the local children. Of them all, it was the heroin that bit me the hardest. We’d get our standard ration of Craven A cigarettes and we’d take the tobacco from them and lace it with 94 – 96% pure heroin which we bought in 250 mg glass vials and carried around with us constantly.
Heroin fucked me up. Fucked us all up; which was why we smoked it of course, but it really fucked me up. I just couldn’t think straight when I was using it. It charged me up, wired me so tight I’d pull my hand gun and shoot at anything that moved, even the mosquitos that would buzz my ears enough to piss me off. I was losing it big time but there was nothing I could do about it.
One day in Ami Ba, a village with a population of 300 or 400 people, a sniper started firing at us as we were trying to help drill a new well so the villagers would have fresh water. Strung out on H, I hit the dirt and started returning fire without even knowing where the shooter was hiding. I was just holding the trigger down and spraying rounds everywhere; a crazed maniac whose nerves were as sharp and frayed as razor wire. Tommy was shouting at me to stop and when I heard his voice off to my left I turned that way to see what he wanted.
For a split second I forgot to let go of the trigger.
The first few rounds knocked my brother’s helmet off; and I can still remember watching it rise into the air like it had wings and spinning around and around in the air as if time was slowing down and I was seeing the world in slow motion.
The next round took the top of Tommy’s head off.
3
My adversary is still back in the main tunnel. He’s lying chilly too, but I can hear him anyway and know it’s the same guy. I’ve picked up over the last few days that this particular Charlie has a nervous habit he probably isn’t even aware of but it gives his position away. He makes this barely audible clicking noise: his tongue nervously tapping against either his teeth or the roof of his mouth.
Tap-tap-tap… then a pause. Tap-tap-tap… pause.
Yeah…it’s him alright. The little five-foot-fuckwad is less than twenty feet away, down the main shaft to my right. I’d been unknowingly heading straight toward him before finding this offshoot, might have crawled right into his lap if lady luck had deserted me. She hadn’t though. That bitch was determined to see me suffer as long as possible. Fuck her, and fuck this gook too. I was taking him out right here and now.
Drawing my .45 caliber auto from its holster near my shoulder I leaned back into the main shaft and fired off two rounds, Jessie James quick, and both bullets hit dead center where I knew Charlie’s heart and head were sitting. My aim was bang on too; Uncle Sam had trained this boy well. Only trouble was the bullets zinged off somewhere down the shaft to bury harmlessly into the dirt because my enemy was gone.
Within the time it took me to realize where he was and pull my handgun to shoot, he’d disappeared again, vanished like a ghost. Obviously he hadn’t gone far. There was no time for that. Must be another offshoot tunnel close by he’d made a break for in the blink of an eye. The little bugger was fast, I’ll give him that much.
Dammit!
I pulled back out of harms way and leaned against the wall to think and listen, although my eardrums were still screaming from the three shots that had been fired. Chances were his ears would be ringing too so for the time being I figured I’d be safe, neither me nor Charlie stupid enough to expose ourselves into the main shaft at least until our most important sense do
wn here in the dark was 100% back in action.
I was wrong.
I heard nothing for a minute but the sound of my own heart beating rapidly in my chest, closing my eyes for a moment and trying to think what my next move should be, when suddenly I heard a tiny scraping noise in the main shaft and knew the crazy gook was on the move again. He was close too, having maneuvered himself near the entrance to my offshoot tunnel without me having a clue he was there. I quietly pulled my .45 again, pointing it in the general direction of where I thought his head might be once he rounded the corner but then I heard the sound I feared most in the whole world – one I heard in my sleep every night since I’d killed the mother and son.
A grenade.
The gook had pulled the cotter pin on a hand grenade and was getting ready to toss it into my lap. That wasn’t what I’d heard though. You never hear the pin being withdrawn; that part of arming the weapon is silent and you can walk around all day with the pin pulled and not have the grenade explode. You can even put the pin back in its slot and put it away again. No, it’s the spoon on the top of the bomb that makes a metallic “PING” noise as the handle is released and the metal spoon flies off to set the detonator timer into action. Once you hear that distinctive noise – and when you’ve heard it even once you’ll never forget it – your butt sphincter clenches hard and you know you’ve only got a few seconds left to live unless you get your ass moving out of the danger zone.
So I did.
Acting purely in survival mode, I spun and bolted on my hands and knees as fast as I could further into the offshoot tunnel hoping I could outdistance the explosion but knowing my chances of that were slim and none. Fuck! After all this effort, the little bastard had beaten me and I was honestly more upset at that fact then I was of my impending death. Hell, I wanted to die; just not like this.
