The next morning, finally, Odysseus tells his men that the cattle belong to Helios, the sun god. But now begins a solid month of powerful, non-stop southwest winds that lock them against the shore. Homer’s audience would have been reminded of the horror that opened the Trojan War, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to free the wind-locked fleet at Aulis, allowing them to begin their amphibious operation against Troy.
The ship’s company begins to run out of the food that Circe had given them, and they have to hunt birds, small game, and fish for their food. Apparently they do not have enough; hunger is getting to them, but the text is a bit unclear as to whether the main problem is that their food is not to their taste, or that there is not enough of it.6 Odysseus picks this moment, when he knows full well that they are getting desperate—to take a long walk in the countryside to find a quiet place to pray! On top of that he takes a quiet nap, blaming that on the gods.7 Again scholars Ahl and Roisman are skeptical:
Under the pretext of piety, Odysseus seeks to absolve himself of responsibility for his comrades’ act…. Yet the nap he takes … lasts long enough not only for Eurylochus to make a subversive speech to the crew … to kill the cattle, but long enough to allow for the killing, flaying, roasting, and consuming.8
These scholars conclude that “the whole point of the story is that Odysseus will remain guiltless…. In the course of his self-exculpation, elements show through which cast doubt on his pose of guiltlessness.”9 The biblical book Exodus contains an intriguing parallel. While Moses is away from the people on Mount Sinai, his kinsman, Aaron, leads the people into trouble with another form of sacred beef, the Golden Calf.10 However, there is no irony in the biblical account, and no doubt that Moses’ hands are clean.
Odysseus speaks to the Phaeacian court in his own voice, saying in effect that there is no reason for them to think less of him, arriving there, his entire command lost. It was his companions’ fault, not his! But why does the narrator, the poet himself, single out felonious feasting on Sun-brand beef as the cause of six hundred deaths, when at least 550 are already dead? Why does the narrator transfer blame for the catastrophic Ithacan losses after the war was already over?
The men I work with in the VA Clinic have vast stores of bitterness over being blamed for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. They feel that those really responsible have weaseled out of taking responsibility and the blame—people such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Lyndon Johnson, and National Security Adviser/Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as well as the spineless senior military leadership.11 Veterans were confronted with intergenerational blame when World War II veterans crudely spurned them with taunts that, unlike themselves, Vietnam soldiers had lost their war. The prejudicial doped-up, violent, crazy “Vietnam Vet Stereotype” further created the idea that the men who fought in Vietnam were themselves solely responsible for how badly it turned out.
WHY ODYSSEUS’ ADVENTURES ARE AN IRONIC ALLEGORY
The tension between the life experience of Odysseus, a veteran of prolonged heavy combat, and the pampered lives of safe, complacent civilian Phaeacians gives rise to the fairy-tale atmosphere and content of Odyssey Books 9-12. I have made this case from the text alone, without reference to any speculations on the Homeric poets’ own ways of making a living and being influenced by what their customers wanted to hear.
Up to this point I have spoken of “Homer” as if there were a single person, like Shakespeare, who created these massive epics. The consensus of scholars is that the epics were originally oral narratives composed in performance by traditional bards using a store of traditional stories, stock scenes, stock lines, and groups of lines (“formulae”). While there might have been one or more Shakespeare-class towering geniuses among them, there was no single Homer, and he never wrote either the Iliad or the Odyssey. There were no audio recordings—somebody wrote them down. The written epics as we have them were the product of cultural-political editing during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E.—with bards continuing to perform them all the while. In Athens this culminated in an official text that became part of the religious life of the city. Homer’s epics were performed to crowds in the thousands during the main summer festival, the Panathenaea, by professional Homeric singers known as rhapsodes. Plato’s short dialogue Ion gives a sketch portrait of a rhapsode and a public festival performance. The epic texts we have are canonical in the same way and from the same kind of official editing as the written books of the Old Testament were edited by high-level committees over a couple hundred years. To avoid the clumsy wording “Homeric poets” in this book, I’ve referred to “Homer” as if I were speaking of a single artist. But the reader should understand this to mean the whole class of performers who gave rise to our written texts.
