I Am Who I Am: Trials and Tribulations of a Resolute Recruit (Paperback or Softback)

Had Sir EJ Drury II not internalized the war he had been fighting as an irresolute recruit who had been condemned to the bowels of a man-o'-war for what he knew not, Sir EJ may well have written a different kind of sequel to 'A Different Kind of Sentinel'.

"No man of war nor destroyer's escort am I," had he declared to the ship's Captain, a pronouncement that would usher in another year of active imagination on the wings of the transcendent function by which he is guided, through dialogue with his unconscious, toward the person he is meant to become.

"How much longer do you think you can keep me from the true intent of these encounters?" Questions he the master of deceit.

"As long as there are images that can keep their secrets to themselves," replies the snake, "I shall prevail."

Stonewalled at every turn, is he led by the transcendent to seek help from an unlikely trio--a professor, an attorney and the First Lady of the Resistance--all of whom work no harder than the attorney to rescue him from the jaws of the beast, intent on sucking any semblance of a real life from him as it has from his fathers and countless other souls who have been forced to kill on command, or be killed, in opposition to every moral fiber of their bodies, the carnage of which cries out unceasingly, "but thou shalt not take another man's life, lest ye lose thine as recompense".

"Give me liberty or give me death," captures he the sentiment of a generation so hell-bent on serving the ego, they kill for it. "And that," says the author, "is the crux of the matter."

Handicapped by an alcoholic stepfather, Sir EJ Drury II set off on a crusade, after high school, in search of the very soul he had lost to this ogre. Upon entering the Navy after a brief stint at the US Naval Academy, he struggled for two long years, with the true enemy of mankind--the Beast. As a sailor, circa 1967, did he continue his search for she who must be obeyed if he was to overcome the beastly side of his nature and reunite himself with soul. And so did he 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 quest that eventually pits him against the Navy as he comes to a fuller understanding of the true meaning of military service. Returning to St. Louis after his eventual discharge, he joined a loosely knit community of antiwar activists, vegetarians and free-spirited thinkers who published the city's only underground paper, The St. Louis Free Press. After not quite a year of leafleting the induction center downtown and of helping disaffected GIs from a nearby army base, he joined another community of Catholics forming a Worker House on the near south side of the city. There he stayed until he left for Milwaukee, WI, later that year, to work at De Paul Alcoholic Treatment Center. After suffering through one of the coldest winters he had ever experienced, he moved back to St. Louis to work on a psychiatric floor at Lutheran Hospital. Upon leaving there in protest, with other health care professionals, over the performance of a lobotomy on a 15-year-old patient, he wound up working on an orthopedic floor, and later, a psychiatric floor at Jewish Hospital. At the same time, he purchased a farm, where he began growing organic vegetables, he marketed back in St. Louis. There he built a cabin and began acquiring the tools and equipment he would need to farm 15 acres of organic fruits and vegetables. Upon leaving Jewish Hospital around 1980, he went to work for Tom Carron Construction as a carpenter. Around this same time, he married and began to raise a family. As his oldest son approached the age of two, he started building a new house on the farm, only to have his well-laid plans dashed by an unfortunate but permanent injury to his back, that left him unable to ever again perform any kind of manual labor on a daily basis. Thrown into a quandary, he eventually went to work for the City of St. Louis as a building inspector, where he worked for two years, before taking a similar position with the City of Richmond Heights, where he worked until he retired in 2015. After a series of dreams he had in his second year with the City of St. Louis, he started writing, two hours a day until he had completed his first book, recounting his first year in the Navy. The book was so poorly produced, it went nowhere. Crushed but not defeated, he continued to work on the book until it reached its present form, a work of psychological and social import entitled A Different Kind of Sentinel, that was released in 2010, and printed twice in 2013 and again in 2016 as newer editions became available. A self-taught, self-made man, Sir EJ has struggled mightily to live up to his soul's expectations, acquiring along the way, whatever it took to get them through the next stage in the development of the one person they are destined to become. His teachers have been the writings of such notables as the contemplative Thomas Merton, psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Zen Master D.T. Suzuki and self-described philosophical anarchist Mahatma Gandhi. He has studied the beastly side of human nature for 30 years, and is now considered a leading authority in his field. During that time he also completed I Am Who I Am, the "Grand Finale" to A Different Kind of Sentinel.