By Richard Martin, Chief Strategist, Alcera Consulting Inc.
“Only the farmers won. We lost.” — The Magnificent Seven
“When I was in the jungle, I wanted to be back home. When I was home, all I could think about was being back in the jungle.” — Apocalypse Now
“So I may learn in my own mind what sorrow they endured at the hands of the war gods…” — Homer, The Odyssey
Prologue: The Map of the Myth
This is a story we have told for as long as stories have existed.
A warrior leaves home to fight a distant war. He suffers, he endures, he sees things no one should see. He returns—if he can—not to rest, but to reclaim what slipped away while he was gone. Sometimes he is welcomed. Sometimes he is forgotten. Sometimes, home is no longer there. Sometimes, he no longer belongs.
This essay is a journey through that myth, not as a single narrative, but as a constellation of echoes—Homeric, cinematic, modern, and ancient. From The Magnificent Seven to The Odyssey, from Apocalypse Now to True Grit, we trace the arc from glory to home, from illusion to revelation. And in doing so, we come to understand that the apocalypse—the unveiling—is not in some distant, prophetic future. It is now. It always was.
The Magnificent Beginning
In The Magnificent Seven, seven hired gunmen ride into a dusty Mexican village to protect the townspeople from marauding bandits. They fight not for money or fame, but for something less tangible: purpose, meaning, perhaps redemption. By the end, the bandits are dead, the village is safe, and the surviving gunfighters ride away. But the film does not end on triumph. It ends with Chris, the leader, looking out over the graves of his fallen companions and saying, “Only the farmers won. We lost.”
With that line, the myth inverts. The warriors, admired and needed, are also transients. They were never meant to stay. They gave the villagers a chance to survive but could not share in what they helped preserve. The ones who endure are not the ones who killed the most or rode the fastest. The ones who endure are the ones who stayed, planted, worked, raised children, buried the dead, and began again.
What begins as a tale of righteous violence ends as a meditation on exile. The warrior is not a hero in the end. He is an interlude.
Odysseus and the False Journey
Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, had everything a man might wish for: peace, land, family, honour, legacy. And yet he left it all to fight in a foreign war, for a woman not his wife, to defend a kingdom not his own. The Trojan War drags on for ten years, and his journey home for ten more. His men die. His ships are destroyed. He is delayed by storms, temptations, monsters, and gods. When he returns, Ithaca has changed. Or perhaps he has. Suitors devour his wealth. His faithful wife is weary. His abandoned son is grown. His homecoming is not a restoration—it is a reclamation through blood.
The true tragedy of The Odyssey is not the time it takes Odysseus to return, but the fact that he left at all. He went to fight for the honour of others and returned to find his own honour nearly lost, his legacy nearly undone, and his family barely intact. His cunning was not enough to protect what he should never have risked.
This is not a story of heroic triumph. It is a story of hard, painful return. Of penance. Of sorrow. The war he fought was not the war that mattered. That war waited for him at home.
Apocalypse Now and the Collapse of Meaning
Where The Odyssey gives us a king trying to return, Apocalypse Now gives us a soldier who no longer knows where home is. Captain Willard, broken and alienated, is sent into the jungle to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a once-decorated officer who has established a private kingdom deep in Cambodia and slipped beyond the control of the U.S. military. As Willard journeys upriver, structure decays around him. Orders become meaningless. The war becomes surreal. At Dolong Bridge, where the river meets fire and confusion, he crosses into something mythic and irretrievable.
When Willard finally finds Kurtz, he finds not madness but a terrible clarity. Kurtz has not lost his mind—he has shed every illusion. He has seen what the war truly is: not chaos, but an order founded on terror and death. A system that demands horror and then pretends to be shocked by it. He speaks in whispers. He quotes poetry. He rules by force and reverence. And he waits for death with a kind of priestly patience.
Willard completes his mission. He kills Kurtz. But when he emerges from the temple compound, he does not feel redeemed. He feels hollow. The villagers bow to him, but he is no god. He is a man who has inherited a revelation that has no place in the world he came from. He drifts back into the jungle, mission complete, soul unmoored.
He left with orders. He returns with insight. But insight is not a home.
Mattie Ross and the Grit of Staying
In True Grit, the myth takes yet another form. Here, the warrior is not a man but a girl. Mattie Ross is fourteen when her father is murdered. She hires Rooster Cogburn, a drunken, brutal marshal, to track the killer. She is not naïve, and she is not afraid. She insists on joining the pursuit, not because she seeks vengeance, but because she believes in justice.
