Archangel of Sedona (5 page)

The large truck would slam into me. I would die. I felt no fear. I said a quick prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel to ask God to watch over my wife and new son, Tim.

Though I can’t explain why, the truck missed a direct hit at the last instant. It popped my left rear quarter and spun the little Z like a hockey puck on an ice rink. I rotated at least three full revolutions across I-66 and ended up buried to the windshield in a snow bank on the median. When the State Troopers arrived, they couldn’t believe that I’d survived at all. One of them mentioned that I must have a four-leaf clover tattooed on my ass.

I didn’t argue. I was almost 40. I’d begun to realize that someone very powerful had been watching out for me.

After my near catastrophe in 1987, Gretchen criticized my cavalier attitude for my own safety. She insisted that I take more precautions. Our family was growing. She didn’t want to be a widow and raise two orphans.

In the late spring, Gretchen, Tim, and I moved into a house in Springfield, a mile south of the Washington Beltway. We’d been renting in Alexandria for two years. Gretchen was now preg
nant with John. We needed more space and had to move to a bigger house. I took leave from the White House and managed the job myself with the help of several Army buddies.

By the end of a sunny Saturday in May, we had boxes lying all over the new townhouse. To show our appreciation, we served beer and hamburgers to our helpful friends. While we were drinking and chatting, my toddler had found a box sitting next to the family room’s fireplace. Clever like his mom, he’d discovered a way to open it. He’d begun to remove the contents: a number of ancient looking stuffed animals.

Then I noticed the logo and writing on the box. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The box had been unpacked from a larger container that Gretchen’s mom had sent her from Texas a month earlier. Gretchen was an Army brat. The box had been in storage for 12 years, since she’d packed it up after graduating from Ball High School in Galveston. I’d never laid eyes on it before.

The box contained her childhood collection of stuffed animals. She’d packed them for storage since she wouldn’t take them with her to Texas A&M University.

“Holy shit.” I said, as I walked over to the box and examined it. “This is not fucking possible. The odds are incalculable.”

“What are you babbling about?” my friend Bill asked, sipping his beer.

“Look at this shit, Bill.” I picked up the box and turned it so he could see the logo on the front.

“Shut the front door,” Bill said.

In 1975, Gretchen’s dad had obtained the box from a liquor store on Galveston Island. He needed several boxes to prepare for his retirement from the Army, which coincided with Gretchen’s decision to attend TAMU in College Station.

This box had once transported liquor from Italy. The winery shipped it to America sometime in 1975.

The logo read: Giordano. Under the logo, the Giordano Company listed their products. They sold acqueviti, liquori, spumanti, and vini. However, it wasn’t the logo with my family name that caused the stir. To the left of the Giordano logo, the high school girl had written her first name to identify the contents as her property. She put her name on that box at least ten years before we ever met.

The words Gretchen Giordano appeared on the front of the box containing her stuffed animals in that sequence and proximity.

Be honest. How many women named Gretchen have you ever met? I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of a Giordano. In the entire Milky Way galaxy, there is precisely one Gretchen Giordano.

Calculate the odds for yourselves. They are beyond miniscule that a high school girl in Texas would write her own first name on a box next to a logo that was also a rare Italian surname—and that logo would turn out to be the last name of the man that she would meet and marry in Virginia ten years later.

No one who’s ever seen the box can explain it. An atheist friend suggested that it was mere serendipity. Sure it is.

Encountering that box was another epiphany. Of all my life and near-death experiences, the Giordano box—and its cryptic message predicting my marriage to Gretchen—convinced me that everything happens for a reason.

In 1990, as a Lieutenant Colonel, I received an assignment to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa to help the feds prosecute a munitions fraud case. After the first Gulf War, the U.S. Attorney asked me to stay. I’d served 20 years on active duty and was almost retirement eligible. He sweetened the deal by hiring Gretchen, too.

By the 1990s, I had a new dream—to litigate long, complex, criminal cases in Federal Court. The U.S. Attorney gave me a chance to show my stuff. Over the next 16 years, I had the time of my professional life.

At home, I mentored my sons, Tim and John, as I watched them grow. Raising two boys proved to be fulfilling and rewarding. Though I missed the Army, someone very wise wanted me to leave my military life with the endless trips, deployments, commitments, and challenges. My job was to focus on my boys, be a good example, and teach my sons how to be better men than I could ever be.

I’m a lapsed Catholic. I never obtained an annulment from my first marriage since I have two precious daughters. The Church would not sanction my marriage to Gretchen. Despite this serious difficulty, I chose to raise my sons as Catholics. They attended Incarnation Elementary School and, much later, Jesuit High School in Tampa. They were top students in both places and established themselves as first-class leaders. Both of my sons turned out to be excellent football players.

I wanted Tim and John to have the same educational advantage that the Jesuits gave me. My sons are now practicing attorneys. They agree that their time with the Jesuits was the best education they could have gotten anywhere.

In 1998, the new U.S. Attorney directed me to help prosecute the biggest health care fraud in American history. By May of 1999, I prepared for a ten-week contested trial.

In the spring, I had been finishing up the motions practice and organizing my portion of the trial-on-the-merits, which was really basic, like identifying and marking exhibits. Since our case involved thousands of documents, it was tedious. The Secretary of Health and Human Services assigned clerical personnel to help out.

One of the very best clerks was a female HHS college intern—a strikingly attractive black woman named Yvette. Like many hip college girls, she wore a small nose ring. I always thought that it detracted from her otherwise stunning appearance.

