Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  The Tet Offensive started in Hue City on January 31, 1968, with heavy rocket and mortar barrages followed by ground assaults on their compound within the city. At first light the American soldiers in the compound could see numerous Viet Cong and NVA (North Vietnamese Army) flags surrounding it. The next six days, surrounded and cut off, they went utterly without sleep under constant rocket and mortar bombardment and repeated ground assault. The incoming rounds formed the content of Doc’s hallucinatory reliving experiences (“flashbacks”), triggered by firecrackers or other sharp loud noises. Three of the five U.S. medics in the compound were killed, two of them close friends. Doc recalled feeling overwhelmed by the number of casualties, and his inability to evacuate them. In particular, he was torn up by the number who died under his care, who would have lived had it been possible to evacuate them.

  During the six days of encirclement, before the Americans in the compound were relieved by the marines, an episode happened that formed the basis of the veteran’s most frequent repetitive traumatic dream: He was standing next to the captain, when within a second both he and the captain were hit by snipers’ bullets. Both went down together. The side of the captain’s neck was ripped open and the blood spurted in Doc’s face and drenched his shirt. Though wounded himself (he received the Purple Heart for this occasion), Doc carried on his duties as a medic. When the marines broke through, he refused to be evacuated and accompanied a Marine unit whose medic had been killed. This led to twelve days of house-to-house combat as the marines retook the city. There were heavy marine casualties, to whom Doc ministered under fire. He was present at the discovery of mass graves of those executed by the VC and NVA. These masses of dead and mutilated bodies also figure in his repetitive nightmares.

  Doc was honored with two Bronze Stars, with the Vietnamese Cross for Gallantry, and the Army Commendation Medal for Valor, in addition to receiving a Purple Heart and the Combat Medic Badge.

  Prior to Vietnam, Doc didn’t drink and had never experimented with drugs, but after Tet, while still in the service, he became a heavy drinker and a steady user of marijuana and heroin to shut out grief and suppress flashbacks and nightmares. When he was honorably discharged from the Army in June 1969, he was heavily addicted to alcohol and heroin.

  After discharge, Doc drifted from one menial job to another, holding and losing over fifty in twenty years. He married three times, each marriage ending because of PTSD and substance abuse. His self-medication of PTSD with alcohol, heroin, and then IV cocaine was partially successful, especially in controlling nightmares and flashbacks. Starting in 1975, he repeatedly sought treatment, with numerous hospitalizations and detox. On every occasion, withdrawal from alcohol and drugs was followed by a resurgence of PTSD symptoms. After completion of the most recent hospital drug abuse treatment, starting in May of 1988, he was transferred to a psychiatry unit, because of reemergence of PTSD symptoms. Previously he had been discharged with no PTSD treatment, only further drug abuse treatment. He was discharged from the psychiatry ward to a halfway house and referred to our specialized outpatient combat PTSD program. Following this final hospital admission Doc remained sober and “clean” for the next three years, until a single, fatal heroin overdose, shortly after his claim for a disability pension for combat PTSD was rejected.

  The coroner signed off the overdose death as accidental, but I believe Doc was too sophisticated, both as a heroin addict and as a paramedic, not to know that he had lost his drug tolerance during the long period of abstinence. His “normal” dose as a hard-core, daily IV heroin addict was a lethal dose to the recovered addict without a tolerance. I believe he intentionally killed himself in despair, anger, and humiliation after the value of his service was—in his eyes—“officially” rejected by the VA.

  The masters of truth in the government bureaucracy followed “objective” procedures and observed “objective” criteria that led them to conclude that he had been disabled by his own “willful misconduct” in drug and alcohol abuse, not by psychological injury in the line of duty in service to his country and fellow soldiers. Whereas Linc died figuratively for a few years in quest of the absolute truth, Doc literally died by his own hand in response to what he apparently experienced as others’ possession of the absolute truth—that his war service had not injured him, only his own misbehavior. He was humiliated and dishonored by the official action. The “masters of truth” had found him unworthy.

  German veterans after defeat in World War I, who inhabited the absolute truth of the “Dolchstoss von hinten”— the “stab in the back” by traitors inside the government and the army—were willing to kill someone who said that Germany had been beaten fair and square by the British, French, and their late-coming allies, the Americans. They felt personally attacked and dishonored by the suggestion that they had been bested, rather than betrayed.15

  Dishonor arouses the; desire to kill—self or others, sometimes both. Honor and dishonor are social processes, which declares “the truth” of a person’s or group’s worth. What kind of truth is it that induces an addicts craving for it when absent, as if for cocaine, and produces an arrogant, violent, paranoid state when possessed? I wish I could answer this question. It goes to the heart of extremist religious and political movements. We can recognize this lethal intoxication with absolute truth in Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and Jewish law student Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Veterans’ tragic experiences render their own reckonings of ultimate truth and worth so very hard for them and so explosive. People will kill for it, and will die for it, as the metaphor of the bodies moldering in the Sirens’ meadow shows.