Unlike Willard, unlike Odysseus, unlike Chris, Mattie is not fleeing from her past. She is protecting it. She does not want to become someone new—she wants to remain who she is. Her journey is not a departure but an act of fidelity. She stays true to her name, her family, her origin. She fights to hold onto what was hers.
Rooster, for all his bluster and gunplay, is redeemed not by shooting, but by helping her do what he never could—fight for something real. The true grit in the story belongs not to the man with the badge, but to the girl with the resolve. She wins, but the victory costs her. She loses an arm. She grows hard. She never marries. She remains faithful to what was right, but she does not remain unscathed.
To stay, to protect, to endure—this is the form of courage that leaves its mark.
Chico and Petra: The Return to the Soil
Back in The Magnificent Seven, a quieter transformation takes place. Chico (kid), the youngest of the gunfighters, joins the Seven out of restlessness. He is tired of being a farmer. He wants adventure, danger, significance. The life of Chris and Vin seems glorious—dangerous, mobile, free.
But as the fighting drags on, he meets Petra (rock), a young village woman whose strength and beauty unsettle him. He begins to see the life he rejected from another angle. When the battle is over, Chico does not ride off. He turns back. He returns to Petra. He returns to the fields. He chooses the plow over the pistol. The hearth over the horizon.
This is not defeat. It is maturity. Chico becomes a man not by following his heroes, but by choosing what they could not: to stay, to love, to work, to grow. He goes home—not because he failed, but because he saw the truth before it was too late.
The French Colonists: The Dream That Isn’t Theirs
In Apocalypse Now Redux, Willard stops at a French plantation deep in the jungle into Cambodia. The colonists live in a forgotten world—drinking wine, speaking of ancestors, clinging to old maps and ancient claims. They believe in what they are doing. They believe in their right to stay. They bury their dead with ceremony and smoke cigars and opium at night. They are not cowards. But they are surrounded by people who farm the same land, raise the same crops, speak a different language—and fight for a home that is theirs in fact, not memory.
The French colonists are not villains. But they are displaced. They are the mirror image of the indigenous farmers. They are settlers with courage but no claim. Their war is not for justice—it is for permanence in a place that never fully belonged to them. They have stayed—but they have stayed on borrowed soil.
Where Chico chooses to return to his own land, the colonists refuse to leave another’s. Their tragedy is not weakness, but loyalty to a dream that no longer corresponds to the world.
The Fractal Shape of Paradox
Each of these stories bends the warrior myth in a different way, and each time the arc folds back on itself. The girl has more courage than the marshal. The peasant boy sees more clearly than the gunman. The colonists defend a home that is not home. The soldier kills a prophet only to become him. The king returns not to peace, but to a reckoning.
The same story repeats in different keys, echoing forward and backward, always circling the same truth: that the journey outward reveals not what we hoped to find, but what we were afraid to face. Each version deepens the last. Each character is a fragment of a larger whole. Together, they form a map—not to glory, but to recognition.
The Apocalypse Is Now
The word apocalypse means unveiling. Revelation. It does not mean fire from the sky or the end of days. It means the moment you finally see what was always there, hidden behind illusion.
That moment is not in the future. It is now.
It is when Odysseus realizes the cost of his absence. When Willard hears the jungle speak. When Kurtz looks at the world and sees it without the veil. When Mattie refuses to compromise. When Chico returns to the fields. When the colonists toast to a nation that has already left them behind.
The apocalypse is not destruction. It is clarity. It is the moment the warrior sees that what he abandoned can no longer be recovered. It is the moment he asks not, “Did I win?” but “What did I lose in leaving?”
The Only Glory Worth Keeping
So we come full circle. The farmers remain. The girl endures. The boy returns. The warrior disappears. The madman is killed. The myth persists.
The true battle was never for someone else’s honour. It was never for glory. It was not at Troy, or at Dolong Bridge, or in the compound. It was always here. In the household. In the name. In the field. In the promise kept. In the choice to stay. To see clearly. To stay faithful. To defend what is already yours.
That is the only glory worth keeping.
About the Author
Richard Martin is the founder and president of Alcera Consulting Inc., and the creator of The Strategic Code—a doctrine for leaders navigating volatility, constraint, and conflict.
His mission is simple: equip leaders to exploit change and achieve strategic coherence. Through his advisory work, writing, and tools, he helps senior decision-makers see clearly, understand deeply, and act decisively in high-stakes environments.
Richard is the author of Brilliant Manoeuvres: How to Use Military Wisdom to Win Business Battles, and the developer of Strategic Epistemology and Worldview Warfare—frameworks that decode the beliefs, values, and power structures shaping strategic action in a contested world.
www.thestrategiccode.com
www.exploitingchange.com
© 2025 Richard Martin
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