Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life at Last I've Found Thee.How befitting that an old song in the American musical theatre played up the voice of a "ghost." Yet, it also could have been about the mystery of death itself. And just as mystifying is the thought of being caught between life and death.Such trial of flesh and spirit still rattles Trinidadian-born A Mark Long, who has had a subconscious grip on a shard of the afterlife ever since a chilling experience on a patch of earth nicknamed Artillery Plateau that, for him, might as well have been renamed God's Little Acre.Long, who immigrated to the US when he was a young boy, might not remember someone's name from a week ago, but he can never cut trauma loose.An Army combat specialist Fifth Class in South Vietnam, Long was on guard at a hilltop fire base when enemy rockets knifed through the dawn. They threaded through the mist like needles of light in search of range. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was "busting caps"-rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and 122mm rockets-inside the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), an area dividing North Vietnam from South Vietnam.Indeed, a rocket's arc tracked five black artillery troopers grouped in a foxhole that just three weeks earlier they had gouged out of the backyard of a self-propelled 175mm howitzer, the army's super gun."My role was to ensure all units were sufficiently staffed to run the tracks (the four big guns that harassed NVA troops carrying supplies and ammo on risky missions down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into South Vietnam)," Long said.He also helped out on the complex firing of the guns.
Luckily, or so he thought, Long, on guard outside the foxhole, had picked up the RPGs through his fogged-up glasses."They're steppin' 'em in," he screamed, affording buddies enough time to hug the circular wall of the living-room-size, five-foot-deep hole, and brace for the explosion. Then, Long, racing for sanctuary, tripped on a sandbag on the rim and fell backward, smack in the middle of the muddy floor, right next to the green canvas cot. That was when he saw the light up close, as he recalls the round's track in the drizzle.Forty years later, that rocket still sails across his mind. Blowing apart the heart of his darkness only to reveal, again and again, in the immortal coda by Col Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in the surreal flick, Apocalypse Now-The Horror."I couldn't feel anything, hear or smell anything," he said. "But the light was getting closer and closer in my face. Like in slow-mo."He remembers squeezing his unease about the squad's chances through the narrowing crevice of time. Lately, they'd been on his mind, because the artillery unit was left unprotected by marines, who'd been hard-pressed to provide adequate support in the surrounding foothills. And they'd survive partly because of his spirituality, since he always found faith for those who'd abandoned theirs.He would puzzle battery mates about the dilemma of the soul: "There's no pain we know of on the other side, so why should you worry (about death)?"It fell to Long, it seemed, to motivate jaded troopers in the trance of war.Now, he's about to preach to the preacher. In the nanosecond before the big BOOM, Long's life would swoosh by, a résumé that he could take with him to that mysterious world across the proverbial river, where warrior saints are embraced as heroes."I relived my entire past," he recalls.Long was born in Boissiere Village but grew up in Compton, California; the extended family taking up residence in the States in the 1950s and 60s. In the years leading up to Vietnam, life was a middle class pursuit, as attested by his stream of consciousness from the foxhole.
The disciplinarian mom, Hilva Monica Tatum, scolding an eight-year-old for preaching from her Bible while standing on her bed.
He and younger brother, Leslie, performing community service-particularly at hospitals in Los Angeles.
His glory years as the high school track star with pretty girls in tow.
His sprinting prowess with the army's track team in Europe that leads to Olympic qualifying times.
And then there's that damn hill.
His "adopted son," Ho Chi, three, jump-cuts into the frame to receive the usual box of C-rations (ready-to-eat military meal) from Long and three troopers driving through a nearby village. The child rushing the jeep from the passenger side, as always. An explosion killing Long's friends. The remote-controlled bomb strapped on the kid blowing him to smithereens. Long pinned under the overturned jeep, but surviving the blast.
