Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  Sometimes a veteran’s desire to “stop the screaming” or “stop the nightmares” gets framed as forgetting, “If only I could forget …” But the inability to remember things that the veteran longs to recover and the inability to feel safe from ambush by flashbacks and nightmares are two sides of the same coin. The veteran has lost authority over his own process of memory. Restoring that authority is one dimension of recovery from combat trauma. A veteran who is actively drinking or actively using drugs can never regain authority over the processes of memory. Sobriety is one of the three essential starting points for recovery from complex PTSD after combat, the other two being safety and self-care.4

  Using drugs and alcohol for forgetting, to suppress nightmares, to get to sleep in the face of unbearable agitation, are examples of what has come to be called “self-medication.” Legally and illegally, the civilian world offers a range of psychoactive substances, which street lingo divides broadly into “uppers” (stimulants such as amphetamines and cocaine) and “downers” (sedatives such as alcohol and barbiturates, anxiolytics such as Valium and other benzodiazepines, and opiate analgesics such as heroin).

  With the story of the Lotus Eaters, echoing Helen’s “anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness,” Homer suggests that if you forget your pain, you forget your homeland—you “lose your hope of home.” To really be home means to be emotionally present and engaged. Even without alcohol, stimulants, opiates, or sedatives, some entirely clean and sober combat veterans endure civilian life with all of their emotions shut down, except for anger, the one emotion that promoted survival in battle. Homer seems to be saying that if you are too successful in forgetting pain, forgetting grief, fear, and disgust, you may dry up the springs of sweetness, enjoyment, and pleasure in another person’s company. This fits our clinical experience.

  Veterans use many strategies to numb their pain, to silence the nightmares, to quell guilt. Chemicals are only one such strategy, danger seeking is another, workaholism is another, sexaholism another still5—and it is not an exaggeration to say that Homer has seen it all (see Chapters 5, 6, and 14). These have in common that they cut the emotion out of the veteran’s homecoming. Even when he’s physically with his wife, his children, his parents, he’s not there. Many men go through the motions, but emotionally speaking, they’re; like ice. The second chapter of Aphrodite Matsakis’s Vietnam Wives carries the grim title, “Living with the Ice Man.”6

  Selective suppression of emotion is an essential adaptation to survive lethal settings such as battle, where numbing grief and suppressing fear and physical pain are lifesaving. Whatever the psychological and physiological machinery that produces this emotional shutdown, it appears to get jammed in the “on” position for some veterans. Do not imagine that this is a comfortable or pleasant state of being. Veterans in this state say they feel “dead” and that they watch life through a very dirty window. They are never in life. More than one has described it as like being wrapped in cotton wool. Such deadness prompts some who sufferer from this hateful numbness to self-medicate with “uppers.”

  In parallel, mobilization of the mind and body for danger, the vigilant sharpening of the senses, the tense readiness to kill an attacker, is also an obvious survival adaptation to combat. When this is stuck in the on position and persists into civilian life, the veteran may embark on a frenzied search for calm. Such a state directly interferes with sleep, often causing a vicious cycle, because of the physiological and psychological “jacking up” that comes from going completely without sleep. “I’ve got to get some sleep!” is a cry of many veterans. The easy, cheap, legal availability of the sedating drug alcohol has been irresistible to many veteran insomniacs. Most have learned, to their sorrow, that it is a poor choice, full of its own dangers and ambushes. The other downers have their own characteristic problems, some different from alcohol’s, but problems no less.

  I argued in Achilles in Vietnam that simple combat PTSD is best understood as the persistence into civilian life of valid survival adaptations to combat. Both hyperarousal and numbing may persist into civilian life, paradoxically coexisting as constantly inflamed anger, but numbing of everything else. Or they may alternate with one another, giving the veteran a history of “cycling” between overexcitement and numb withdrawal. No wonder many have been labeled “manic-depressive,” or the more recent term “bipolar affective disorder.” Combat veterans with PTSD sometimes come to our clinic dragging behind them a long history of alternately self-medicating both numbing and hyperarousal and carrying the dismal label of “polysubstance abuser.”

  Can drug and alcohol abuse among veterans be prevented? Clearly, when one in four civilians7 meets the criteria for alcohol abuse or dependence currently or some time in their life, we are talking about something that no one has an easy answer to. There are many encouraging developments in today’s U.S. military services in the form of alcohol awareness, the availability of treatment for alcoholism, reduction of the semiofficial practice of using alcohol as a reward for a unit’s doing well at some challenge, considerable institutional discouragement of drunkenness—all of these may result in a future veteran population less inclined to alcoholism. What about the major role I advocated in the last chapter for unit associations in easing the transition back into civilian life? Were not American Legion and VFW posts mostly cut-rate bars and drinking clubs? I shall not address this prejudicial stereotype of these mass membership veterans service organizations, but rather describe my personal experience with one unit association with which I had a brief, but informative, contact.

