The Winged Men

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1Jon Kirk Comes to Ares

The strange story I am about to relate to you will probably not be believed. This is up to you. You may see it as but the mad ravings of a deranged mind. If such is your opinion, then you are welcome to it. However, I think that it is an exciting narrative of a lone Earthman’s adventures on a strange and alien world.

It was told to me by Jon Kirk, an old college friend of who having dropped out of school in 1967 enlisted in the U.S. Army and after boot camp was stationed in a place called Vietnam that few of us had heard of back then. He fought bravely for two years and proved a natural soldier and eventually was promoted to the rank of sergeant. As a sergeant, he was stationed in the northern city of Hue in South Vietnam during some of the heaviest fighting of the Tet Offensive in 1968.

Upon one of my frequent visits to his home to see his sister, my future wife, Janet, a letter from the United States Defense Department suddenly arrived. It was ominous, for I found Janet, her younger brother Stu, and her parents were all in a state of shock. When I asked what had happened, the parents only broke down and cried. Then Janet handed me the letter and I read it.

United States Defense Department

Washington. D.C.

April 28, 1968

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kirk,

We regret to inform you that your son, Sergeant Jon Kirk, has been reported Missing In Action on or before February 1, 1968. We are sorry to report that he is presumed dead.

Sincerely,

General H.T. Tomnson

United States Army

It was terrible news. We did not want to believe the worst, and we tried to hang onto hope, but a few weeks later we were informed that Jon’s body had been discovered. Eventually it was shipped home to the family and buried in a family plot at Green Acre Cemetery.

One would think that was the end of the story of Jon Kirk. As it would turn out, it was only the beginning.

* * * *

Years later, the past intruded into my calm and orderly world one day and this whole strange tale began. It had been years since Jon Kirk’s death, and I had all but forgotten about him and moved on, but then with a ring of my doorbell—and as I answered the door—there he was!

Jon Kirk stood there right there in front of me when I opened the door!

“Jon!”

My mind raced, I almost fainted. The man I saw before me had been dead and buried for many years. Yet here he was, standing right there in front of me! I just stood by in open-mouthed shock and awe.

“Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?” Jon Kirk asked me with that same warm smile I’d known from him for so many years, “Or aren’t we still friends?”

“What? Of course, but…how?” I stuttered, hardly knowing what to say. I felt like I had seen a ghost. I guess, in some ways, I had!

He smiled at me, that same warm glowing smile, the Jon Kirk I had known for so long and loved as a brother. The good friend I had missed for so many years. Now he was here! There was no doubt in my mind that it had to be him. But how?

I grabbed his hand and shook it heartily.

“You’re alive!” I shouted, fearful of what my eyes told me and of what he might say to me.

Jon Kirk just laughed lightly in his usual manner, “Of course I am alive.”

He looked the same to me now just as he had looked before he had left for Vietnam so many years before. Tall, lean, well-built and muscled, with his raven black hair and those sharp steel-gray eyes. He was the same Jon Kirk I had always known.

“I can’t believe it is you! You have to tell me what the hell happened!” I asked, unable to restrain my words and excitement any longer, feeling as if I had somehow gone mad, standing there talking to a man I knew to be dead and buried! “Jon, what happened?”

“It’s a long story, my friend,” he said, coming into my house and sitting down. He asked for a drink, and as we sat down while drinking more than a few beers that long June afternoon, this is the story I have written down in Jon Kirk’s own words just as he told it to me that warm Summer day.

“As you know,” Jon began “I was killed in the Vietnam War. Killed quite dead—and yet perhaps—not so dead as one might believe. It happened like this. My unit was in a firefight during Tet in the battle for Hue up in the northern part of South Vietnam. I got separated from my unit. I later found out that all the other men were killed. As it turned out, I was killed, too.”

I gulped hard at that ominous admission.

He just smiled.

“Killed?” I asked, totally confused, fearing some joke or strange extenuating circumstance. “There must be some mistake?”

“It was no mistake. I was killed in battle. I was dead.”

“Then… Then you were killed? Truly dead? But how can that be? How can you be here? If what you say is true—then you have risen from the grave!”

“Well yes, that is essentially true, but…” Jon admitted with a grim smile, noting my wonderment and incredulity. He went on to explain, “We were on patrol outside Hue, the northern provincial capital, and a key city, the focus of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong invasion of the South during the Tet Offensive. You may have read about it? It was big. Nasty. Bloody and bad.”

I nodded as I looked at my friend. I recalled the battle in the news. It had been a turning point in the war on many levels, but this—? I looked at my friend closely. He was surely of flesh and blood, just like me, for had I not felt and shook his hand? It was warm, a warm-blooded hand. Yet he had been dead and buried. I had seen his body buried, and by his own admission he says he had been killed. Dead. I was thoroughly convinced I had finally lost my mind just then. Perhaps he was some kind of illusion? I even told him so.

“No, no my friend.” Jon Kirk laughed, with that calm good humor of his, those steel-gray eyes of his shining with the power of life. “It’s all true, but you see, while I am dead and buried on this world—on the planet Ares I have been alive and well for many years!”

I needed some time to digest these words. The planet…Ares? Two worlds? Simultaneous life existence? It seemed incredible!

Jon Kirk saw my obvious bafflement and continued, “I cannot explain it, but no sooner was I dead here on Earth, than I awoke upon the planet Ares, completely alive and well. I awoke a strong flesh and blood man again and in perfect health. Of course, at that time, I knew absolutely nothing of what had actually occurred or why. So I will tell it to you all now, just as it happened and eventually it will all become clear to you, as it did to me.”

I could only nod blankly. Astonished but not wanting him to stop telling me his strange tale. I was fascinated by it and eagerly wanted to hear all he had to tell me.

“It happened like this. I awoke on Ares alone, terrified, and disoriented,” Jon Kirk told me in simple clipped words. He laughed a bit, said, “You know, I thought I was either dead or mad. Certainly I had to be mad, or dreaming, or perhaps in Heaven. Though more likely, probably in Hell. I could not tell which. Instead where I found myself, was upon the planet Ares. A new world! Ares turned out to be a combination of a lot of things I have always yearned for in my life, all wound up in a wild world full of the kind of action and adventure I have always craved.”

“Where is this…Ares?” I asked, eagerly, trying to get answers to stem my confusion and assuage my curiosity.

“To answer some of your questions, my friend, Ares, is a planet about 150 light years away from Earth, the fourth planet in the Orion system,” he answered.

I nodded, though this meant very little to me at the time.

He smiled at me indulgently.

Well, of course, after that, I asked him a hundred more questions, unable to contain myself, and he just laughed and smiled good-naturedly. He was a patient man.

“Are you real? I mean are you actually alive here before me now?” I had to ask him.

“As to those questions, of course I am alive, but I am not physically there in your presence. What you see before you now is an energy field formed in my likeness. A great scientist named Tar-Gool from the planet Ares has invented a transmitter that can send me to you in this fashion. Or my image, I should say. Form with substance, you can feel the flesh on my bones, feel the warmth of that flesh, the blood in my veins, but it is not real. Though it does feel real to you. At this moment I am in Tar-Gool’s laboratory light-years away from Earth, but my likeness is sitting across from you speaking as if I were right there with you. A neat trick, eh? To all intents and purposes the energy image is an exact likeness of me. It can speak, it has substance, you felt that when you shook my hand.”

“It seems nothing short of…supernatural,” I gasped.

“Super science, my friend,” Jon Kirk corrected.

I nodded. “Extraordinary!”

“Indeed,” he smiled broadly. “There is much that is extraordinary on Ares.”

“I wish to hear all about it,” I said. “Everything!”

Jon Kirk laughed deeply, “Well, my friend, that is why I am here. So why don’t you crack open another beer, sit back, open your mind, and I will tell you the strange story of how I came to the world of Ares and what I beheld there.”