In the foxhole--the rocket still sinking in his face-Long would pick up "those eerie NVA bells all over again."First, it was trumpets, followed by thebells, ka-lang ka-lang, and then lights flashing through the trees in the jungle. They started a-whoopin' and a-hollering, coming at us from every angle. That night we were overrun."And there are the parish baboons, occupying their own area of activity. Long's platoon comes upon them while on patrol in the surrounding jungle. A family of about 40, the baboons jump them, grab their weapons and beat them up. Wrong war, wrong turf.Back on the hill, Long watches as "Indian," a knife-throwing Native American, zaps a rat as large as a cat, thus saving the night in the trench for a beaten squad that hasn't eaten in five days because resupply choppers couldn't fly in extreme weather.His life guided by the subconscious and continuing to wind down, Long returns to the scene where a buddy, The Gambler, who carries his bones (dice) even in combat, is taking gruesome odds on the next attack: Where and when it would occur; which unit would be the first to go. Long is also reacquainted with shot-putter Fowler, the mind wandering over to the site where he was killed trying to save The Gambler. That hurt, how both bought the farm, because The Gambler, a non-smoker, strangely lighted a cigarette while on patrol.
Now, Long's own personal light is edging closer to doom. It would be interrupted, though, by a hallucinatory event."An out-of-body experience," he says. "I was standing on the lip of the hole and seeing just myself on the floor. None of the guys. It reminded me of a similar spiritual happening when I ran the 400 (metres) at a district meet. I'd won the 100 and 200 and was tired, so I cramped up halfway and fell-then I got out of my body and remember telling myself, 'Get up!, Get up! You can do it.' That race gave my school the championship."The mixed metaphor, though, doesn't interlock with the situation in his face on the hill. Watching an image of himself splayed out in the hole, he's thinking the spiritual and the temporal had better be communicating through his favourite Psalm 27: "The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?"Then I went back into my body... And that hurt. That's why I wanted to stay out wherever I was."The athlete tried to relax at the apocalyptic moment. But with his foot caught in death's door, the body twitched in the torturous heat of the moment. Long had found the transition zone. The hue of the rocket had gone green, then turned white in the quickness of time-thought, space, matter and such, all of that were left draped over death's door. A moment before he entered the beyond, he tried desperately to hold on to this side. Long reached back and found a foot to grab. Now, his mind has become suffused with the liquid colours of a rainbow. There's fire in the hole. It's the explosion. He's gone. No, he's still here. He's gone again.Thirty-two gut-wrenching days later, Long emerges from a coma in a ward on a hospital ship in the South China Sea. His head and legs swathed in bandages, he demands answers from a nurse. What is this new world? Where are my boys? Shortly afterward, Long says, a general, obviously tipped off about the patient in the long sleep, arrives by chopper. The chief and a clutch of doctors gather at his bedside.
"How are you feeling?" the general asked.
"I'm fine."
"And, mentally?"
"Nothing's wrong with my mind," Long replied.
"You know, you're living on borrowed time, soldier."
"They kept hammering about my mental state," Long recalls. "But they failed to realise I'm balanced between the universe and this planet."
Long remembers the general whipping out a few photographs that showed him alone in the crater, clutching someone's leg, just a leg, amid the goo. His boys were, in essence, vaporised. A smile crossed his face."I was extremely happy for them," he says. "Spiritually, they were on the other side. When the general left, I started communicating with them. That wasn't unusual. After the first fire fight on the hill, some friends were blown away and they came back that same night looking for food because they were hungry. They were in the ether stage, so how could you be hungry without a body. Some things you just got to accept."When Long returns to the States, his mom, who let slip that she felt a tug on the heart, simultaneously, and synchronised with the explosion, sweats it out at the bus terminal. A welter of emotions welling up inside. An army sergeant finds her in the longings of the heart. He's about to expand the gap of this year-long yearning for her damaged boy."Ma'am," he says, "your son's been through a harrowing experience. Don't ask him nothing. Ever."Today, mother and son reside in Las Vegas, Nevada. A city far from that other madding world where shadows cannot be illumined until the end-yet illumined by its own deepest darkness of odds.Odds sometimes too short to interpret value.