  In 1996, Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, U.S. Army, retired, invited me to attend the reunion of the 101st Airborne Division Association at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, after reading Achilles in Vietnam. He had commanded the 2d Brigade of the 101st in Vietnam, and had subsequently commanded the whole division. At the time of this invitation he was president of the 2d Brigade Association, which appeared to nest comfortably inside the larger 101st Airborne Division Association. I went with expectations based on the unexamined stereotypes of boozy, loud, and argumentative local VFW posts. When I arrived, somewhat late because of the vagaries of air travel, the banquet was already in progress in the Enlisted Men’s Club. On a large-screen closed-circuit TV another event was in progress, a full-dress affair at the Officers’ Club, which few seemed to be watching. What impressed me were the comfortable hum of conversation and an almost palpable atmosphere of mutual love. Yes, there were pitchers of beer on the tables, but the noise level was so quiet that I doubt that much of the beer had been consumed. People shout when they’re drunk, in part because they themselves are somewhat deafened from the neurological effects of alcohol.

  I found General Cushman among enlisted veterans from his brigade. He took me over to one of his aviation company commanders, who immediately wanted me to know about a former trooper who had been having a rough time with his memories and with alcohol. The local chapter of the 101st Airborne Association had recovered contact with him after many years of not knowing where he was or how he was doing. They had drawn him into their circle and persuaded him to join Alcoholics Anonymous, and were immensely proud of their continued ability to be a “Band of Brothers.” Unit associations appear more capable of fostering this sense of mutual support and obligation than the mass-oriented veterans service organizations.

  There are many other military unit associations—large, such as the First Marine Division Association, and small, comprising former members of a single company or even platoon. Prior to the twentieth century, each American military unit was raised from a specific geographic area, and usually bore the name of the place it was raised. This resulted almost automatically in every local veterans association, both formal and informal, being a unit association. The spectacular political power of the main mass membership veterans association in the nineteenth century, the Grand Army of the Republic, has obscured this history. The GAR was accused of raiding the U.S. Treasury for Civil War veterans’ pensions. />
  Today, because of a conscious policy of both promoting national unity and protecting any single town from being bereaved of a whole generation of its young men, every unit is made up of recruits from anywhere in the country. However, modern technology, starting with the telephone, and now with the Internet, permits scattered veterans to form and maintain unit associations that are little impaired by geographic scatter. I have personally witnessed the beneficial, even lifesaving power of the social support that veterans can gain through Internet communities, and shall expand on this in Chapter 18.

  So Captain Odysseus drives his men away from the silky embrace of the addicting Lotus, and gets his flotilla back out to sea. The sullen sailors pull away from Lotus Land, but they have no clue where they are. The dope dealers of Lotus Land were recognizably human, but on their next landfall, they encounter monsters.

  5 Cyclops:The Flight from Boredom

  After a mile or two I said to Boanerges [“Son of Thunder,” the name Lawrence had given his motorcycle], “We are going to hurry” … and thereupon laid back my ears like a rabbit, and galloped down the road…. It seemed to me that sixty-five miles an hour was a fitting pace … but often we were ninety for two or three miles on end, with old B. trumpeting ha ha like a war horse…. [In Oxfordshire, where traffic moved at about thirty miles per hour] Boa and myself were pioneers of the new order, which will do seventy or more between point and point…. Boa was round the next corner, or over the next-hill-but-two while they were sputtering.

  —T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” 19261

  In popular culture the Cyclops is the part that stands for the whole of the Odyssey. It’s what shows up in the Saturday morning cartoons. Oceans of ink have drowned continents of paper explaining this episode. Homer lays it on thick, with suspense, marvels, clever twists, gore, and gross-outs. Not only does the Cyclops snatch up pairs of Odysseus’ shipmates, bash their brains out across the floor, and munch them down raw, but at one point he even barfs up undigested pieces of eaten Greek. Like a stage magician, Homer controls our gaze with stunning gestures of one hand, while the real action is in the other hand in plain sight. What mostly concerns us here is the conjurer’s other hand.

  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

  “LAWLESS BRUTES”

  The Cyclops is adventure number three that Odysseus recounts to the Phaeacian civilians. It comes after the plundering of Ismarus, where his flotilla lost about one man in ten when the natives counterattacked,2 and as the end point of their flight from the sweet oblivion of Lotus addiction. These themes of random fighting, loss of friends (after the war is over!), and forgetfulness are fresh when the flotilla is carried by the winds to the “land of the high and mighty Cyclops, lawless brutes” (9:119f, Fagles). Odysseus tosses off a few more disparaging remarks about Cyclopes and then describes making camp on an island just offshore. He leaves his squadron and takes his own ship and crew across the narrow water to

  probe the natives over there.

  What are they—violent, savage, lawless?

  or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?

  (9:194ff, Fagles)

  At the time, Odysseus the naval officer had no reason to know anything about where the wind had blown him, even though as he relates the tale to the Phaeacians, Odysseus the storyteller knows exactly what he faces: giant cannibals. But in the context of the story, it would seem a reasonable reconnaissance that he hazards. Yet Odysseus goes on to tell us that his “bold heart” (thumos) prompted him to bring along a large skin of especially potent wine, because

  … I’d soon come up against some giant …

  a savage deaf to justice, blind to law.