Yvette was wicked smart and analytical. In short order, she grasped my situation and helped to modify a Microsoft database into a unique resource for tracking, sorting, and illuminating the thousands of exhibits. During the trial, this database proved invaluable.

I tried to convince Yvette to go to law school. She declined. She wanted to be a criminal investigator. She thought the FBI would be a good fit, but she was willing to work for any of the other federal agencies that employed special agents.

Once, as we catalogued evidence, she mentioned that she was an Army brat and that her dad was near retirement. After learning that, I made a point of asking after her father on those occasions when we worked together.

In May 1999, after her graduation from UT, she stopped by my office to tell me that HHS had hired her as a special agent and criminal investigator. They’d agreed to assign her to Los Angeles so that she could be closer to her mom and dad. I wished her well and asked where her father had decided to live after retirement.

“Oh, they’re already there. They took terminal leave. They moved to Arizona.”

“Really? I grew up there. Where in Arizona?”

“They moved to Sedona.”

“Have you been there yet? It’s so beautiful.”

“No. I’ve flown over Arizona on the way to California. I’m looking forward to seeing this place. Mom and Poppa think it’s awesome.”

“It is. I spent a lot of time there before Vietnam. I went there once after the war. I’d finished up at ASU on my way to law school in Texas. When you go out there, you have to see the Chapel of the Holy Cross.”

“Is that the one that’s built into the mountain? Mom sent me a postcard with a picture of the chapel. Very impressive.”

For reasons that I can’t explain, I launched into the first description of my close encounter in 1966. I’d seen Spielberg’s movie decades earlier. The term close encounter conveyed the substance of my experience.

Yvette listened. Halfway through my story, she sported a look of complete incredulity. Dan Ostergaard’s common sense warning for me to keep my mouth shut had come to fruition.

“You look like you think I’m crazy,” I said. “I know it seems hard to believe. I sometimes wonder myself. Nothing like that has happened in the last thirty years.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Why the look then?”

“Tony, I spoke with Poppa last Sunday. He’s a squared-away guy. Like you, he was both enlisted and an officer. He also retired as a light colonel. He’s down to earth, all business, no nonsense. He told me about an experience that he had hiking between Bell Rock and a place called Courthouse Butte.”

“So what’s the connection?”

“Other than the different site, his story is identical to yours,” she said.

“No shit?”

“None.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Bell Rock and Court House Butte are four miles south of the chapel,” I said.

“In galactic terms, that’s a bull’s eye,” she said.

“Who says that this is other worldly?” I asked.

“You think it’s something secret? Where’s Area 51?” she asked.

“What do you know about Area 51?”

“Just stuff on TV.”

“Area 51 is northwest of Sedona. Must be a couple of hundred miles. Maybe they’ve got something now that could do the things that I saw, but in the mid-sixties? I don’t think so.”

“OK. We don’t know what the phenomenon is. We know you aren’t crazy, unless Poppa is too. Could be something they fed you guys in the Army.”

“Nice theory, but my close encounter predates my Army service.”

We left the issue at that. We exchanged pleasantries and promised to keep up. We never did. I didn’t have contact with her until 14 years later.

Chapter Four

June 4, 2013, 11:30 PM

1908 Port Colony Way

Tampa, Florida

I’d retired from the Department of Justice in 2006. I went to work for the local Sheriff. Since my youngest son, John, had recently graduated from a top tier law school and because I maintained an expensive mistress—Gretchen—I had no plans to retire and live out my golden years in peace and comfort.

It had been a miserable day. I’d been wrestling with the unresponsive bureaucracy of the Social Security Administration. To calm myself before I went to bed, I sought out a soothing video on YouTube.

It had become my habit late in the evening to watch something placid and soothing. While I watched, I would pray on a special rosary. A friend had purchased it for me from the gift shop at the Chapel of the Holy Cross on a trip she’d made to Sedona. Since I’d encouraged her to go see the red rocks, she bought the rosary as an unexpected present.

Praying on this rosary in the quiet of my empty nest comforted me. I don’t go to Mass anymore. The Sedona rosary has been my connection to the Divine Spark.

I carry the Sedona rosary with me everywhere. I also have a gold St. Michael the Archangel medal. St. Michael is the patron saint of Paratroopers and police officers. Twenty years earlier, I had a jeweler engrave the designations of the three Airborne units in which I’d served on the back of my medal.

I’m a klutz beyond the imagination of Inspector Clouseau. I’m hard on the things that I carry around. Sometime in late 2010, I lost the Christ figure from the little wooden cross on my rosary. I felt horrible.

I chose to keep the Sedona rosary, rather than replace it with a newer one. At the time, I didn’t realize that the loss of the Christ figure wasn’t an accident, but a foretelling of my future.

Despite its importance to this story, there’s nothing miraculous about my rosary. I view it as a cell phone for talking to God. Atheists will claim that my use of the rosary is an act of desperation by a man beyond middle age. I don’t care.

You’ve heard my story so far. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve seen too many things that convince me that there is far more than we mere mortals can fathom. I don’t pretend to know what lies beyond—but there is something.

I opened YouTube that night and searched for a soothing video. I found one that used photographs of special sites around Sedona as the backdrop to new-age music. I noticed an interesting video on the list to right of the one I’d played.

That video led me to a link to an extraordinary article written by an Anglican Bishop from St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sedona. The author, the Right-Reverend David McMannes, had written a bizarre tale about the history of the Christus and the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which is now part of St. John Vianney’s Roman-Catholic Parish.

This should be good. The Anglicans are writing an expose about the Roman Catholics
, I thought. While the Anglicans and Catholics have similar beliefs and rituals, they can be very competitive.