Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  “We were there to die, and I didn’t die…. I always have that thought, why am I alive? Look at what we did to them people…. Keeping me alive so they don’t forget…. What happens is, I like pain…. Pain makes the nightmares go away. There’s not enough pills or booze to make the nightmares go away, but pain…. In jail I made them do me [beat him]—grabbed a guard and beat him so they’d do me…. If I get hurt bad it helps the nightmares go away faster.”

  Wiry is an intelligent, capable man. After discharge from the Navy, between 1970 and 1985 he held himself together by being a workaholic, building up and repeatedly losing businesses, both legal and illegal. He started a successful delicatessen and then destroyed the business when his symptoms flared up. He describes “certain points where I get erratic—all fucked up—and whatever I have going at the time is irrelevant.” He has worked as a caterer, as a tractor-trailer driving instructor, and as a trucker. Several of his businesses were criminal, “in the rackets,” for which he has served prison terms.

  One such criminal business involved stealing locked safes from business establishments and then expertly opening them elsewhere with explosives—a civilian application of his trained military skill. He informs me that an ordinary auto tow truck is quite up to the job of pulling a safe through the wall of a building with its cable and then driving away with it.

  His first VA hospitalization occurred in January 1985 when he was employed as a trucker. His truck broke down in the cold, and he called in to his employer, who promised to send help. Wiry waited in the truck, but help never came, resulting in the development of hypothermia, for which he had to be hospitalized. He now understands that he experienced this as a replay of being abandoned in the Mekong Delta after being blown off his boat. At the time, however, he did not see this: “They left me…. [After release from the hospital] I went off and I shot up the warehouse…. I made the people who owned the company get down on their knees…. I treated them like [Vietnamese] prisoners.”

  Treatment in the VA since the mid-1980s has only partially stabilized Wiry. He remains highly symptomatic, highly mistrustful, and highly explosive. In the periods around Christmas and around the anniversary of Tet in March [that is, of a period of thirty-five consecutive days of fighting during the Tet Offensive], he has gotten himself beaten up almost every year. He does this by going into a bar and attacking the largest man in the place. Wiry weighs no more than 140 and is about five feet seven, and, of course, wiry in build.

  Speaking of his criminal activities he says, “It’s not the money, it’s the action.” His skills, his cunning, his craft—a precise word, because it means both highly developed skill and cunning—all become valuable again in “action” in a way that they never are in civilian life. To my knowledge, he has never read Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, but would readily subscribe to the following:

  How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

  To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

  As tho’ to breathe were life …

  He shares the disdain that Tennyson’s Odysseus has for the civilians: they merely “hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”11

  What kind of recognition and acknowledgment would have let Wiry feel he was “known,” understood, and valued? Any kind? Would it have affected his need for “action”? I believe that a unit association of Riverine Force veterans, such as exists now thirty-plus years out, could have made this difference had it existed at the time.

  Some readers will angrily accuse me of perpetuating the “crazed, criminal, out-of-control Vietnam Veteran Stereotype.” Absolutely nothing I have to say here is distinctive to the Vietnam War. War itself does this. War itself creates situations that can wreck the mind. If Wiry has lost his reason at times, he had good reasons. I’ll put it as bluntly as I can: combat service per se smoothes the way into criminal careers afterward in civilian life. Reread the list above on page 21 of capacities that combat cultivates. A criminal career allows a veteran to remain in combat mode, use his hard-earned skills, and even to relive aspects of his experience. In other words, he is doing exactly what Odysseus does in the sack of Ismarus.

  Leban (another pseudonym), a now-deceased World War II veteran whom I treated in my early years at the VA, became a “leg breaker” for a criminal gang upon his return from Europe. He pursued this career of violence for about five years and then gradually became a recluse in the house owned by his immigrant mother. “I can’t explain it—I just got afraid to go out.” After she died, he continued to live there as it crumbled around him, with ceiling plaster falling due to unrepaired roof leaks.

  Some years before I became his psychiatrist, a VA social worker who ran a therapy group for former POWs heard about him, went to his house, and persuaded him to come into the VA clinic for the group. Leban had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge—his unit was being rested, “the first time since I was in France that I undressed to go to sleep!”—and was a POW in Germany till wars end. During his years of solitude in his mother’s house after his criminal career, he reinvented much of Stoic philosophy and Buddhist practice—neither of which he had ever read or heard about. I listened to his philosophic reflections with astonishment and admiration. With different luck in terms of resources and education, Leban could have become a noteworthy philosopher. British poet and novelist Robert Graves had that luck and became an international literary figure after World War I. An infantry officer in the trenches, Graves wrote of his rocky and scapegrace return to civilian life:

  I still had the Army Habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth—it was always easier for me now, when charged with any fault, to lie my way out in Army style. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to … my present situation.

  Other loose habits of wartime survived, such as stopping cars for a lift, and unbuttoning by the roadside without shame, whoever might be about.12

  This is hardly a criminal career, and his social position as a decorated “officer and gentleman” and as a published poet shielded him from most of the legal complications of “commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about.” An American grunt veteran, especially if black or Hispanic, would not have been treated so tolerantly.

  Graves was not violent. Leban was violent during his early postwar years. For many combat veterans, violence plays constantly in their heads, disrupting their ability to concentrate on and take pleasure in civilian pursuits.

  Ernst, the main character in the celebrated World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front, goes to work as a schoolteacher in The Road Back, which follows the survivors’ lives after the war. The violence that intrudes into his thoughts mocks the civilizing and uplifting tasks of the elementary school teacher.

  There sit the little ones with folded arms…. They look at me so trustingly, so believingly—and suddenly I get a spasm over the heart….

  What should I teach you? Should I tell you that in twenty years you will be dried-up and crippled, maimed in your freest impulses …? Should I tell you that all learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery …?

  What am I able to teach you then? Should I tell you how to pull the string of a hand grenade, how best to throw it at a human being? Should I show you how to stab a man with a bayonet, how to fell him with a club, how to slaughter him with a spade? Should I demonstrate how best to aim a rifle at such an incomprehensible miracle as a breathing breast, a living heart? Should I explain to you what tetanus is, what a broken spine is, and what a shattered skull?13

  Just imagine the consequences today to a newly hired American grade school teacher if he were to reveal such thoughts to his supervisor! It’s not too much to guess that the police would be called.

  Homer put first the pirate raid on Ismarus. I take this as a metaphor for all the ways a veteran may lose his homecoming by remaining in combat mode. Of these ways, taking up a criminal career is the most
destructive to the veteran and to the civilian world around him. Everyone knows that war can wreck the body, but repeatedly forget that it can wreck the soul as well. The sacrifice that citizens make when they serve in their country’s military is not simply the risk of death, dismemberment, disfigurement, and paralysis—as terrible as these realities are. They risk their peace of mind—please, hear this familiar phrase, “peace of mind,” fresh again in all its richness! They risk losing their capacity to participate in democratic process. They risk losing the sense that human virtues are still possible. These are psychological and moral injuries—war wounds—that are no less of a sacrifice than the sacrifice of the armless, or legless, or sightless veteran. One of my former patients, a combat medic in Vietnam, has said, “Just acknowledge the sacrifice!”14

  These veterans want acknowledgment; they want treatment; and when disabled, they want disability pensions. But they also want prevention. Are there helmets or flak jackets for the soul and for the character? Can combat veterans be kept away from criminal careers in civilian life? Can we prevent this damage to good character, which is so destructive to the veteran and to those around him? The alienation, bitterness, and boredom with civilian life cited by Waller in 1944, and that I have heard from many Vietnam veterans, contribute to a drift into criminal careers. Anything that pulls the plug on alienation, bitterness, and boredom will reduce the attraction of remaining in combat mode by criminal “action.”

  The answer does not lie in something that is new or expensive, or once it is said, surprising: it lies in community. Vietnam veterans came home alone. The most significant community for a combat veteran is that of his surviving comrades. Prevention of criminal deformity of returning veterans must start with the beginning of military service, not as an afterthought when the veteran is home and already in trouble. We shall go into this further in Part Three.

  Let us go back to the scene in the Phaeacian court, where the king pressures Odysseus to reveal his identity. Odysseus’ way of doing it is surprising and ironic under the circumstances. It seems more intimidating or off-putting than ingratiating:

  Men hold me

  formidable for guile in peace and war:

  this fame has gone abroad to the sky’s rim …

  (9:20ff Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

  Just twenty lines further he launches into the pillaging of Ismarus.

  The questionable side of Odysseus’ character, and how it came to be, is a thread that runs through this book, sometimes in the foreground, but always in the background. I hope that the sensationalism attaching to crime will not distract the reader from those losses that never make headlines, such as losing a great job because of making a mission out of it, or becoming almost fatally obsessed with “what really happened” in a certain battle. But the Odyssey’s most famous section, Books 9-12, Odysseus’ adventures, does begin with three elements of the hated Vietnam Veteran Stereotype: violent crime, drug addiction, and irresponsible thrill and pleasure seeking.

  4 Lotus Land: The Flight from Pain

  Throughout history, returning veterans have endured the pain of grief for dead comrades, along with the physical pain of war wounds. But there is a special pathos when comrades die after the war is over. In an epic that shows Odysseus losing all his comrades, the first winnowing of the crews at Ismarus is given a fuller appreciation than much greater losses later. Odysseus and his crew become progressively “numbed out” as these blows accumulate.

  Odysseus and his squadron have taken heavy losses in their first postwar battle of homecoming, their plundering of Ismarus:

  Six benches were left empty in every ship

  that evening when we pulled away from death.

  (9:67ff, Fitzgerald)

  And this new grief we bore with us to sea:

  our precious lives we had, but not our friends.