  (9:239f, Fagles)

  What’s going on here? He’s the captain of his own ship and commodore of a flotilla of twelve. He has told us repeatedly how sorry he is that not one of the six hundred or so men he was responsible for made it home alive, but it was their own damned fault … or so he says. And the narrator says. And the gods say. The families back at Ithaca reasonably will hold him responsible for all six hundred young men who shipped out with him, but here we are looking at Odysseus’ conduct only with regard to the six men who get eaten by the monster.

  The squadron has lost its bearings. Reconnaissance is called for, and any responsible commander would see it competently done. Odysseus and his crew cross the small stretch of water. Now closer, looking up from the shore, Odysseus can see that the cave is a giant’s lair. This prompts him to take the skin of extra-potent wine, much as a modern commander might take extra, nonstandard weapons he thinks the mission requires.3 Odysseus leaves most of his crew with the ship, and with twelve picked men climbs up to the giant-scale den. They enter it wide-eyed. The owner is not at home. Odysseus’ men plead with him—This is bad shit, Cap’n! Let’s grab what we can carry and get out of here! But Odysseus turns stubborn and says,

  But I would not give way—…

  not till I saw him, saw what [guest-]gifts he’d give [me].

  (9:256ff, Fagles)

  This “curiosity” to see what xeinia, hospitality gifts, the giant would give him costs six men their lives. This is no ominous hunch. He knows that a giant inhabits this cave, but nevertheless he keeps his men there in danger!

  One of the veterans I have worked with for many years once punched his sister’s husband in the side of his head as he passed him in the back hall of their house. What happened in the ensuing fight matters less than why he did it: “I just wanted to see what happened.” Another veteran says that a couple of years after returning from Vietnam he dove off a roof. Was he trying to commit suicide? No. “I wanted to see what would happen—sometimes you do that.”

  Commentators on Odysseus’ behavior are divided between those who emphasize his “curiosity”—praising him as a sort of ancient proto-scientist—and those who emphasize his greed—that he hoped for a guest-gift of some immensely valuable item.4 I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans’ attraction to danger, an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives after returning home, and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their survival. To quote from a veteran’s poem you will read later, in Chapter 18:

  I drive Chu Yen [the veteran’s motorcycle] to the Wall in a Demon rage, we make the trip in eight minutes; if she’d been flesh and blood I would have ridden her to death.

  Vietnam veteran bikers did not invent dangerously fast motorcycle riding, as we saw in this chapter’s epigraph by the famous World War I combat veteran Lawrence of Arabia, who died from it.

  Veterans’ behavior has been variously called irresponsible, impulsive, judgment-impaired, thrill-seeking, and danger-seeking, but these adjectives don’t quite get at the sense that the dice must be rolled. In addition to hungering to acquire the guest-gifts, Odysseus just wanted to “see what would happen” in the Cyclops’ cave. Prolonged combat leaves some veterans with the need to “live on the edge” to pose the same question to the cosmos over and over again: yes or no? The veteran who dove off the roof was not “curious” about what broken bones feel like. Odysseus’ irresponsible impulse to see “What are they—violent, savage, lawless?/or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?” (9:195f, Fagles) and what guest-gift he would receive from the giant makes perfect sense, as something that veterans of much fighting simply do. It is as if, having lived in a world where the dice were constantly rolling, the calm, plan-filled responsibility of civilian life (or for that matter, of peacetime military service) is intolerable. They speak of it as a “boredom” that somehow grows to unendurable proportions. Tennyson captured this boredom in the opening l
ines of his poem Ulysses:

  It little profits that an idle king

  By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

  Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

  Unequal laws unto a savage race,

  That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. [Emphasis added.]

  So, in part just to see what happens, Odysseus has his men settle down to dine on the giant’s stored food and wait. Who are the “lawless brutes” here? Homer has made the point just a few dozen lines earlier that they have plenty of stores in their ships and have just gorged themselves on wild goats; these men are not starving. Necessity is not driving them. No learned commentator on the Cyclops episode has claimed that the customs of the ancient Mediterranean permit uninvited strangers to walk into someone’s home in his absence and eat up his food. In fact, a refined version of this same misconduct has occurred earlier in the epic, in Books 1 and 2, when Penelope’s infamous suitors back in Ithaca eat her, Telemachus, and Odysseus himself out of house and home. Over and over, we are given to understand that the suitors deserve the death that Odysseus rains down on them in the climactic Book 23 for eating his supplies uninvited.5

  Polyphemus the Cyclops returns and tidies up some domestic chores, at first not noticing the intruders. And like a householder returning for the evening, he locks his front door: Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave when Polyphemus deftly plugs its entrance with a rock so big that twenty-two wagon teams could not budge it. When finally he discovers them,

  ‘Strangers!’ he thundered out, ‘now who are you?

  Where did you sail from, over the running sea-lanes?

  Out on a trading spree or roving the waves like pirates,