Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  American soldiers in Vietnam were in a world where such threats were thought to be real and the gods very far away and uncommunicative. These soldiers could not protect themselves with words and oaths. One widely circulated rumor among American GIs in Vietnam was that prostitutes were Viet Cong cadres, who put razor blades or broken glass in their vaginas. A variant of this was the advice never to fall asleep after sex with a prostitute, because the VC would sneak in and cut off your balls. Similar to these rumors, but with more frequent basis in reality, was the fear that Vietnamese prostitutes harbored antibiotic-resistant strains of venereal diseases, known collectively as the “black syph.”

  The painful and destructive legacy that some veterans brought home with them from the Vietnam War was this visceral sense that women are dangerous. Remember that many young men had their first sustained experience with sex in the demeaning and dangerous context of prostitution in Vietnam. Veterans have told me that they always went armed to a “steam and cream,” a brothel providing steam bath, massage, and ejaculation. Rapes and rape-murders of Vietnamese prostitutes were widely known. They were not investigated by either military police or South Vietnamese civilian police. Fear, anger, and violence do not lay groundwork for any postwar sexual life that deserves the name “intimacy,” not to speak of sweetness or delight. Exactly the contrary.

  Once Odysseus defeats Circe’s plan to turn him into a pig like the rest of his crew (with a little assistance from the god Hermes), she enthusiastically pulls him to frolics in bed, punctuated only by daily feasts of meat and wine. Her words to him are like a combat veteran’s wish-fulfillment dream:

  Royal … Odysseus, man of action,

  no more tears now, calm these tides of sorrow.

  Well I know what pains you bore on the swarming sea,

  what punishment you endured from hostile men on land.

  But come now, eat your food and drink your wine

  till the same courage fills your chests, now as then,

  when you first set sail from native land….

  Now you are burnt-out husks, your spirits haggard, sere,

  always brooding over your wanderings long and hard,

  your hearts never lifting with any joy—

  you’ve suffered far too much.

  (10:502ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

  Odysseus laps it up and apparently forgets all about his faithful wife, Penelope, and son and homecoming for a whole year, until his shipmates snap him out of it—“Captain, this is madness! / High time you thought of your own home at last” (10:520f, Fagles).

  Circe’s inviting bed would appear to need little decoding as an obstacle to returning home, but that appearance may be misleading. I wrote above about the danger and degradation that often permeated sex with prostitutes in Vietnam, as one obstacle. Another obstacle, the extreme opposite of danger and degradation, is described by a veteran, a former Airborne officer, who has never been my patient. His picture of sex with prostitutes in the midst of a war—a dreamlike, wonderland quality—created its own obstacle to homecoming. I shall omit explicit sexual detail:

  FROM “LOVE AND WHORES” BY DENNIS SPECTOR4

  What would the good mothers of the PTA say if they knew what type of sex their sons got off on in Vietnam? Those wonderful women who bake cookies and expect their boys to go off to war, with all the glory of the 4th of July and Memorial Day parades….

  [In Vietnam] you learn that the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his cock….

  If it is your first time, getting your rocks off, it’s even more believed. And, it was the first time for almost all of us in the 1960s. Mary Magdalene is part of our heritage of forgiveness and redemption. There was no redemption in our jungle of blood, redemption could be found in taking care of a vulnerable woman and being taken care of in return. A redeeming time of peace and care and passion. No killing, only female softness, femininity of giving totally in the care of a strong man.

  These Vietnamese women were perfect beauties, small-boned, very delicate, petite beauties with soft, smooth olive-colored skin, and the gentle rounded curves of youth, girl-like in their beauty. The natural way they ply their trade created a perfectly good loving acceptance of these whores by a man. They needed us to care for them and protect them, that was the only way they could survive. The hardships and constant touch of death made this love right for us, for this moment it was love, all soft yielding, pleasing flesh. We begged for it. We knew that: “Hey, I could be dead tomorrow. So why not live every moment?” The insanity, lies, cruelty all around us, all of the time, made us want to run to the soft gentle flesh of a woman accepting, without any hint of danger, a respite from the killing to make life intimate and worth living again…. We needed nurturance so badly, they gave it to us so naturally. They needed a man to take care of and protect them…. These women had no choice, and that also made it right….

  These Asian whores treated an American like a king. Sather [the author’s pseudonym for himself] had seen so many ladies get serious about a GI; believing he would really be allowed to bring her home, wanting his loving protection, falling so loyally in love with him….

  These women were all passion, it was their femininity, that was all that they knew. They wanted to make it real if they could.

  In the U.S., Sather missed the passion.

  Circe’s offer—once Odysseus has intimidated her—of sex, baths, food, wine as therapy for a haggard, sere spirit appears to have played out in reality among some American combat soldiers in Vietnam. These Eurasian and Afro-Asian prostitutes, whom Spector describes as working in bar-whorehouses in “a boom boom village” at the crossing of two roads that Spector’s unit was patrolling, were not free, self-determining sex workers. They had probably been sold to the brothels as children, or they had been born in the brothels, being outcasts because of their mixed race. They were, as most prostituted women in the world are, enslaved. Spector writes of this village among the rubber plantations, “Decades of French Foreign Legion assured this legacy of outcasts. The South Vietnamese hated the mixed races of Senegalese, Algerian, Moroccan, French…. The only living open to these women was the same as their mothers, as whores.”

