Around this time, I received some information about taking a correspondence course, in response to a hankering I’d had to do something a little more constructive with all the time I had on my hands. Drawn to a course in creative writing, I opted for a refresher course in English, out of a lack of confidence in my ability to write. I was so disappointed when I finally received the materials for the course, that I never started it. Obviously, I hadn’t found what I’d been looking for.

In a second letter I fired off to Mary, before I received any response to the last one I’d sent her, I hinted around, again without coming out and telling her what I had done, that I’d been getting into trouble with the Navy, for I had need of her perspective, whether I agreed with it or not. How else was I to find out if we were compatible enough to marry.

Unless she was open to the new direction, my life seemed to be headed, I saw no future in our relationship. On the other hand, maybe I needed the reality check she offered.

While the mail came and went by helicopter, on a fairly regular basis, I still experienced long delays in hearing from her, for I’d often mail off two or three letters before I’d hear from her. Since she was the only source of real life I had outside myself, I pined away for any word from her and clung onto her letters for dear life. In my need for instant gratification, I experienced an intolerable ache inside my heart when I hadn’t heard from her any sooner than I did. I read her letters over ’n’ over in search of the love I so desperately needed but could not see in the blindness of my own self-centeredness. O how I longed to hear her tell the beast within that she loved him.

“It is not she you desire,“ uttered my soul from somewhere across the void. “Rather it is I, whose image you have only recently come to see in her, after whom you really lust.“

Immediately, I broke out laughing.

“You laugh because you know I’ve spoken the truth,“ she insisted.

“While that may be true,“ I responded, “I’m also laughing because of all the feeling you’ve just expressed. I never realized, until now, how much you care for me,“ whereupon I caught sight of her, long enough, to see her blush before she disappeared.

With that, I felt a twinge of pain, a tug on my heartstrings in the direction she had disappeared. From that moment on, I no longer knew, with any certainty, which one I really loved, Mary or this image of my soul. Having been smitten by both the physical and the spiritual aspects of love, how could I let go of either one?

And yet, I was terrified of both of them, for love appeared to be such a harsh and dreadful thing. Unprepared for the sudden eruption of creative energy that’d shattered my life as a child, was I driven from paradise by my own sexuality. In other words, had I lost control of myself upon having been given the responsibility for it. Because I’d never been shown how to make contact with She Who Ruled Over Instinct, I was being driven to have intercourse with her, one way or the other, to reproduce a being made not only in the likeness of God, but in His image as well.

RESPONDENT: Yes, dated 14 April 1967, it reads as follows:

This 20-year-old, single SA/USN with two years active service was referred by the Naval Shipyard Dispensary for evaluation of a possible schizoid personality. The subject presents a problem with his sexuality that he regards as excessive. Also, he reports a rather vague problem with adjusting to the shipboard environment.

Mental status examination reveals a well developed, clean cut, blond-haired young man who relates in a self-effacing manner. He does not appear to be anxious, but does convey the impression of being overly ashamed of himself. Flow of speech is smooth and thought content is focused on his concern about his compulsion for sex. His guilt regarding the behavior persists despite professional reassurance regarding the normality of the behavior. He describes distant relationships with his peers, indicating he has never formed long lasting or deep-seated interpersonal relationships. He denies any conflict with authority figures. He has experienced some recent impairment of sleep and appetite. His thinking is clear, coherent and goal directed. He is capable of spontaneity and appropriate emotional expressiveness. There is no evidence of loosened associations, delusions or hallucinations. Intelligence is in the high average to superior range; and judgment is considered essentially intact.

A brief review of background history reveals distant relationships with peers and lack of persistence in reaching goals. The patient’s natural father suffers from schizophrenia and has been hospitalized since the patient was three years old. The patient’s stepfather is described as an alcoholic who never established a meaningful relationship with the patient. The patient’s mother worked frequently and he has no warm feelings about her. He reports several episodes of stealing minor objects as a child. He progressed through high school making excellent grades, graduating at the age of 18. He briefly attended the Naval Academy, making excellent grades, but dropped out suddenly for vague, unspecified reasons. He attended another college and dropped out for similar reasons. He held several jobs briefly but terminated his employment following impulsive trips out of town. On one such occasion he was apprehended at a girl’s dormitory. He has dated only occasionally, usually upon the initiative of the girl, and is presently uncomfortable in the presence of women.

Impression: No psychiatric diagnosis is indicated at the present time. There is evidence of a basically schizoid personality makeup with some depressive features.

Comments & recommendations: The subject is considered capable of remaining on active duty. There is evidence, however, of an underlying instability, which may require periodic reevaluation and supportive therapy in the future.