To return to my speculations on how the interaction between the Homeric poets and their customers shaped the two epics—even though we’re unlikely ever to have evidence to disprove or prove any of them—here is my just-so story12:
The Iliad was a masterpiece by artists who themselves personally had “been there, done that” in war and sang about it for their comrades. I believe that the first customers or audience for the Iliad were other combat veterans whose wealth and political legitimacy as leaders of an emerging polis (“city-state”) were based on their personal accomplishments in military prowess and “counsel”—i.e., good tactical and strategic advice. These leaders also had the resources to pay the bards. In this scenario, the audience for the Iliad was both the product of and advocate for meritocracy. The people in charge, those getting the most honor and most rewards, had gotten there by showing themselves to be “the best” through their own achievements.
However, an alternative system of fixed, inherited13 status hierarchy was known and available in the world of the Iliad’s performers and audiences. That’s what Agamemnon stood for and embodied as the king of Mycenae. It is reasonable to expect that they were also aware of hereditary monarchies in Egypt and Asia Minor.14 Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus were not only “old money” and “royals,” their supporters such as Odysseus also proclaimed divine sanction for their preeminence (e.g., Iliad 2:214ff and 236ff, Fagles). These two settings, polis and aristocratic court, shaped the Iliad and Odyssey respectively, according to my speculation, and both poems were performed in both settings by the same itinerant combat-veteran bards.
The Iliad painted a very unflattering portrait of Agamemnon and the fixed aristocratic hierarchy.15 I imagine the meritocrats lapping it up. Achilles, with whom the meritocrats identified, shines by comparison. In the Iliad, Odysseus is Agamemnon’s lapdog, carrying out, justifying, and when possible repairing the damage from his boss’s caprices. Neither epic shows much interest in a nonelite dēmos, the tensions being played out between two competing elites. Members of the meritocratic elite saw themselves as fundamentally one another’s equals, who struggled among themselves for timē, that is, for status or honor.16
However, from roughly 800 to 500 B.C.E., the bards who performed the Iliad had a second customer base made up of those very royals who looked so bad in the Iliad. The Odyssey’s Phaeacian court may be an idealized picture of these royals.17 Greece and the Ionian coast were a patch-work of polis and monarchy, constantly at war with each other in constantly shifting alliances, with city-states and monarchies sometimes experiencing revolutions from one form into the other.
What’s missing from the courtly picture of the make-believe Land of the Phaeacians in Odyssey 6-13 is the high-performance soldiers who in the real world would have fought its battles and kept it in power.18 These same soldiers, fifty miles away, could have been meritocratic leaders of a polis, or formerly were such, but had hired out to a king. My just-so story has the same bards circulating between both settings. The same seen-the-elephant veterans were present in both settings—as the leaders and bill payers in the polis, and as subordinate retainers to the bill-paying kings in the courts. (A veteran who has actually been in combat, not havi
ng served only in peacetime or only in the rear during war, is said to have “seen the elephant.”) The great performers played both venues.
This just-so story relates to the present allegorical reading of the Odyssey in the following way: in the kings’ courts I imagine the bards playing to two audiences—the paying audience of rich, Phaeacian-like royals and a wink-and-a-nod audience of former or current fighters in their court who have seen the elephant. I imagine a poet winking at some of the grizzled veterans in the course of a performance, much like the veteran in Sonny Hoffman’s “The War Story” (quoted above at the beginning of the Sirens chapter) might have winked at another G.I. Bill veteran in the classroom when he said that two amoebae had carried off his buddy in Vietnam. I believe the dual audience for the Odyssey gives it its distinctive character.
