Indeed, Odysseus has acquired his thirst for “all kinds of dolos [cunning]” directly from his divine ancestors. He is descended from Hermes, the god of thieves, being born the grandson of Autolykos, the one who surpassed all men in the art of thievery (Od. 19.394-397). In fact it would not be too difficult to see Odysseus as many of the lēistores, “pirates, robbers” we find in Homer. Telemachos tells us that Odysseus procured his entire estate by “raiding” (lēissato Od. 1.397-398). In the male heroic society of Homeric poetry, it is expected and accepted to obtain anything, including women, by raiding.32
Scholar Erwin Cook ties it all together by pointing out that the darkly ambiguous “man of pain” designation for a hero crystallizes in the scarname Oulixes. He is named and defined by this scar. Cook proposes that we hear the name Ulysses as “He who was permanently scarred in youth.”33
The story of the scar may finally provide the answer to the much vexed question of Odysseus’ cruelty to his father, Laertes, which seems completely unmotivated to many scholars and readers. A surprising, but extremely common, phenomenon arising from childhood trauma is the misdirection—or so it seems to most outside observers—of the most intense anger at the ineffectual bystander, rather than at the perpetrator of the trauma. Thus a woman who as a child was the target of incest by her father may hate her mother who failed to protect her with more vitriol than the father who raped her. Some Vietnam veterans, who volunteered to return to Vietnam after their first, not-voluntary combat tour, have told me that they hated American civilians after their initial return far more fiercely than they hated the Vietnamese enemy in the war zone. The scar on Odysseus’ thigh by which he identifies himself to his father explains his cruelty to his father. The scar is the lifelong and to him still valid token of his rage that his father failed to protect him from his villainous maternal grandfather.
The impact of these childhood experiences, and of the family system that produced them, was evident even before Odysseus left for Troy. There are dark shadows even then in his character. The opening scene of the Odyssey has the goddess Athena visit Telemachus disguised as Mentes, the lord of a nearby island. Mentes offers the boy advice and cheerful reminiscences of his father, including this one of Mentes’ first meeting with Odysseus more than twenty years before:
[Odysseus had] just come in from … visiting Ilus …
hunting deadly poison to smear on his arrows’ bronze heads.
(1:302ff, Fagles; emphasis added)
Ilus refused—he feared the wrath of the everlasting gods—
but [Mentes’ own] father … gave him all he wanted.
This passage is loaded with puzzles and ironies. The goddess, who has a special soft spot for Odysseus, tells this story about Odysseus doing something that is anathema to the gods, poisoning his arrows. What’s more the story is told to Telemachus his son as an example of how praiseworthy his father is.
In this book and in Achilles in Vietnam, I have been far more interested in the effect of trauma on character and on the capacity for social trust than in lists of symptoms. The American Psychiatric Association has held out against the idea that horrible experience, especially caused by other people’s betrayal, coercion, cruelty, or injustice, can wreck good character or produce bad character. If the expectation that other people plan only harm, exploitation, and humiliation produces a cynical “strike first” attitude, trauma can produce an active, self-starting predator. Odysseus’ scar alerts us to the interconnection of childhood trauma, combat trauma, and a veteran’s adult character.
HE LEAVES—AGAIN!
The poem as we have it ends in Book 24 with the face-off between the posse of townsmen looking to carve up Odysseus for the two generations of youth he has killed off or let die. They are roused by Eupithes, the father of the most vicious suitor, Antinous. His appeal to the townsmen is this:
My friends, what a mortal blow this man has dealt
to all our island people! Those fighters, many and brave,
he led away to his curved ships—he lost the ships
and he lost the men and back he comes again
to kill the best of our princes.
(24:471ff, Fagles)
Quick, after him! …
Up, attack! Or we’ll hang our heads forever,
all disgraced, even by generations down the years,
if we don’t punish the murderers of our brothers and sons!
He speaks the simple truth about the facts, and his appeal is to tisis, blood vengeance.34
On Mount Olympus, Zeus tells Athena, enough is enough, wipe everyone’s memory and “Let them be friends…. Let peace and wealth come cresting through the land” (24:536ff, Fagles).
Against the posse three generations—Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus—stand shoulder to shoulder, with a few loyal retainers to back them up. Athena, of course, is on the scene in the guise of Mentor, but Odysseus recognizes her immediately. Despite Zeus’ orders to her to force the two sides to make peace and an amnesty (amnesty literally means “forgetting”), Athena pumps up old Laertes to get off one shot that takes down Eupithes—“brandish your long spear and wing it fast” (24:572, Fagles). Odysseus and Telemachus charge, but now Athena uses her 250-decibel voice to stop everyone cold. The posse turns tail and runs. When Odysseus charges after them Zeus lands a lightning bolt and he stops. The last few lines tell us that peace reigns for years to come.