  11 Scylla and Charybdis: Dangers Up, Down, and Sideways

  Recall that Odysseus vowed to return to Circe’s island to give Elpenor a proper burial. Circe wines and dines the crew and pulls Odysseus aside to give him more sailing instructions. She tells him about the Sirens’ trap, and how to waltz past it using wax earplugs. Then she warns him of the narrow strait beyond: on the left are breakers, hull-tearing rocks, and a fearsome whirlpool called Charybdis; on the right is a sheer cliff, home to the cave-dwelling six-headed monster Scylla. The two deadly hazards are “side-by-side, an arrow-shot apart”1 across the strait. She advises him to make a dash for it under Scylla’s lair, instead of losing the whole ship in the whirlpool. If he makes it through the strait, the next landfall is the sun god’s cattle ranch on the island of Thrinacia. She repeats the warning Teiresias had given Odysseus in the Underworld not to touch the god’s fat beef cattle.

  Americans in Vietnam fought against the “finest light infantry in the world.”2 A part of what made them the finest was their mastery—even within their limited technologies and resources—of what is known as “combined arms.” This is the military competence and mental discipline to create a Scylla and Charybdis for the enemy, and doing it so fast or so unpredictably that the enemy loses his grip on the situation and freezes or panics and the attacked unit comes apart. It’s no exaggeration to say that persistent, skillful use of combined arms drives the enemy insane. An American column of half-tracks on a road encounters mines—slow down and sweep the mines!—and at the same time a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades—speed through the killing zone as fast as you can! These two tactical responses, slowing down and speeding up, are incompatible, and both bad, Scylla and Charybdis. American infantry patrols encountered ambush sites where the vegetation on either side of the trail was prepared with punji stakes—concealed needle-sharp bamboo or metal stakes set in the ground or wooden planks pointing up—for the soldiers or marines to impale themselves on when they dove for cover to avoid rifle fire from their front Scylla and Charybdis.

  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 C
attle

  Whirlpool

  Calypso

  At Home, Ithaca

  Some veterans I work with never allow themselves a moment of satisfied relaxation after successfully meeting any challenge, such as making the car payments, or fixing a burst washing machine hose, because, they say, there is always something more they have to prepare themselves to meet. Here again is the persistence into civilian life of adaptations that allowed the veteran to survive in battle.

  As usual, Homer’s gold is to be mined from details of the text. Circe counsels Odysseus—

  Hug Scylla’s crag—sail on past her—top speed! Better by far to lose six men and keep your ship Than lose your entire crew.

  (12:118ff, Fagles)

  Odysseus bridles at this coward’s dash and asks her if he can’t just steer away from the whirlpool and fight off the monster. To this she replies—

  Must you have battle in your heart forever?

  The bloody toil of combat? Old Contender,

  will you not yield to the immortal gods?

  That nightmare cannot die, being eternal

  Evil itself—horror, and pain, and chaos;

  there is no fighting her …

  all that avails is flight.

  Lose headway there

  … while you break out arms,

  and she’ll swoop over you …

  taking one man for every gullet.

  (12:136-45, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

  Circe tells Odysseus that apart from headlong flight, there is no chance of surviving an encounter with “eternal Evil itself.” She asks him if he must have battle in his heart forever, responding to every danger that the world presents with resort to heroic feats of arms. Even though Odysseus responds to her advice—remember, she is a minor goddess and knows what she’s talking about—with a salute and a “Yes, Ma’am,” when he actually reaches the spot, he ignores her advice. His answer to her question whether he’ll have battle in his heart forever is—yes. This quotation, along with Circe’s perceptive picture of the veteran’s “haggard spirit,” brings together so many elements of combat PTSD—battle forever, nightmare, eternal evil, the sense of helplessness—that I am tempted to smirk like the cat that swallowed the canary. After this, how can anyone not see the connection with combat veterans?

  But like Odysseus, I go forward … Odysseus reaches the narrows,

  But now I cleared my mind of Circe’s orders—

  Cramping my style, urging me not to arm at all

  I donned my heroic armor.

  …

  (12:245ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

  Now wailing in fear, we rowed up these straits,

  Scylla to starboard, dreaded Charybdis off to port….

  When she3 swallowed the sea surge down her gaping maw

  the whole abyss lay bare and the rocks around her roared …

  bedrock showed down deep, boiling

  black with sand—

  and ashen terror gripped the men.

  But now, fearing death, all eyes fixed on Charybdis—

  now Scylla snatched six men from our hollow ship.

  Odysseus is the only one who knows the danger of Scylla, having decided not to mention her to his men. This means that he alone can be on the lookout against her sudden appearance. But along with everyone else on board he becomes riveted by the sucking vortex below and to the left and misses Scylla’s first attack. Odysseus only turns in time to see six of his crewmen drawn upward, writhing like hooked fish at the ends of the monster’s six long necks.

  The poet throws dangers at this terrified crew from left and right, above and below. Veterans have described their own need to “wail in fear” when ambushed in a particularly skillful way, using combined arms: mortars and grenades from above, mines and punji stakes below, and automatic fire from the side and front. I’ve already commented above in Chapter 7 on some veterans’ expectancy of attack from any direction, or as with Odysseus’ ship, all directions.

