Individuals join the military and go to war for personal reasons, but for some there is an instinctive need to find and initiate the inner warrior spirit. The awakening of the warrior spirit may come during training or in combat. It is an awareness of mysterious instincts, feelings and intuitions that guide one in combat and are more acute than logical reason. However, modern warfare can frustrate and undermine the authenticity of the warrior spirit, and psychologists have shown that failure to initiate, transform and reintegrate the warrior into society contributes to combat related PTSD. Written as a memoir in a style that illuminates the classic struggle between Love and Death, JOURNEY TO MYRTOS tells the story of a young man whose call to adventure in the Vietnam War is motivated by an instinctive desire to know the warrior spirit, which he discovers during his training as a helicopter pilot. But in the combat zone, he also discovers that his warrior spirit is bound to serve elaborate and abstract political justifications that, along with the concepts of a "war of attrition" and "free-fire zones," is in conflict with the morality of the warrior spirit. His body is wounded in combat, and the young warrior returns home. But he is frustrated by the failure of his initiation, and he carries the burden of the killer instinct that was evoked in training. These are the wounds to the soul that must be healed and transformed so that the veteran can move on with his life. The cure for his post-traumatic stress is to re-discover the person he was before joining the military: to rediscover his Eros spirit. To fulfill this new revelation of his destiny, he flees to Europe. In both America and Europe, in the 1970s, the youth of the counter-culture are experimenting with sex and drugs and rock-n-roll. The young veteran is attracted to the counter-culture in order to rediscover his more innocent, younger self and heal the wounds to his soul inflicted by his failed combat initiation. When he opens himself to the mystery of his own soul, he is drawn to the island of Crete. "Whoever sets foot on this island senses a mysterious force branching warmly and beneficially through his veins, senses his soul begin to grow," wrote the famous Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis. And in a small fishing village on Crete, he meets the ancient Mother goddess. She is the only one who can heal his soul of the wounds of war. She is the ancient deity of warfare and motherhood, of destruction and nurture. She commands all the phases of the life cycle: birth and growth, love and death and rebirth. That gives her license to be both chaste and promiscuous, a nurturer of new born infants and bloodthirsty for meaningful sacrifice. As man is born of woman, the sprits of Eros and Thanatos that manifest in the individual soul are the twin gods born of Great Mother goddess. Thus, the goddess presides over life and over the gods of Love and Death.
About the Author: Robert Mitchell served as a combat helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War during the time of the Tet offensive of 1968. He spent ten months in the hospital recovering from physical wounds and the following twelve years recovering from the wound to the soul inflicted by his combat experience. His 12-year odyssey of healing and reintegration led to the transformation of his warrior spirit from an agent of death and destruction to a positively contributing member of society combating injustice. In that capacity, from 1982 to 2006, he was a secondary school teacher of math, English and history combating the injustices of the American educational system. He currently resides in Maryland, where he has retired from classroom teaching but continues to write and lecture on important issues of individuation, spiritual democracy and educational curriculum reform in the United States.