by Gord Rollo
The Archangel stopped reading the book, closing it with a loud bang. He looked at the brothers long and hard, then finally said to Tyrone, “You would sacrifice yourself to let your brother pass?”
Before Tommy could protest, Tyrone immediately responded, “Of course. I love him. I’d sacrifice anything for him.”
The archangel turned to Tommy. “And what about you? Would you sacrifice eternity for your brother as well?”
“Absolutely,” Tommy said. “I love him too.”
There was a moment of grueling silence but then the Archangel smiled down on both of them. “I believe you both speak the truth. Love is a great and powerful thing and I do see the goodness inside of your hearts. It’s that goodness which has guided you to this hallowed place. Without it you would never have found your way, so for your proven selflessness and brotherly love you may enter into paradise.”
The brothers jumped into each other’s arms, hugging each other and unabashedly crying tears of joy. “We did it, Tommy!” Tyrone said. “I can’t believe we did it!”
“No…you did it, bro. I’d be on my way to Hell if it hadn’t been for you. I owe you everything, man!”
“Not a chance. You watched out for me my whole life and I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to you back in ’Nam.”
“That’s all behind us, bro. There’s no more blame to go around so forget about it. Let’s just get inside before they change their minds, okay?”
“After you, man. Age before beauty, right?”
“Whatever you say.”
The brother’s began walking past the archangel, smiles plastered on both their faces but as fast as a flash of lightning, Michael drew his sword and placed it between Tommy and Tyrone. Backing the younger of the brothers up a few feet with the tip of his blade, the archangel said, “I was only speaking to Thomas. Only he has the right to enter into Heaven.”
“But why?” Tyrone said, bitterly disappointed but not nearly as surprised as he should be. He’d always expected to be turned away, even before this journey had even begun. Getting the others into Heaven had been his only goal and he was pleased he’d actually accomplished his mission but still upset he wouldn’t share eternity with his brother and loved ones. “You said you believed both of us and that you knew there was goodness in our hearts?”
“I did, and I still do. That’s not the reason you can’t enter into paradise today.”
Bewildered, Tyrone had to ask. “Then why? What’s the matter?”
Michael put his sword back in its sheath, kneeling down so he was at eye level with the disappointed soldier. “You can’t enter into glory, Tyrone, simply because you’re not dead yet.”
“What?” the Marine said, not sure he understood.
“Only the dead can enter Heaven, son, and your body still waits for you within the Tunnel in Vietnam, your soul drifting between life and death right now not unlike the Marine platoon that helped you earlier. That’s why your name hasn’t been written in this Book of Life yet. You’re only a visitor here in the afterworld and although the pendulum could shift either way, I’m going to send you back to where you belong.”
“But I don’t want to go back. There’s nothing there for me. I wanna stay here with Tommy and Henrik and everyone else.”
“I’m sorry but I’m made up my mind. There’s goodness inside of you, but I sense you have much more to give to the world. It’s not your time, Tyrone. Not even close. Say goodbye to your brother and then go back and make a difference in the world. Your family and friends will still be here when you eventually come back.”
“Is the anything I can say? Do I have any choice here?”
“No. You do have a choice how you live the rest of your life though. I pray you’ll make the right one. This judgment is closed.”
The archangel stood up and stepped back a few steps, allowing Tyrone a minute with his brother before Heaven’s gate was relocked. Tommy walked over and put his hand on his younger brother’s shoulder, trying to comfort him.
“What should I do, Tommy?” Tyrone asked, honestly at a loss. Of all the scenarios he’d considered might happen since this adventure began, returning to Earth hadn’t been one of them.
“Nothin’ you can do, bro…except do what he says. Go home and live a good long life. Find a beautiful wife. Have a few kids. Nothin’ wrong with that, right?”
“I don’t know. Guess not. Just seems like a whole different world. I’d just started getting used to being dead and now I find out I’m not. Hard to take it all in, ya know?”
“Of course. Don’t be like the Lost Patrol though. Whatever you do, find some peace and don’t come back until you’re ready. I’ll be right here waiting for you. Soon as you come through the gate, I’ll be the first guy you see.”
“You better be.”
“I will. Promise.”
The brothers hugged for a long time and when they stepped back from one another both of them had tears streaming down their cheeks. “Say hi to Mom and Dad for me, okay?” Tommy asked.
“I will, bro. I’ll tell ‘em you’ll be waiting for them too. Someday we’ll all be together again, right?”
“You know it.”
“Time to go,” the Archangel said behind them, waving Tommy to his side.
Tyrone kissed his older brother on the cheek and said, “Get in there, man.”
“Okay,” Tommy said, starting to walk toward the open gate. “I love you, little brother. Take care of yourself.”
“I will Tommy. Love you too. Don’t ruin the place before I get back.”
Tommy smiled and gave one more wave before disappearing behind the high wall. Tyrone fell to his knees, gutted to the core and having never felt so incredibly alone in all of his life. He was still on the ground when Michael quietly approached him and touched him on the top of his head.
“Be at peace, son. You’re young. You’ve got sixty or seventy years left to enjoy Earth. Live them well and I promise you’ll see your brother again. Close your eyes and relax. You’re going to be just fine.”
“Seventy years?” Tyrone laughed, more nervous than amused. He closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. “I don’t even know how or where to start on day one.”
“You’ll start where everyone has to… in the dark. It’ll be your job to find some light in your life and start anew. Good luck.”
The archangel removed his hand from Tyrone’s head and the Marine could hear him walking away. Tyrone didn’t think he was leaving until seconds later when he heard the lock click on Heaven’s Gate and realized what was happening. The Marine’s eyes flew open in panic, not ready to be dismissed so quickly. He still had a million questions for the commander of God’s army. The magnificent golden gate, the high stone wall, the gold brick road and everything else around Tyrone was gone though, the sky and air around him so dark the Marine couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
“Wait!” Tyrone cried out in fear. “Please don’t leave me. Not yet. I don’t even know which way to go. Are you still there? Michael? Tommy? God?”
And then in a much quieter voice, “Anyone?”
But there was no answer. Lance Corporal Tyrone Banks was totally alone.
THE LONG HAUL: OTHERWISE KNOWN AS LIFE: AUGUST, 1970 - PRESENT DAY
25
In three small words I can sum up everything
I've learned about life. It goes on.
Robert Frost
It was pitch black in that section of the tunnel…
Yeah, that’s right, I knew where I was. It took me a few minutes to pull my head out of my ass and stop whining about it, but just the smell alone told me everything I’d needed to know. I remember that day vividly, even after all these years. I could smell that sickly-sweet odor of shit, piss, and dark nutrient-rich earth again but on top of those odors I could smell the acrid stench of burning flesh as well.
My flesh, of course.
I can’t tell you how long I lay there in the dark, simply ignoring th
e fact that I was alive, but I’ll bet it was at least half an hour. I tried shouting for the archangel again and remember trying to communicate with Tommy through the strange mind-link we’d had over in the afterlife but nothing I tried worked. I was on my own.
Eventually I found the strength and more accurately – the willpower – to roll onto my hands and knees and start crawling along the dirt shaft I was in. My body was sore as hell and I was probably bleeding from a dozen different wounds but thankfully I couldn’t see anything so I just kept on crawling. My time in the tunnels is sort of blurry after that. I don’t think I ran into anyone else down there and don’t even remember if I had to crawl back across the Vietcong soldier who’d blown himself up with the hand grenade or not. Doesn’t matter I guess. All that’s important is that eventually I found my way out. I crawled out into the jungle in the middle of the night but the moon’s light was still so bright after living in the dark for so long, that I still had to shield my eyes and squint. Sometime in the early morning, I managed to stumble my way back to basecamp and collapsed about three feet inside the safe zone.
The doctors patched me up and let me sleep for a few days but once I started trying to tell my commanding officer what had happened to me down in the tunnels things got a little hairy for me. The words “stressed out” were said a lot after that, but those were the words said to my face. Behind my back I heard a lot of quiet laughter and more than one reference to me going “crazy as a bedbug”.
Whatever. I really didn’t care what people said about me. Not after what I’d been through. I even played it up a little after that. If the doctors wanted “crazy” I was more than happy to give it to them; anything to get me the hell out of Vietnam and back to the States. It worked too. At first I was sent to a military hospital in Okinawa, Japan, for a few months, but after a million therapy sessions and seeing half a dozen so called specialists I was discharged from the Marine Corp for being mentally unfit and given my walking papers to head back home. In the years to follow, that diagnosis would change to something a bit less demeaning known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but no matter what label they wanted to put on me, it amounted to basically the same thing. For me, the war was over.
Unfortunately, the real battle of life had only just begun.
26
You may think I’m being dishonest here, but I swear it wasn’t until a full two months after I’d arrived back in the United States that I seriously began to question whether or not any of those things in the afterlife actually happened. None of the doctors thought they had, of course, and neither did any of my friends in the platoon or my commanding officers for that matter, but I certainly believed I was telling the truth. It wasn’t until I was settled back in my parent’s house in Cleveland and had all the time in the world to sit alone and think about things that I started to doubt my recollections. I mean, my story didn’t make a lot of sense did it? It was a whole lot easier pill to swallow if I looked at things from everyone else’s perspective. I’d nearly been killed in a freak grenade explosion down inside the tunnel and while my battered and burning body lay in a semi-coma trying to unscramble my brain, I had this elaborate dream of spending time in the afterlife looking for Tommy and running around trying to save Henrik, Huong, and her son Gia from a Scarlet Witch who rode around on a marble Gargoyle. Saying it like that, it even sounded stupid to me. No wonder everyone thought I was nuts.
I wasn’t though.
I was sure of it. Sure of it back then, and even more sure of it now. I had no proof any of it had really happened but I stubbornly held on to my beliefs because what other option did I really have? If I played along with everyone else and admitted I’d only been dreaming, that left me in the same spot I’d been before I volunteered to go down into Charlie’s tunnel: A broken man who’d accidentally killed his brother and mindlessly murdered an innocent woman and child.