  As a metaphor for some combat veterans’ response to the civilian world, this episode has a number of unfortunate echoes. Various powers in the civilian world—the police, the IRS, an employer’s personnel department, the Department of Social Services, the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration, the gas company, the electric company, the telephone company, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the criminal courts, the divorce courts, the bank that financed the pickup, the company that insured it, the agency that financed the college loan, the collection agency, the ex-wife’s lawyer—these all seem to have the capacity to swoop out of the sky and snatch the veteran, writhing, and carry him to some dark place to devour him. In such a state of vulnerability, they often want to do what Odysseus did, to arm themselves and fight the foe the only way they know how. Direct, courageous, armed action that we associate with military heroism is wildly out of place. There is literally no place for it.4

  Scholars have debated whether six more of his men die horrible deaths because Odysseus cannot take Circe’s instruction, or whether the first six were unavoidable. Her advice runs counter to his way of doing things.5 Does he risk his life for them when he dons his armor, or risk their lives? Possibly he will lose six no matter what he does (12:109f, orig.). Scholar Alfred Heubeck clucks his tongue at Odysseus as if to say, “heroes will be heroes”—

  His heroic stature is no more diminished by his ignoring of a warning … than by his clever tactics towards his own men [i.e., keeping them in the dark]. Ignoring all that he knows of [Scylla], Odysseus attempts the impossible and foolish because it is also the heroic. He must be true to his own nature, and, faced with a hopeless situation, nevertheless risks his own life for the sake of his men.

  The heroic gesture of arming against an [unpreventable disaster] in a world where there is no place for the heroic, is here almost grotesque, but it also vividly illustrates the tragedy of the hero with his limited outlook.6

  12 The Sun God’s Beef: The Blame Game

  Six shipmates lost at Ismarus, six more to the Cyclops, then eleven entire ships and crews destroyed in the fjord, now six more shipmates snatched by Scylla. More than 550 deaths have occurred before the remaining ship reaches the island where the sun god keeps his cattle. Recall that the narrator has blamed Odysseus’ men—all of them—for their own destruction, because they had transgressed by eating the god’s sacred beef:

  But [Odysseus] could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove—

  the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,

  the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun

  and the Sun god blotted out the day of their return.

  (1:7-10, Fagles)

  Odysseus has been warned authoritatively, warned twice (by both Teiresias and Circe) not to molest the herds belonging to the sun god on the island of Thrinacia, which now heaves into sight after the horrors of the strait. True to form, Odysseus has not shared this knowledge with his crew and only tells them in general terms—forcefully to be sure—“the worst disaster awaits us.”1 He orders them to just row right on by.

  He says nothing about the sun god’s cattle, even though the sailors can hear them mooing across the water. The men are exhausted, strung out from their latest near-death experience, and they see nothing wrong with camping for the night on this green shore. They have food, but these men love beef.2 Even though he knows how his men are drooling at the thought of spitted roast, Odysseus doesn’t tell his men not to touch the cattle or the reason why—don’t mess with a god! His kinsman Eurylochus3 complains about their fatigue and the risks of sailing at night in stormy unknown waters:

  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

  A
t Home, Ithaca

  Night falling fast, you’d have us desert

  this haven and blunder off into the mist-bound seas?

  Out of the night come winds that shatter vessels.

  (12:308ff, Fagles)

  Now Odysseus finally mentions the cattle—he makes his men take an oath not to kill them—but without explaining the prophecy from Teiresias and Circe that the sun god will slaughter all the men if they take any of his cattle. Why does he not tell them the most important, life-or-death facts? The text gives no explanation. It appears to be part of Odysseus’ leadership philosophy to be an information miser, disclosing to his subordinates only what he absolutely must, and sometimes not even that.

  Odysseus relents, and they land on Thrinacia, but he has set up Eurylochus to take the blame from his audience and from “history.” He has warned the men not to land there, “But Eurylochus waded in at once—with mutiny on his mind” (12:301, Fagles). What Eurylochus said was hardly mutinous, it’s simply stating the facts: the crew is half dead with fatigue and sleep deprivation, night is falling, and storms can wreck ships in the dark (12:305ff, Fagles). It is typical Homeric irony that we have been led to see Eurylochus as a whiner who just wants to bed down, but we learn a few lines later that during the night, just as Eurylochus had warned, “Zeus … loosed a ripping wind, a howling demonic gale”4 (12:138f, Fagles).

  Previously, in Book 10 (line 437, orig.), Homer again put the truth in the mouth of the same low-prestige player, when the not-very-heroic Eurylochus blurted out that Odysseus’ calling his crew to feast in Circe’s palace was leading them into another death trap like the Cyclops’ cave. He explicitly blames the deaths in the cave on Odysseus’ atasthaliai— wanton recklessness. This is more vintage Homeric irony, because this same word, atasthaliai, is used in the prologue to explain that the death of Odysseus’ men was their own fault, thereby acquitting him of any blame. We shall see below that Homer has a discredited voice speak the truth again near the end of the epic when he has the father of Antinous, the most despicable suitor, say that Odysseus has killed two generations of the town’s youth.5 He has!