In 1966, as a twenty year old university student with a good job as an apprentice architect, I received my draft notice. I never knew why my draft status was changed from a student deferment to 1-A, but I accepted my fate and enlisted in the Army's flight school to become a combat helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. Going to war, I rationalized, would be a great adventure that would initiate me into manhood.

The war was hell. From my position as a helicopter pilot, I knew little of the atrocities that were being committed on the ground as a result of command orders to rack up body counts on search and destroy missions in free fire zones. I did not participate in any massacres, but neither did I have a face-to-face, kill-or-be-killed confrontation with an enemy warrior, and I did not fulfill my blood-rite initiation into manhood. As fate would have it, my helicopter crashed, and I was flown back to the States with traumatic injuries--burns that covered 40% of my body.

I was discharged in 1970, but I did not return immediately to my home town and try to re-integrate into society. I completed my university degree in mathematics, but knew that I needed to heal my soul of the wounds of war before I would be accepted back into civilian life. The military experience had thrust me into a liminal space, disassociated from everything that was "normal." Rather than try to return to a mundane existence, I embraced the liminal space and the possibility for a new adventure. I fled to Europe.

Being in that mysterious space between reality and fantasy--between the world of nature and the realm of the spirits--gave me permission to explore aspects of myself that were repressed before and during my experience in the army. I was free. In Germany, I discovered the erotic vitality within myself that had been missing from my upbringing and repressed by the authority of military discipline. I discovered my soul. Then, on the island of Crete, in the small fishing village of Myrtos, I fell more deeply into the Realm of Spirits, the realm the Mother goddess that rules over Love and Death--deities that fight each other in the heart of every warrior. Confronting the wounds of the soul was only the beginning of a 12-year odyssey of transforming the warrior spirit so that I could reintegrate and be a benefit to society.

Journey to Myrtos is a story of healing the wounds of war. It tells of an inward journey of the soul, from serving the god of war to meeting the Great Mother goddess, that takes place in the liminal space between reality and fantasy. That magical meeting with the Mother goddess was not an end but, rather, the beginning of a 12-year odyssey of transformation, told in a second book, THE TRIALS OF THE INITIATE: Transforming the Warrior Spirit. Thus, it is an incredible adventure of initiation--an adventure of active imagination and erotic involvement with the world that ultimately allowed me to re-integrate into American society, free from the burden of a scarred and wounded soul.

In 1982, I finally returned home from the war and, not unlike Odysseus, from my 12-year odyssey of transformation. I became a secondary school teacher of mathematics, English, history and art in both public and private schools and eventually completed doctoral studies in the History of Consciousness. Informed by these studies, and my own experience of self-transformation, I have spent the past 35-years teaching, lecturing and writing about education in America.

I hope that young warriors from our current wars will find inspiration for their own lives in this memoir. My message is that healing the wounds of war can be an even greater adventure than war itself--just set one foot in front of the other, have faith in the spirit that guides you and let the goddess transform you from a warrior serving death and destruction to an instrument of healing and justice.