  No ship made sail next day until some shipmate

  had raised a cry, three times, for each poor ghost

  unfleshed …

  then two long days and nights we lay offshore

  worn out and sick at heart, tasting our grief …

  Ismarus was a real place, north-northeast of Troy on the Thracian coast.1 But once the flotilla pulls away it is caught in a violent storm and driven completely off the map. Odysseus will not set foot again in the known world until the Phaeacian rowers put him down, sound asleep, on the beach at Ithaca.

  Phaeacian Court

  Raid on Ismarus

  Lotus Land

  Cyclops

  King of the Winds

  Deadly Fjord

  Circe

  Among the Dead

  Sirens

  Scylla and Charybdis

  Sun God’s Cattle

  Whirlpool

  Calypso

  At Home, Ithaca

  Taking the Odyssey as an allegory of real homecomings from war, we should not be surprised that the next landfall is on the Land of the Lotus Eaters, who come across as stoned flower children:

  [they] showed no will to do us harm, only

  offering the sweet Lotos …

  but those who ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos,

  never cared to report, nor to return:

  they longed to stay forever, browsing2 on

  that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.

  (9:96ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

  Odysseus reacts with the moves of a tough disciplinarian, having possibly learned a lesson from letting wine flow at Ismarus:

  I drove them … wailing, to the ships,

  tied them down under their rowing benches,

  and called the rest: “All hands aboard;

  come, clear the beach and no one taste the Lotos,

  or you lose your hope of home.”

  (9:105ff, Fitzgerald)

  We shall never know if Homer had some particular narcotic plant in mind, and if so what plant this “lotus” was, but his description is clear enough: you get into lotus abuse and you lose your homecoming. Forget your pain—forget your homecoming! This is the path to destruction taken by a horrifyingly large number of Vietnam veterans. Chemical attempts to forget with alcohol or drugs—reaching the American Psychiatric Association criteria for dependence or abuse—were sought by 45.6 percent in alcohol and by 8.4 percent in drugs. If a veteran has current PTSD, these rates are higher still, 73.8 percent and 11.3 percent respectively. These data unfortunately lump together all in-country veterans, both combat and noncombat. It is shocking to realize that male civilian non-veterans who are demographically similar to Vietnam combat veterans have a 26 percent lifetime incidence of alcohol dependence or abuse and a 3.4 percent rate of drug dependence or abuse.3

  The episode with the Lotus Eaters is actually the second time that Homer has suggested the complexity of combat veterans’ “substance” use and chemically induced forgetting. We first encounter it during Telemachus’ (Odysseus’ son’s) search for the truth of whether his father is alive or dead. He comes to the court of King Menelaus, one of Odysseus’ fellow officers. Menelaus guesses that Telemachus is Odysseus’ son and bursts into tears of grief:

  “His son, in my house! How I loved the man,

  And how he fought through hardship for my sake!

  I swore I’d cherish him above all others …

  And so we might have been together often …

  But God himself must have been envious,

  to batter the bruised man so that he alone

  should fail in his return.”

  (4:181ff, Fitzgerald)

  A twinging ache of grief rose up in everyone,

  and … Telemakhos and Menelaos wept …

  There’s no hint that Menelaus wants to forget Odysseus, nor that he finds the pain unmanageable, nor that he finds his own tears humiliating. But Menelaus’ wife, Helen, the famous beauty, Helen of Troy, over whom the whole war was fought, apparently thinks “it’ll be good for him” to forget:

  But now it entered Helen’s mind

  to dro
p into the wine that they were drinking

  an anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness.

  (4:235ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

  Whoever drank this mixture in the wine bowl

  would be incapable of tears that day—

  though he should lose mother and father both,

  or see, with his own eyes, a son or brother

  mauled by weapons of bronze at his own gate.

  The opiate of Zeus’s daughter bore

  this canny power….

  She drugged the wine, then, had it served …

  While some veterans will say that they want to forget what they’ve seen, what they’ve been through, what they’ve done, they never say they want to forget the comrades they’ve lost. Veterans are more often distraught that they cannot remember the name of a friend who died or cannot envision his face, much as it’s common for bereaved widows and widowers to go through agonizing periods when the pain is there but voluntary recall of the beloved’s face is impossible. The veterans I have worked with regard forgetting dead comrades as dishonorable as forgetting dead parents.

  A third time, when Odysseus’ men fall into the clutches of the witch Circe, Homer connects drugs with forgetfulness:

  “[Circe] ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,

  then she mixed them a potion—cheese, barley

  and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine—

  but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs

  to wipe from their memories any thoughts of home.”

  (10:256ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

  The drug turns the veterans from Odysseus’ crew into pigs—a ripe metaphor for moralizing on what drug and alcohol addiction can do. But the core of what Homer shows us is that drugs cause veterans to lose their homecoming. The Lotus and Circe’s drug both make them “forget” their home. The drunk may literally be unable to recall how to get home, and the crack cocaine addict may be unable to remember anything worth going home to at all. In the subtler sense, the drug- or alcohol-addicted veteran may be physically at home, but his cognitive and emotional resources are entirely consumed by the next drink or fix.