  If homecoming means returning to the specific civilian world from which one departed for war, to its now boring job, to its now trivial social demands, to the annoying insistence that things be paid for, to an unsexy wife, and to a crowded and unglamorous neighborhood, then perhaps a life of limitless sex, food, and wine with a rich, bewitching nymph (and later with the another nymph, Calypso) sure could distract a guy from coming home! But two questions spring to mind: How real is this threat to a soldier’s homecoming? Does Odysseus’ affair with Circe shed any light on the mistrust and hostility toward women described in the earlier part of this chapter?

  A minority of the men I work with today have active, let alone promiscuous, sexual lives—now. The rest are not celibate on principle, but are so socially isolated—even in their own homes, sometimes living on a different floor from their partner—that there is little occasion for sexual intimacy. However, many went through periods during the first decade after returning from Vietnam when they apparently did seek the solace that Circe specifically offers in wine, good food, and great sex. Veterans have described periods when they were wildly promiscuous, having sex with as many as three women a day over an extended period. We shall return to the subject of sexaholism in Chapter 14.

  Perhaps it’s the New England moralist in me speaking, but I do not believe there is salvation for a haggard, sere spirit in sex, or even romance. In fact, I speculate that the hostility toward women displayed by many veterans with PTSD stems from disappointment of the hope that “the love of a good woman” would be enough to heal the wounds of war: “If my wife (or wives) did not do that for me, it must be because they had some other agenda.” Or to be more exact, if the momentary relief found in sex from the after-effects of combat did not last, then the woman must have taken that relief away from the vete
ran for some sinister or self-serving reason. A young man coming home to America hoping for, possibly expecting, the land of wonderland dream-love-sex described above by Dennis Spector might well be bitterly disappointed. He might well conclude that women are to blame for his disappointment. Homer puts a similar wish-fulfillment dream into Circe’s words with such beauty and understanding of what a returning war veteran wants that it’s extremely painful to recall that it is a fiction, it is a dream, and she is a nymph, a demigoddess, and not a merely mortal woman.

  A real-world woman, in America, meeting a haggard combat veteran, might have been as understanding as Circe, but unlike Circe had no staff of serving women, had to consider how to pay to keep up the household, had a life with her own family and friends apart from the veteran.

  Dennis Spector writes the following about his experience when he returned:

  Coming home to women is very hard, it is impossible to reestablish an intimacy. They just can’t relate….

  Women are treated so well in our society, there life is so gentle. I’m glad that they are. I’m talking about the average American female. That is the good side of the double standard….

  It’s not because they don’t have it, it’s that we have changed. We can’t share our inner self with them. We come home with the reality, there’s blood on the risers, there’s blood on our hands, there’s friends we can’t touch. What happened is scary, very scary. We have this reality, we know that it can happen again….

  How can you come home to a woman and be yourself after combat? How can she even understand that? You can hardly be yourself again.

  I went to see that great movie Born on the Fourth of July with my wife. We went to a matinee, at a small theater. Only eight couples were there. Born on the Fourth of July did something, it explained the death of a soul…. When you come back you find that they lied to you. It had the … analogy of the death of a spine with the hero. It was the first movie that captured the idea that you have to … have a rebirth, whatever it is, you have to have it.

  I remembered looking around the theater and all the people were still sitting around, just like I was. You could tell they were all my age. I could hear the whispers…. I got out of there quickly because I was going to cry and I don’t like to cry. They were hit by the story of a need for rebirth, just like I was hit.

  My wife could not understand what I was talking about.

  How do you bridge that gap? … I understood the need for a rebirth. She could not comprehend what happened to me, because she had never been beaten up. If she had been raped, abused, beaten, scared, or starved [like the mixed-race Vietnamese outcast prostitutes?], she could understand. I am glad that she wasn’t.

  And, I thought: “How many people have touched a dead person. Or have had to put their buddies in a bag, and made sure that you got all the parts. Or, stuffed their stomach back in so that you could get them out.”

  You have sex, but you don’t have intimacy. We live in a hell that is ours alone and we don’t want to drag her into it, so we live in there alone and cut off intimacy.

  With a life partner you want to be able to share everything with her. You can’t even come close, she has never experienced anything like that. Her image is the illusion that a man goes off to fight, you’re strong, you come home and you build your life.

  You have the reality.5

  Here Spector emphasizes the chasm between the danger and horror of war and the safe complacency of civilian life and the chasm between veterans and women.

