Just NDEs Episode 2 - When Death Stood Still

Just NDEs

Episode 2:
When Time Stood Still

Source:
nderf.org

Set and Setting:
May 3, 1969
B Company, 2nd Battalion, 47th Mechanized Infantry, 9th Infantry Division

Event Description:
It was toward the end of the dry season, and my platoon was pulling out. Our mission was simple: drive down the road, show the flag, and make sure that we still had the right-of-way. The two slowly moving tracks (armored personnel carriers) in front of mine were already kicking up the pulverized dirt road into little clouds of dust. Lady, the platoon mascot, trotted alongside, wagging her tail. She no longer went with us ever since a mine had blown up the track that she had been riding on. I exchanged my cloth hat for a helmet, put on my wire-rimmed sunglasses, and half-cocked the .50 caliber machine gun as we passed through the base camp gate and picked up speed. Lady stopped a few feet beyond the gate and watched us go.

Our four tracks soon achieved a monotonous but comfortable 40 mph, which created a welcome breeze. To either side of the road for mile after mile lay a gridwork of rice-paddy dikes dividing the land into tidy rectangles of various sizes. The pale yellow stubble of last season's crop failed to hide the earth in the fields. Separated by cracks an inch wide, the clay soil of the paddies had dried into flagstone-sized blocks. Although the land was flat, the fields did not extend far into the distance but rather ended abruptly at the ubiquitous wood line.

This woods was composed of thick, lush, green nipa-palm and stood from twenty to thirty feet tall. From no place in the Mekong River Delta could one escape from being completely surrounded by it. Sometimes it might be a couple of miles away, and at others, only a few hundred feet. It grew where the delta distributaries were, and they, like a root system, were everywhere. "We" controlled the larger towns and villages, the roads, the skies, the major waterways, and the rice paddies. The wood line belonged to "Charlie."

With diesel engines roaring and trailing a huge, mile-long cloud of dust, the column began to approach one of the spots where the dreaded jungle wall squeezed in on the road from both sides. Instinctively, I began to watch the wood line more closely. All of a sudden, a very large anti-tank mine was command-detonated eight feet directly beneath my lil' ol' lily-white ss. I immediately knew what was happening (because my track had been blown up before just three weeks prior to this), and thought to myself, "Oh sht, here we go again." I was catapulted upwards along with everyone and everything else. People, dust, weapons, ammunition, helmets, and C-ration boxes formed an expanding inverted cone with myself in the middle.

On the journey upward, external time decelerated. The rates of the rotations of all of the objects surrounding me rapidly decreased—in an apparent violation of the law of conservation of angular momentum. I was fascinated by the unnatural ever-slowing gyrations of the bodies of my comrades and wondered, "Is this the end? Are we all dead?" At the apex of my trajectory, time stopped completely and an inexplicable calm descended. The state of consciousness that then prevailed was as to the normal waking state as the normal waking state is to a dream. Whatever It was, It was peaceful, omnipresent (temporally and spatially), omniscient, and absorbed everything into an indivisible Whole.

The entire universe past, present, and future collapsed down to a single Center upon which everything depends for its existence. It is That which does not change. It is the "Light" of Pure Consciousness which illuminates all things. It is the ultimate meaning of the enigmatic Biblical passage, "The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light" (Matt. 6:22). It is the great Nothing—for it includes all things, and therefore, is Itself not a thing. That's how It gets to be the All-in-All.

Furthermore, there was (and still is) absolutely no doubt as to Its authenticity any more than one would doubt upon awakening from a dream that the waking state is "real" and that the dream was "just a dream." In short, God Himself took over my reins in the sense that "I" no longer existed as a distinct entity—only He exists. There was an overwhelming feeling of bliss, love, compassion, and strangely enough, a foudroyant sense of déjà vu. The knowledge obtained that the True Home and the True Self of all things had been miraculously revealed.

The events of my life up to that point were unhurriedly and nonjudgmentally reviewed in great detail—not in chronological order, but somehow all at once—although some events were emphasized more intensely than others. Subsequently, "I" was allowed to exist again (there was no choice in the matter—it simply happened) and was given the opportunity to be aware of anything that I wanted to be aware of with the understanding that time was not a factor; indeed, there was "all the time in the world." I proceeded to focus on this or that aspect of my life and concluded that there wasn't too much to be ashamed of. Actually, I made extremely poor use of this gift, but then, I was just a naive 22-year-old with a somewhat skewed concept of relative importance.

I could "see" a 360-degree panorama of the road, the wood lines on either side, and the other three tracks of my platoon (two in front and one behind us). The entire episode seemed to be housed in my head, but I was uncertain whether or not my head was still attached to the rest of my body—although, under the circumstances, this point did not seem important one way or the other. In other words, I really didn't care if my life was to be snuffed out or not within the next few seconds. I was then gently (but unequivocally) "informed" that I would survive the explosion without serious injury and even that I would make it out of Vietnam in one piece. So, selfishly, I turned my attention to the immediate situation and very calmly and deliberately concluded that I should: 1) stay conscious so as not to drown in two inches of rice-paddy water, 2) stay loose so as to break as few bones as possible, and 3) roll away from the track so that it wouldn't crush me to death if it tipped over. Only after my mind had run out of things to decide on did time start to rush back in. The transcendental state of consciousness terminated and I reverted back to the normal waking state. I could see the ground about 20 feet below me and began to fall toward it.

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Just NDEs has utilized AI to remove typos and grammatical errors from the above transcript, but the narrative is otherwise true to the original.

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