Signed L. Bonney LTJG MSC USNR
Clinical Psychologist

While I sat inside the dispensary, awaiting my debut with one of the Navy’s psychologists, I wondered if my real father had been sent here for psychiatric evaluations when he too began to display bizarre behavior in response to the beast that’d been unleashed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And I wondered if he too had been bombarded by the same barrage of fantasies I had experienced, to help me make sense of what I’d seen. It was then that I realized what a tragic mistake he had made when he stumbled upon that great abyss, which separates this world from the next. For it was in his inability to make any sense of either world that I saw him clasp his ears as the frenzied screaming of his soul filled his head, like the song of a Siren, and drove him over the edge of the abyss to his destruction below. As these perceptions about my real dad shot through my head, I shivered at the thought that I had stood on the same brink of insanity, he had stumbled over, twenty-five years ago.

Having gone into the interview hoping to find some answers, I instead left empty-handed. While the psychologist only seemed interested in probing into my past and the history of my family, I was eager to talk to him about the problems I was currently experiencing with my sexuality and the Navy. For I saw, within me, the struggle to give birth to a whole new way of life, the past as well as the present were impeding. Because he had not the foresight to look beyond the dirt in my past, I never gained any insight from him into the troubles of the present.

For I was just as incapable of accepting my sexual feelings as they were theirs. Where they sought acceptance in the arms of a prostitute, I fled to the confessional for absolution from my guilt—to ease the burden of my pain. Whereas they sought to escape their pain in the forgetfulness of an alcoholic stupor, I wallowed in mine in one failed attempt after another to get to the bottom of it. And where they discarded the responsibility for their pain onto the outcasts of society, I held tenaciously onto mine, fearful of letting it go.

For oddly enough, I needed my pain as much as this crutch needed me, as I had the distinct feeling Nature was driving me to lose my self in some yet unknown task. If only I could let go of my self, long enough to taste how it felt to forget about oneself, I believed I would actually find myself. In imbibing the spirits of alcohol, I had sought the spirit of such an experience. Because my actions were self-serving, I drank excessively, ever seeking to find that state of mind which could ultimately free me from the pain of my self. Instead of losing my self to the Spirit crying out within me, I lost myself to the spirits of alcohol which then blacked out my pain and brought to life the soulless Hyde hiding behind Nature’s desire for unity with spirit.

Compelled to release the incredible tension that’d built up between Mother Nature and Father Spirit as a result of their long separation from each other, I realized I couldn’t accept just any ole way of life fate threw at me, like that of the Great Gray Bitch or any of her prostitutes, for only the real thing, the way of my soul, could ever cool this compulsion of mine.

A review

Having survived the war in Vietnam, without physical injury to himself, the author “had nonetheless incurred the deeper wounds of a house divided against itself.” As a child, had not he experienced his real father’s schizophrenia and, later, his stepfather’s alcoholism as war related, he may very well have written a different kind of story than A Different Kind of Sentinel.

That the author takes memoir writing to a new and intriguing level is a gross understatement. For he gives to the imagination what Albert Einstein gave to the world, a reality “that is just as accessible to one’s faculties as the material world.”

“You speak of the imagination,” complained a cohort of his, “as if it were some place I could walk to, like the back of this plane.”

“Indeed I do,” proclaims he to whom the vastly rich experiences of the imaginal realm are just as real as those of the material world–a topic that, no doubt, will be hotly debated for years to come.

From the first page of this very well-written book to the last, does the author slip so seamlessly from one world to the next, as if there were truly no distinction between the two. While standing, for example, in front of a mirror, one day, he sees an image of his soul, a woman “standing opposite” him in the mirror. Alarmed at first, he steps “back from the mirror only to find himself being inexorably drawn back into her world through the smile on her face.” In the end, is he “left standing in front of the mirror, smiling at an image of himself dressed as a white knight.”

And therein lies the whole story in a nutshell. For this remarkable story is as much about the author as it is about the soul and their eventual reunion. While he fears the white knight, she loves the White Knight “above all else.” Where he longs to be free of his obsession with sex, she longs to be free of her imprisonment in nature, somewhere out there. “I am the way,” she boldly proclaims when he finally admits he is lost. And though the two suffer the same agonizing pain of separation from each other and their respective worlds, both seek the one person they are meant to become.

As a sailor then, in the service of the US Navy circa 1967, does he reluctantly set off, that spring, in search of she who must be obeyed if he is to overcome the beastly side of his nature and reunite himself with soul. “Whatever you do,” is he forewarned by a fellow shipmate, “don’t let them rob you of the most precious gift you have, your humanity, for the wraiths will claw away at it until all that remains is the shadow of what was once you.” And so must he, at all costs, resist the temptation of his fathers before him, “to live out the visions of others rather than the one with which he had been entrusted at birth,” a vision that eventually pits him against the Navy.

Loaded with many wonderful insights into the workings of the soul and the trinity, human sexuality and creativity, war and the beastly side of nature, this little gem of a book is sure to please the palate of those intrepid souls who venture to open its pages in search of what they know not. Having gone where no book has ever dared, this starkly honest book is truly “a work of art of indescribable beauty.”

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