That didn’t exactly make me a hero now, did it?
I’d come out of those tunnels actually feeling good about myself. I was disappointed that the archangel had sent me back to live out the rest of my life but I walked away thinking I’d at least made the best of a bad situation and had honestly made a difference getting Tommy and the rest of them out of Tartarus Fortress and to the gates of Heaven. Dime store self-analysis maybe, but screw it – I felt redeemed. I went into the tunnels hoping to die for the terrible things I’d done, but I’d come up into the jungle a new man; a changed man determined to make a positive difference in the world, like the archangel Michael had suggested I do.
If none of it was true, what was the bloody point?
Living with my parents quickly became intolerable. They both loved me and tried their best to appear understanding but in the end they just couldn’t hide the fact that they too thought I’d left my sanity somewhere back in Vietnam and worse yet, gave me the distinct feeling they wished it had been me who returned home to them in a flag-draped coffin, rather than their beloved Tommy. Maybe I’m being a bit unfair with that last part, but that was definitely how I felt so I packed my bags and wandered around for a while. I ended up in Jacksonville, Florida in the fall of 1972, staying with a few buddies of mine I’d known in the Corp, but that was a complete failure as well. They were good guys but all they ever wanted to talk about was the war and how we were constantly getting the short end of the straw by our own people back here in the U.S. I just didn’t want to talk about any of that stuff anymore. Didn’t even want to think about it.
I’m not exactly sure when I made the decision to fly back to Vietnam, but it was an idea I’d had bouncing around in my head for several years. Had to be about ’76 or maybe ’77, but once I’d made up my mind there was no changing it. I arrived back in ‘Nam expecting to be hated and have all sorts of terrible flashbacks to my time humping through the jungles there but it didn’t happen like that at all. Southern Vietnam looked about the same as I remembered but the people took me in and accepted me far better than I’d thought – much better than our troops had been treated back home, that was for sure. Failure or not, I think the Vietnamese people knew we’d at least tried to help and I instantly fell in love with the place.
And the people.
In 1988 I married a wonderful local woman named Tuyen, which meant ‘angel’, and she certainly was that for me and more. Never had I known peace and love the way I did until she entered into my life. We were blessed with a son in 1995 and Tuyen was kind enough to let me name the boy Gia. She even let me give him Tommy for a middle name, so the poor little bugger was carried around town being introduced as Banks Tommy Gia. It was a strange name for a Vietnamese boy, but I always thought it sounded kind of cool too. What do I know? Anyway, in public I called him Gia, which was still a fairly popular name, but in private I liked to call him Tommy G, much to his mother’s displeasure. Tommy G was my world, man; my reason for getting out of bed in the morning. God I love that boy. And because I love him so much I still to this day have never told him the story of what I believe happened to me down in that dark tunnel back in August of 1970. I don’t want him to think badly of me, or think I’m crazy like so many other people still do.
I suppose that was the reason I started to dig.
Yeah, you heard me right. I’ve been digging tunnels out in the fields behind my house ever since little Tommy was born. He’s a teenage boy now – heading towards being a man – so I’ve been at it for a long time now. I’m not ready to admit I’m an old fart quite yet, but I’m no spring chicken either. The digging hasn’t been easy, especially these last four or five years, but I keep at it anyway. Slow and steady, that’s my motto nowadays. You’d be amazed at what I’ve accomplished down there though, a network of passageways and rooms comparable to anything the Vietcong dreamed up during the war. The question is why am I doing it?
What am I looking for?
It’s a good question. One I honestly don’t have a cut and dried answer for. I suppose the long and short of it is I’m looking for proof about what happened a
ll those years ago. I wanna know once and for all if I’m crazy or if I really did stand at Heaven door and kiss my brother goodbye. I keep thinking about the Lost Patrol; that platoon of phantom Marines who are still whispered about even to this day. If they had a way of crossing over between life and death, why not me? I’d done it once already; why not one more time? I hope that makes some sense. Probably not, but there you have it.
I’m a good man. I know that. I’m a good husband and an even better father. I just need a sign that I’m not out of my mind. Not even for my sake. It started out that way, sure, but not anymore. Now I dig for Tommy G, so that he’ll never stop looking at me the way he does now. Someday I even hope to take him down into my tunnels and show him the proof I’m trying so hard to find. Oh, don’t get me wrong, him and his mother know all about my hobby. They always have. You can’t spend ten hours a day underground without those closest to you knowing what you’re doing, right? Yeah, they know I’m digging but whenever they ask I just tell them I’m looking for buried treasure. I’ve told them hundreds of stories about how there were deposits of gold and silver and bank notes scattered all over the country when the war destroyed all of the southern towns and cities. There’s even a decent market out there for old weapons and buried souvenirs, and I’ve found lots of that stuff while I was digging and always make a big show of it when I do.
