East Of The Dark Nebula

By Jonathan Phillip Blackwell

About the Author
Jonathan Phillip Blackwell was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and lived there until age twelve. As a military brat, Blackwell traveled to Kentucky, Tennessee, Colorado, Kansas, and California. He graduated from Washington Union High School in Freemont, California in 1962 and worked for Bishop Moving and Storage in Long Beach before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1964. Blackwell spent sixteen years in Japan and nine months in Vietnam before being medevacked out. He served in the U.S.A.F. for twenty-six years. He later drove trucks, some long haul, for thirteen years.
Blackwell has played guitar in a band, and he also loves to play chess. He taught C141s and C130s Phase II school. Blackwell is interested in plate tectonics, astrology, astronomy, the mind, and making big puzzles, but his true love is writing novels. Blackwell has lived all his goals and then some. He is presently widowed and living in Ogden, Utah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Oct 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889257295

Book preview

Chapter 1

Contemplation of War

It seems the first part of my life began at six or seven. My pa and I spent a lot of time together hunting, fishing and trapping, raising pigs and chickens, a couple of cows and two work horses, trying to keep food on the table. We chopped wood for the stoves and raised a good sized vegetable garden, and was always doing silly things to keep Mama happy. When I was ten, papa bought me a long barrel .22 and four boxes of ammo. Out behind the shed, there were instructions on weapon safety and ammo preservation, and how to take care of my rifle.

Then came the lecture I would never forget about the soul of life and death of animals and people, and my rifle. I watched Pa hunt; every shot had to count; it was always intense. He looked all around before each shot, took his time and seldom ever missed. Later I asked what he was looking for. We sat down in the middle of a pile of leaves and he explained it to me. It seems there’s a lot more to hunting than pulling up and pointing that rifle to knock that squirrel off a limb. Then I was thinking, one day I would learn the why of Pa’s reasons for what and how he did things. I always wanted to be like Papa.

I grew up in a little place called McKinnon, Tennessee, just a ways back from the river. We had to move back up the hill a bit a couple of times when the river got pretty wild, tearing out trees and pushing boulders around like they were pebbles.

Folks down here mind their own, but are willing to lend a hand when it’s needed. Never had much time for the girls, with hunting and chores and all, but that didn’t keep them from trying. When I was fifteen, Pa bought me a 30.30. He said I was responsible enough to do the job. It was kind of an all around rifle to hunt anything from deer to rabbits. But after a while I wasn’t satisfied with anything but a headshot. Pa said I wasn’t half bad with my new rifle, cause I was bringing in most of the meat for the table. That kept Mama happy and busy, and gave Pa more time to take care of other chores.

Mostly on my own, I learned how to hunt, really hunt, like Pa, in all kinds of weather. I learned to pay more attention to the clouds, the feel and smell of the Earth, and the way of the river. The effects the wind, rain and snow had on the trajectory of my bullets, and the effects it had on my rifle and me. The way I felt and the logic of things around me, the way I thought about the different ways of hunting in the heat and the cold. Just before, during, and after the snow and ice came, I was learning how to be patient with nature and myself. Guess I was growing up inside, I just couldn’t tell it by looking in the mirror.

I learned how to still myself and hide in plain sight. How to track and stalk different animals. Then one day I found some boot prints. Just for the hell of it, I tracked the guy right to his cabin. People are easy to hunt, they’re careless and clumsy and the ones that do wrong are afraid. At seventeen, I had just started hunting with a bow. It was a forty-five pound Bear bow. I started using it because the gunshots were too loud and scared the other animals away. Hunting with a bow is more intense, cause you don’t want to miss the shot. You look at an arrowhead differently than you do a bullet, it makes you feel different.

It was about that time when Pa sat me down and we had a long talk about my future, my life in general, without him and Mama, and about the military. When I was almost nineteen, I got to thinking seriously about what Pa had said. It was time. Ma and Pa and I said our emotional goodbyes. It was pretty tough leaving them, knowing I might never see them again—the woman of my dreams and the man who taught me everything I know. They had let me grow and taught me well. It took a couple a miles up the road to stop the tears, but then I started thinking about me and how I would make it outside these woods I had lived in all my life? I hitched a ride up to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, figuring to do what Pa said was the responsibility of every young man in the United States, to do my small part for my country and those who couldn’t.

Turns out, this was going to be a whole different way of life from what I was used to, hell, from what anybody was used to.

Basic training didn’t seem a lot different from hunting in the mountains. Most of the guys didn’t have their heart into what they were doing and would get mad when they got behind or got chewed out. This was all about combat and killing people. If you didn’t take it seriously, you could wind up getting hurt, booted out, or killed.

During my third week there, I got put in a different platoon. These guys were different. No nonsense or fooling around. Our training was different too. We did a lot of night training and navigation. Most of these guys became squad leaders, scouts, special ops, or snipers. I thought I wanted to drive a tank, but my TI had other ideas. It seemed there was always one of them watching me. During my fourth week, I was moved out of the barracks and put in a tent out in the woods. I felt a little more at home except for the smell of that tent. All I had to do was get along with one other guy and our environment. Still we were being watched all the time. Then they took my partner someplace else, and they took that smelly tent too. Now it was like being back home. But still they watched me, and now there were two of them. Everything I did or wherever I went, they watched, but never said anything. Again I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but surely they would have said something if I was.