In the Iliad, the gods are arbitrary, heartless, capricious, and unconcerned with justice. The combat vets of the Homeric poets’ original audience had no need or desire to justify the ways of the All-Powerful, or the very powerful, to man. To them, the idea of divine justice was a joke. In my clinical practice, veterans of prolonged combat mostly found that the chaos and rolling dice of war made such an idea absurd. However, in a royal court, I speculate that the bards (like Odysseus among the Phaeacians) had to watch their step and play to the ideological self-justification of the kings and their gods. The Odyssey proclaims the justice of the gods (and by association the kings who claimed divine descent or saction), and proclaims that if anything went wrong in one of the king’s wars, the enlisted men were to blame.19
When the bards sang in court, the royals would not have noticed that the bards showed Odysseus to be at fault, as long as they loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that someone else was to blame. For this audience, Homer adopts Odysseus’ perspective, which is that of the kings. But the old veterans would have noticed and smiled their wry smiles.
If we accept this tension between the powerful paying audience of complacent hereditary kings and the wink-and-a-nod audience of old veterans listening in the shadows of the great hall, the Odyssey can be seen as an ironic allegory of exactly what it says it is, a veteran’s homecoming. It is entertainment for the royals, and communalization for the veterans.
13 Above the Whirlpool
Odysseus awakes from his pious nap with a sense of dread and hurries back to the sun god’s beach where the ship is hauled up. He can smell roasting beef even before he sights the ship. He scolds and upbraids his crew, but the damage is done. The god’s sacred cattle lie dead next to the roasting pit. The cuts of meat sizzling on the spit moo spooky reproaches at them all.
Meanwhile on Mount Olympus, the sun god rants and threatens Zeus with cosmic consequences if he doesn’t take action. A week later, Zeus quiets the winds that pin Odysseus and his crew to the shore. Like a shot, the men get the boat launched, rigged, and out to sea toward home.
Once they’re beyond sight of land, Zeus maked the good on his promise to the sun god and build a giant thunderhead above the ship. The squall hits, shredding the sail and rigging, toppling the mast, then blasting the hull with a giant thunderbolt. Everyone who is not killed outright is drowned in the waves—except for Odysseus. He improvises a life raft from the mast and keel, hanging on till the squall passes. But a powerful wind springs up blowing him back, back—to the narrows between Scylla and Charybdis! Just as the giant whirlpool seizes his raft, Odysseus grabs for the branch of an ancient fig tree overhanging the strait.
like a bat I clung … for dear life—not a chance
for a good firm foothold …
But I held on, dead set …
(12:46ff, Fagles)
There’s the image that interests me: the veteran clinging to sanity above the sucking whirlpool of rage and grief, fear, guilt, and despair—and of all the destructive ways that humans act on these vehement emotions. What’s at the bottom of that vortex? Death by suicide, death from the myriad ways that drugs and alcohol can kill, death from risks gone bad—in fights, crashes, shootouts, falls, death from neglect of self-care, death as the end of a prison life sentence. Yet most of the veterans I have worked with have hung on, or they wouldn’t be alive to be my patients thirty-plus years later. Like Odysseus, they are survivors.
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
I believe that nearly every veteran who returns to civilian life after a long time in combat has moments in which he is afraid he is losing his mind. Let me be clear: not everyone carries permanent psychological injuries from combat, but I believe that everyone who makes the transition from battle to home—especially if the transition is made quickly—fears for his sanity at some point This may only be when he awakens from a nightmare, or when he notices that he senses danger around every corner.
The World War II generation is famous for its stoical silence on post-combat thoughts and emotions, a silence that has only recently begun to thaw. There are many reasons for the World War II veterans’ spirit of stiff upper lip, or only-tell-the-funny-or-uplifting stories. That generation had spent their formative years in the Great Depression. Their generational experience taught them what Woody Guthrie gave voice in his mistrustful “Dodger Song,” which rings the changes through candidates, lawyers, preachers, farmers, and generals, calling them all dodgers.1 This bleak song not only doubts the goodwill and good intentions of society’s power holders, but with the words “and I’m a dodger, too,” acknowledges the thousand little and large betrayals of “what’s right” that poverty tortures out of the desperately poor. If Woody Guthrie reports truthfully on the Depression, the World War II generation did not go to war thinking itself all that righteous and pure, thinking that it had upheld every word of the Boy Scout Law, “Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent.” The World War II generation didn’t expect as much fairness, rationality, or honesty as their children who went to Vietnam did. It’s my impression that the films of the 1930s are full of crooked cops and corrupt public officials who mysteriously disappear from the films and television series of the 1950s that the Vietnam generation grew up watching.