  The theme that women are dangerous and untrustworthy because of their deceptive mētis and because they allure men with secret powers will haunt the rest of the Odyssey. The opening four books of the Odyssey concerning Odysseus’ wife and son at home in Ithaca depict women in a generally favorable light, especially the faithful and long-suffering Penelope. As Odysseus is presented as a “man of pain,” she is a woman of pain who could understand this husband. She also has plenty of mētis herself, including the famous trick of the shroud that she weaves each day, and unweaves every evening to deceive the suitors (2:100ff, Fitzgerald). But this mētis is apparently in the service of loyalty to her husband. Homer depicts females who are powerful, but not actively malevolent on their own account, such as Queen Arete. But early on, we hear about the scare-figure of Queen Clytemnestra, King Agamemnon’s treacherous wife. Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, says of her—

  A stranger killed my brother, in cold blood—

  Tricked blind, caught in the web of his deadly queen.

  (4:98f, Fitzgerald)

  With the introduction of Circe in Book 10 the picture of women gets rapidly worse and more sinister as we encounter autonomously dangerous female beings who are both powerful and malevolent. Clytemnestra becomes Agamemnon’s murderer, rather than merely an accomplice, says Agamemnon in the Underworld—

  There’s nothing more deadly, bestial than a woman

  set on works like these—what a monstrous thing

  she plotted, slaughtered her own lawful husband

  (10:484ff, Fagles)

  And it is impossible to avoid the emotional impact of the cosmic she-evil of Scylla, the six-headed man-eating monster in the narrow strait across from a giant whirlpool, Charybdis, also gendered female. When facing such powerful female malevolence, Circe says—run for your life:

  That nightmare [Scylla] cannot die, being eternal

  evil itself—horror, and pain, and chaos;

  there is no fighting her, no power can fight her,

  all that avails is flight.

  (12:139f, Fitzgerald)

  Our encounter here with Circe merely opens a theme we shall meet again and again in the chapters that follow.

  9 Among the Dead: Memory and Guilt

  Veterans carry the weight of friends’ deaths in war and after war, and the weight of all those irretrievable losses among the living that, like the dead, can never be brought back. When Circe tells Odysseus that their homeward route takes them through Hades, the House of Death, Odysseus says, “So she … crushed the heart inside me” (10:546, Fagles). Who has ever heard of anyone coming back alive from Death? It is his longest single “adventure.”1

  THE DEAD (TRY TO) REPROACH THE LIVING

  Homer enlarges our understanding of what is conventionally called “survivor guilt “2—the lesson being in the contrast—Odysseus’ almost complete absence of moral pain, guilt, self-reproach, and self-criticism.

  His encounter in the Underworld with the great Ajax is particularly revealing. In courage, self-sacrifice, combat leadership, fighting skill, and fortitude, Ajax was second only to Achilles in the entire Greek army His strength and giant stature were legendary, as was his unadorned, simple, and almost tongue-tied manner of speech. By contrast, Odysseus is glib and tricky-tongued. Ajax was a man of deeds, not words. When Achilles was killed, his corpse and armor were saved from the enemy. The armor was awarded during a grand assembly as a prize of honor to—honey-tongued Odysseus! Afterward, in humiliation and rejection, Ajax suffers a psychotic break in which a corral full of consecrated animals becomes—in his delusion—the hated top leadership, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and their henchmen. He kills them all. When he snaps out of his delusion surrounded by the slaughtered sacred animals, he is doubly humiliated, religiously defiled, and kills himself by falling on his sword.3

  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

  This is how Odysseus tells his encounter with Ajax, the suicide, in the underworld:

  Only the ghost of Great Ajax …

  kept his distance, blazing with anger at me still

  for the victory I had won … that time


  I pressed my claim for the arms of Prince Achilles.

  …

  (11:620-43, Fagles)

  Would to god I’d never won such trophies!

  All for them the earth closed over Ajax,

  that proud hero Ajax …

  greatest in build, greatest in works of war….

  I cried out to him now, I tried to win him over.

  ‘Ajax … still determined,

  even in death, not once to forget that rage

  you train on me for those accursed arms?

  The Gods set up that prize to plague the [Greeks]—

  so great a tower of strength we lost when you went down!

  …

  Zeus sealed your doom.

  Come closer, king, and listen to my story.

  Conquer your rage, your blazing, headstrong pride!’

  So I cried out but Ajax answered not a word.

  In the value system of warrior heroism constructed by the Iliad— which Achilles and Ajax embodied—there was only one choice for who should receive the arms of the dead Achilles as the army’s prize of honor, and that was Ajax. Exactly how Odysseus weaseled it for himself doesn’t matter. He never should have competed for them, and never should have used his mētis to win them.4 I hear his apparently large-spirited attempt to make peace with the shade of Ajax—he cannot bring him back to life!—as posturing for the Phaeacian audience to show his superiority to Ajax. In the honor code of the Iliad, Odysseus’ generosity to his defeated rival is actually a kind of further put-down.

  The lyric poet Pindar, who is closely associated with the pan-Hellenic athletic “tour,” of which the Olympic Games are the best known today, composed the following bitter lines about Odysseus’ “sophistry” in cheating Ajax out of his arms: