Showing results by author "Rory Patrick Allen" in All Categories

The Sultanate of Oman is a land of oases,deserts, rolling sands, shifting dunes, and mountains upon which ancient cities have been carved from stone. A land that boasts the Queen of Sheba, Sindbad the Sailor, and The Lost City of Ubar buried for millennia under the Arabian Sands. A country that was heralded for its wealth in frankincense, and it is from here that ancient frankincense caravans began carrying their precious cargoes to the classical world.

From April 1975 to January of 1979 Pol Pot murdered nearly two million of his own people out of a population of seven million, thus introducing a new word into the English language, "auto-genocide": the murder of one's own people. The world just stood by and let it happen. Why was this allowed to happen? What events created this monster? Was it the dropping of two and a half million tons of explosives by the USA on a neutral country in its war with Vietnam?

I have lived in the Middle East for 25 years now, and the constant undercurrent of these conflicts is ever present.

In a grisly nightmare war scenario, Rory tells the story of a new recruit who has been shipped out to an operational airbase on the eve of The War on Iraq in 2003. The new recruit suffers nightmares and questions himself over the validity of such a war. After his first stint in the field of battle, he embarks on a hellish journey into the underworld where he encounters soldiers in many kinds of uniforms, from many battles that have been fought over the ages, who are inflicted with terrible wounds and enduring great suffering.

High on a mountain top in an isolated region that is North of Salalah, in the Sultanate of Oman, lies the Tomb of Job, a prophet in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. My journey is to take me to this tomb, a journey that will take three hours by car, but a journey that will take me on a mystical voyage to a time long gone, to the time of the queen of Sheba and other such figures in the Classical Age who themselves visited the Tomb of Job on pilgrimages for this site has been a place for pilgrims for many millennia.

Blurred faces loom in and out of my vision, their lips moving, yet I hear not a word. Surgical masks cover their faces. Blue gowns are splattered with blood.... I regard my uniform, bloodied and torn. My body racked with pain. I have been given an injection; I feel myself falling down a black tunnel at the bottom of which I see two silver angels whose bodies are harnessed to a chariot of gold, their wings gently flapping, waiting for me to arrive so as to carry me in their chariot to a distant place.

An elderly woman, recently bereaved and virtually disowned by her only son, ponders over the meaning of her very existence...leading to tragic consequences.