But those that were watching were gathering information of one that had been chosen for another task not too different than what Scythe was doing. Scythe Dorian was still quite young for the task in mind, and that is what the watchers were presently concerned with, his mind and his inner self. They were looking for the demon of this young man they had been told of. These watchers and others were part of an equation of a finitely calculated plan of hell that Scythe would one day control!

Chapter 2

During my fifth week in basic training, several of us were taken out to a rifle range. This was easier than shooting squirrels, cause the target didn’t bounce around at all. There was no real challenge, so I made one up. Put all the bullets through the same hole! After only about a half hour at the range, one of the TIs tapped me on top of my helmet and motioned for me to follow him. Maybe putting them all through the same hole wasn’t such a good idea. Again I thought I’d done something wrong. Maybe I was shooting at the wrong target or not hitting one at all, but he wasn’t saying anything, so I just followed along.

We got in a jeep and he drove over to another range about five minutes away. This range was a bit different. There was no one else on the range but me. On the firing blocks were three different types of rifles and one of them was the infamous .50 cal. I’d heard what that rifle could do, especially in the wrong hands, but I didn’t think I’d ever shoot one. I was given some basic instructions on each rifle and its ammo. With the naked eye, you could barely make out the targets in the distance, cause they were quite a way’s out there. I spent the next three weeks at that range, each week with a different rifle. The next week I was taken to a pistol range where I learned to shoot four different kinds of pistols for a week or so.

The next week after that, I was separated from the already small group of guys I had been training with, and taken to a building that was mostly underground and put into a room that had only two chairs and a small desk.

The guy behind the desk knew I was sitting there but didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he started staring at me. That made me nervous, but I stared right back at him. He finally started talking slow and asked what seemed like a million questions about the way I think about things, places all over the world and my ideas of life and death, and what I thought about killing another person. The longer we talked, the faster the questions came. The next day I was put on a bus with eight other guys and we were off to some other base where they taught us the art of hiding, camouflage!

We spent about a month and a half there, then I was moved to another base to go through some hand to hand combat that included martial arts, knives, guns, and different ways to very quietly kill somebody. That started out to be a lot of fun, but by the third week of that nonsense, these guys started acting like they really wanted to kill each other. Guess I got carried away a couple a times myself and they wound up having to take the other guy to the hospital. I didn’t get chewed out, but the TIs now seemed a bit leery when they were around me, and they paid more attention to what they had me doing and where.

When that was finally over, it was out to a small airport for a while, where I learned how to pack my own chute, and jump out of a perfectly good airplane just to get back to the place I had just left. For two weeks I packed my own chute four times a day and made four jumps a day. Then it was off to the jungles of South America for a while. Jungle survival and navigation school. They give you a map and a KA-BAR and turn you loose. This was where I found out how much of a delicacy squirrel and rabbit hash was. The menu in this country was grubs, bugs, bush snakes, and just about anything that didn’t eat you first. You learn how to find water and all the stuff you can do with it.

You learn how to make weapons, clothes of a sort, quick shelters and other things out of trees, vines, and bamboo. Then it was back to real food and jumping out of planes, but at higher altitudes. Then I was sent to Navy Seal and black ops training. We did what they call Hell Week, then learned how to become a deadly ghost. Didn’t know I could even do some of that stuff, but I did.

Then it seemed my training started all over again, from the very beginning, but with a lot of little changes or variations along the way. It became more than obvious they were fine tuning me for something.

Officers had more respect for the lower ranks and weren’t such assholes. Certain guys were segregated from other guys and kept away from normal people. You watched the eyes of those guys carefully. These guys were wound really tight. Someone usually died when one of them unwound. Turns out too much training is not good around civilians or normal GIs.

Then came the high altitude jumps. At first it was all done in a classroom. Then we jumped out of C130s in the daytime in good weather. Then the flights became later in the day and then at night. We started jumping in all kinds of weather with different kinds of equipment and weapons, and often into the ocean. We did this night and day, over and over again for about three months, until it all became like another part of life. Then the serious stuff started. I called it killer school! It was a combination of the training we already had, along with sniper and tasking training, intense and spooky! Some of the guys were two man teams, some of us worked alone. So this is what they had been training me for. Then came a lot of physical training, swimming, running and jogging for miles at a time, exercises and obstacle courses.

Then my uniforms changed into three different kinds of cammies. There was more ocean swimming and a lot of running. Then I was taken out into the desert. I had a shed for shade, a cot, a blanket, my KA-BAR, a box of C rations, and a big blue bottle of water. They left me out there for an entire week, doing absolutely nothing but enjoying the scenery, silence, and relaxing, or so I thought. Then one morning a jeep shows up and I was taught the intricacies of extractions. Trust me, that’s not as much fun as it looks. I did four extractions a day for two weeks. The week after that, things started getting weird.

I was given two specially packed duffel bags and a chute, and put on a plane that took me out to an island in the middle of the ocean, and it wasn’t for training. I’m thinking that’s where all this started. After I’d been on the island a couple weeks, debriefed, and saw what was going on, I got to thinking about what this was all about, what I was here to do, and how all that training pertained to it. You hear about the effects of stuff like this that happens way over there, or to someone else in another country, or it’s in some movie. But