But the attentive listener/reader still remembers that in the Underworld, Teiresias had told Odysseus that he must leave again once he gets home, to tramp inland till he finds a place where the sea is unknown to perform sacrifices to his god-enemy, the sea god Poseidon. Odysseus has somberly repeated this to Penelope the previous night—their first and only night together in the whole epic. What a heartbreaking insight! After so much struggle, suffering, and loss to get home, he cannot be home.
The prophet Teiresias has promised that the final trial done, he will enjoy a “ripe old age, with all your people there in blessed peace around you” (11:155f, Fagles). Some of the men I work with, astonished to be alive now in their early to mid-fifties seem on the verge of finding this ability to be at home, here, now, with their partners, their grown children, and especially grandchildren.
PART II RESTORATION
16 Introduction1
Odysseus has shown us how not to return home from war. It’s been a grim picture with all the worst elements of the prejudiced Vietnam veteran stereotype. In this part of the book I will introduce two pictures of how those veterans who have been psychologically injured in combat can recover from those injuries.
The symptoms caused by psychological injury that the American Psychiatric Association calls PTSD2 in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) can be understood in one clear and simple concept: persistence of valid adaptations to danger into a time of safety afterward Reexperiencing symptoms of PTSD are varied outcomes of the capacity to learn about danger, so as to be able to anticipate it, to prepare for it, or to avoid it. The mobilization of the mind and body to meet danger, and the shutting down of mental and bodily functions not required to survive in mortal danger, become harmful and dysfunctional if they persist long after danger has passed. I invite the reader to look up this list of symptoms in the light of the simple concept I offer here, to see for themselves that these represent the persistence of no longer needed adaptations. Almost all of them fit this simple concept.
Despite our proud boast to be at the top of the animal kingdom, we are not the only species that has ever responded to great danger and then failed to unlearn those responses after the danger has passed. Our vulnerability to being injured in this way goes very far back into evolutionary history. What the APA calls PTSD (and I shall call “simple PTSD”) is probably rooted in an array of changes in the physiology and anatomy of the central nervous system3—and may be irreversible. An injury, not a disorder! As with any injury, the symptoms can range from mild to devastating, depending on the severity of the
wound, the robustness of health at the time of the injury, and the conditions—especially nutrition—under which recovery occurred. In the case of a physical wound what counts is physical nutrition; in the case of a psychological injury what counts is social nutrition.
Like physical injuries, simple PTSD can lead to specific disabilities. For example, an infantryman may learn from horrible experience that any bunching up or dense gathering of soldiers, particularly in the open, offers a too tempting target to enemy mortarmen and snipers. Later, in peacetime, this same infantryman may have an unshakable and non-negotiable fear of crowds and open spaces. In civilian life this is a disability. It interferes with various social, economic, and political functions that the veteran may want to take part in. The collision between the old combat adaptation, such as fear of crowds, and the requirements of a current civilian activity, may cause him to engage in further adaptations to his disability that allow him to salvage something. For example, in order to avoid crowds, but still be able cast his vote in elections, this infantry vet may show up at the polls before they open in the morning, may urgently insist on being the first one in the door, and be almost frenzied, possibly rude in his haste to be out again. His family and the poll workers probably view his behavior as annoying or even deranged. However, the resiliency, energy, and will he puts into such adaptations are of the same species as the amputee puts into playing ice hockey.
We all know or know of people with physical injuries who nonetheless have been able to make a flourishing human life, despite their specific disabilities. There are many famous heroic examples of this, such as Helen Keller. I have the privilege of knowing United States Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, an Army veteran who lost two legs and one arm from a Vietnam War grenade explosion. My impression is that, despite his specific disabilities, he has a flourishing life. We can only guess at and admire the personal strength, resiliency, and struggle that enabled him to achieve this, and do not fault others with similarly terrible injuries who have been laid low by them. Not everyone is a Helen Keller or Max Cleland, nor should we require them to be.
Depending on their severity and the resources and resiliency of the survivor, simple PTSD injuries can be disabling in the same sense that physical injuries are. But they do not necessarily blight the whole life of the person that bears them. Some combat veterans shrug off their nightmares, startle reactions, avoidances, and so forth as things to adapt to and live with, again akin to physical injuries. Their life is changed, to be sure, and often limited in specific ways, but the possibility of it being a good human life is not destroyed.