The culture of the post-World War II period also conferred enormous prestige on the model of rationality recommended by the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics: any emotion weakens reason and virtue, so root out emotion from your soul. A story is told about General George C. Marshall, possibly the most admired American of his generation. It goes like this: After some big news (perhaps it was the Berlin Blockade) a reporter asked General Marshall what his feelings were, to which the general is said to have replied, “You ask me about my feelings. I can tell you that I have no feelings on this or any other matter, except for those I reserve for Mrs. Marshall, which I shall not discuss.” I have been unable to verify this possibly apocryphal story, yet I tell it because it distills the Stoic posture toward emotion that ruled the imagination of American elites of that period. Veterans of the time were much more willing to embrace the norms of the elites than their sons were upon return from Vietnam. I speculate that the reasons for this are multiple. The fathers’ generation found themselves getting richer in the 1950s than their youth had led them to expect and credited the elites for it; the sons got poorer than they expected and blamed the elites for it. The fathers feared being labeled Commies if they disagreed with the elites and self-censored; the sons had lost their fear and criticized freely.
A major unwritten chapter of the American history of World War II represents another factor silencing its veterans. I believe that the huge “neuropsychiatric” hospitals built by the Veterans Administration after that war loomed as a warning in the minds of
World War II combat veterans: “If you talk about what’s going on in your head, tell anyone the anger seething in your belly, or what’s in your dreams, they’ll put you away and you’ll never come out.” Most of the story of these multi-thousand-bed hospitals, and particularly their impact on veterans who were not hospitalized there, has never been told.
By 1970, when the bulk of Vietnam veterans had already returned from the war, the situation for them was worse than it had been for their fathers, in terms of a supportive community in which to digest their experiences, because of the intense struggle over the wisdom and legitimacy of the war itself and how it was being conducted. So most veterans had to face their nightmares, their storms of fear and rage, their visitations by the dead, their lacerating guilt, alone. Many doubted their sanity and hung solitary above the whirlpool.
GUILT AND GOOD CHARACTER2
Much of what I have reported about veterans’ guilt, both here and in Achilles in Vietnam, has pertained to veterans’ moral anguish over what they did or did not do with regard to their American comrades. Horrific things done to enemy soldiers and civilians have great power to injure the mind and spirit of those who have done them. The recent controversy concerning former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey’s Vietnam service as a Navy SEAL brings many important aspects of this into focus.
In the spring of 2001, The New York Times Magazine broke the story of the 1969 killing of at least thirteen unarmed Vietnamese women and children in Thanh Phong, in the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam.3 The article and the news coverage that followed over the next weeks and months gave Bob Kerrey’s pain-filled account, and the competing narrative by fellow squad member Gerhard Klann. Kerrey’s team was inserted near this hamlet (from just such riverboats as the veterans Wiry and Farmer served on) to kill or capture an important Viet Cong commander. Here are the two competing accounts of what happened: Kerrey says the team was fired on in the dark. He says they returned the fire, and when they came forward to look, they found numerous dead women and children. Klann says that they got into the hamlet, didn’t find their target, but did find a dozen or so women and children. Klann is quoted as saying, “Our chances would have been slim to none to get out alive”4 if they had let the villagers live to call in their own forces to kill or capture the Americans during their retreat. Kerrey tells it as a horrible accident in the dark; Klann frames it as “us-or-them,” and says that Kerrey gave the order, “them.”
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