However, when the injury invades character, and the capacity for social trust is destroyed, all possibility of a flourishing human life is lost. I (and many others) call this “complex PTSD.”4 Social trust is the expectation that power will be used in accordance with “what’s right.” When social trust is destroyed, it is not replaced by a vacuum, but rather by a perpetual mobilization to fend off attack, humiliation, or exploitation, and to figure out other people’s trickery. Veterans with complex PTSD see the civilian world in the same two dimensions as Homer’s warriors saw warfare, biē, violent force, and mētis, cunning. Civil society, the world of the civilian at peace, is founded in a third dimension of trust that power will be used in accordance with “what’s right.” In actuality, both biē and mētis play significant roles in the modern state. However, no legitimate government anywhere in the world or in any historical era has ruled purely by armed might and deceit alone. Trust that power will be used in accordance with “what’s right,” however locally understood, is a key component of state legitimacy. This third dimension is invisible to veterans with complex PTSD, or they deny its existence. Claims of trustworthiness by any institutions of power—whether governments, employers, economic or educational institutions—seem to these veterans to be a deceptive veneer hiding a violent and exploitive reality.
Complex PTSD veterans usually suffer this along with their adaptations to war, so complex PTSD usually includes simple PTSD. At least this is true of the veterans we see in the VA clinic. Possibly a veteran like Odysseus with no simple PTSD, only injuries to good character, would never come to the VA. In Achilles in Vietnam, I observed that the World Health Organization (ICD-9/10) diagnosis “Enduring Personality Change After Catastrophic Experience” yields complex PTSD when added to the DSM diagnosis of (simple) PTSD. However, I was baffled by the WHO assertion that “Enduring Personality Change After Catastrophic Experience” excludes PTSD. This diagnosis fits Homer’s Odysseus quite well, but in our clinical experience, symptoms of simple PTSD are present even in the most Odyssean veterans we work with.
Lying and deceit are valuable military skills, for which Odysseus boasted, “Men hold me formidable for guile.”5 In war, “they”—the enemy—really are out to kill you. The modern soldiers own military organization propels the soldier into the presence of that enemy and holds him captive in the war zone. This happens in all modern wars. Added to that in the Vietnam era were multiple violations of good military practice and betrayals of “what’s right.” After such experience, any friendliness and cooperation may only look like manipulations to trick innocents into a position where they can be exploited or hurt. One often hears veterans describe themselves as “paranoid” when speaking of their vigilance against harm, humiliation, or exploitation. Mental health professionals frequently agree with this label, although I believe that nothing is added to our knowledge about the veteran by using this psychiatric jargon, and much is lost in prejudicial stigmatization. It suffices to say that a given veteran does not trust anyone.
AVERSION TO RETURNING VETERANS IS AN OLD STORY
Acts of war generate a profound gulf between the combatant and the community he left behind. The veteran carries the taint of a killer, of blood pollution (perhaps what Dennis Spector described above as a need for rebirth) that many cultures respond to with purification rituals. Our culture today denies the need for purification and provides none, even though in the past it has done so. Both the veteran and his community may question the wisdom of return. The community worries about the veteran’s self-control. The veteran, knowing what he is capable of, may also fear losing control. He may fear that if people knew what he has done, they would reject him or lock him up in a prison or mental hospital. Both the veteran and the community collude in the belief that he is “no longer one of us.” Many Vietnam combat veterans with complex PTSD express the feeling that they died in Vietnam and should not have returned.
The anguish of guilt drives some away from life with others, but some, like former Senator Bob Kerrey, seem motivated by it to devote their lives to the service of others. The next chapter presents a good deal about what might be called medical-psychological therapies. They often help manage guilt, but they are not, and should not be, the only therapies available for moral pain. Religious and cultural therapies are not only possible, but may well be superior to what mental health professionals conventionally offer.
In the medieval Christian church, everyone who shed blood in war had to do penance. If you committed atrocities, you had to do more penance, but even if you wore a white hat and were a perfect model of proper conduct, you had to do penance. Most warrior societies, as well as many not dominated by warfare, have historically had communal rites of purification of the returning fighter after battle—the purifications in Numbers 31:19ff, for example, in the Hebrew Bible.6
The performances of the Athenian tragic theater—which was a theater of combat veterans, by combat veterans, and for combat veterans—offered cultural therapy, including purification. Aristotle famously said that tragedy provides “katharsis.” Scholars tell us that three meanings of katharsis circulated in Aristotle’s time and were used by him at various places in his work: (1) religious purification of a ritual taint and expiation of a religious sin; (2) medicinal purgation of something unhealthy, poisonous, or impure; (3) mental clarification, removing obstacles to understanding, the psychological equivalent
of producing clear water from muddy.7 The ancient Athenians had a distinctive therapy of purification, healing, and reintegration of returning soldiers that was undertaken as a whole political community. Sacred theater was one of its primary means of reintegrating the returning veteran into the social sphere as “citizen.”
The early Romans had a ceremony of purification for returning armies, the details of which we know little. It apparently involved passing under a beam erected across a street, with head covered, as well as other ceremonies, purifications, and sacrifices. The French scholar Georges Dumézil writes,
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