Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  The 101st Airborne reconnaissance sergeant with four combat tours in Vietnam, whose voice and narrative figured prominently in Achilles in Vietnam, developed his own personal aversion to sleep. He became suicidal and panicky when the medication I prescribed caused him to sleep soundly. Toward the end of his first combat tour in Vietnam as the sergeant in charge of a five-man reconnaissance team, he had contracted pneumonia and been hospitalized. While he was in the hospital, his team was sent out under another leader, and his closest friend on the team, the Patroclus to his Achilles, had been killed. He felt that he was to blame for his friend’s death because he allowed himself to relax in the hospital—and to get one good night’s sleep for the first and only time in Vietnam. He carries in his soul the guilty belief that had he not been sick, had he not slept, his friend would still be alive. He now cannot sleep. Whatever his reason may say, his heart tells him: “You let down, you go to sleep—people die.”

  Within sight of home, Odysseus’ squadron is blown all the way back to Aeolia. Depressed, Odysseus drags himself from the beach to the palace and sits down on the threshold. Aeolus, the powerful patron, spots him and shouts,

  ‘Back again, Odysseus—why? …

  Surely we launched you well….’

  (10:70ff, Fagles)

  I replied in deep despair,

  ‘A mutinous crew undid me—that and a cruel sleep.

  Set it to rights, my friends. You have the power!’

  Back again? Give me another chance. Back again? Give me another chance. How many times this has replayed itself in the lives of the veterans I work with. They have screwed up the golden opportunity that their war service has earned them and they go back, humble supplicants, to the big man.

  Aeolus gives him only one bite at the apple, and harshly turns Odysseus away with words that ring like a curse:

  Away from my island—fast—most cursed man alive!

  It’s a curse to … [help] a man …

  when the blessed deathless gods despise him so.

  (10:79ff, Fagles)

  Crawling back like this—

  It proves the immortals hate you! Out—get out!

  Hated by God—this is how many veterans feel.

  Homer identifies some characteristic ways in which combat veterans blight valuable chances offered by influential benefactors:

  • He turns it into a “combat mission,” such as working the job for days and nights without sleeping.

  • He doesn’t trust anyone else to “do it right.”

  • He doesn’t trust anyone with the facts they need to know to help him do the job.

  Many a veteran has felt his “real homecoming” just within his grasp and then lost it, leading to despair, demoralization, and thoughts or attempts of suicide, whether before or after going back to the benefactor to beg for a second chance. The drama of homecoming is in part a drama of rejection or acceptance. Many a veteran has had the experience that people who formerly helped them “turn cold and still,” and greet him with the question, “What, again?” They have been left feeling humiliated by their own pleading for another chance. They have been driven out of factory offices, union halls, government offices and felt “cursed by heaven.”

  In American culture, one’s claim to automatic esteem, respect, and recognition is determined by having a “good” job. The generation of young men who grew up in households of World War II veterans believed that simply serving one’s country, especially in war, established a claim to automatic esteem, respect, recognition, and employment. That was what they expected to come home to. To repeatedly lose jobs became a bitter way to lose their homecoming.

  The experience of returning from war to civilian society is universal, something that’s been with us as long as war has been a human practice. In the Homeric world, what a powerful man could do for a veteran was to offer material help of some sort, such as food, shelter, transportation on the way home, as King Aeolus does. Homer shows us several examples of exiles settling as dependent retainers in the household of the powerful man.3 “Employment” as we know it hardly existed, although the bards appearing in the Odyssey and the heralds of the Iliad seem to be in some sense “employees” of the princes they are attached to. So could any of the singers known to tradition as Homer have “intended” this metaphor that I find in the story of Aeolus, King of the Winds—of ruining an opportunity from a powerful patron? Maybe not. But mistrusting others so much as not to let them help, or not to tell them what you know, and thus causing a disaster—these were not invented in the twentieth century.

  A Vietnam veteran, who has never sought a VA disability pension or psychological treatment from the VA, contacted me by e-mail after reading Achilles in Vietnam, and we met when he moved to the Boston area for his wife’s graduate studies. We talked about the King of the Winds chapter, and I sent him my first draft—resulting in e-mail with these reflections on his own work life:

  I’ve never screwed up a job because of sleep deprivation. I have however, screwed up my relationships on the job by making that job a mission. More to the point, my life is a mission. I don’t know how not to be on a “mission.” Intellectually, it’s not a problem. Emotionally, it is.

  Insofar as employment, I’ve never been fired. Instead, I have pissed people off by making them look bad. I do this by working harder than anyone else, and I never stop. In more than one case, I’ve quit because none of my co-workers could stand to be around me, and I would end up hating all of them, fantasizing about killing them, etc., until I couldn’t stand the idea of going there anymore. My wife calls it my obsessive mode. On the job, I don’t know how to stop, and I’m nearly always on the job….

  Someday I’d like very much to rest, and feel rested. I think that that’s got something to do with not having any real friends. I can’t relax, and no one else seems to when they’re around me. My wife’s the exception, but even that’s only sometimes. You know, those times when I’m absolutely clear that she needs me to be there for her, then I’m okay.

  Nobody else has had the guts to be that way with me for twenty-five years. I respect her for that.

  Dedication, sometimes going over the line into fanaticism, is normal for combat veterans in the workplace. It accounts for the success in the world that many do achieve. They typically work much more than forty hours a week. The truism “Money isn’t everything” has an unusual application here. I have never known a group of people so little interested in money as the combat veterans I have worked with. If they have worked like madmen, like they are on a “mission,” it is not for the money, but for the sake of having a mission that shuts everything else from their minds.

  One veteran formerly in our treatment program—a giant of a man who left school in grade school—worked so much overtime as a stevedore on the docks that he was able to purchase a large house in an upscale suburb of Boston for his wife (now ex-wife) and children. They never saw him.

  When I write these words, I have been working with Vietnam combat veterans for fourteen years. The veterans are now more than a decade older than when I started. While I have not attempted to go back to clinic records and do a count, my impression is that the typical civilian employment history of the veterans newly coming into the program a decade ago was fifty or more jobs since Vietnam, none longer than a year. Now the typical Vietnam veteran newly admitted to the program worked the same job for ten to thirty years making good money, and then “broke down,” incapacitated by combat-related symptoms and emotions. The life courses of the veterans with fifty-plus jobs in twenty years and those who held a single job in that time are very different, with very different consequences for the veteran, his family, and society. But what impresses me most, having gotten to know veterans in both groups quite well, is not how different they are, but how similar.

  The event triggering a “breakdown” from a long successful job history has usually been some external event that prevented the veteran from keeping the workaholic schedule he had followed. One
veteran currently in the program worked his way to top site supervisor in a nationally prominent demolition firm. Arrest and incarceration for assault—probably facilitated by the amphetamines that he used to support his workaholism—led to his collapse. Another “broke down” when cardiac bypass surgery interrupted his fourteen-hour-a-day work habits.

  Farmer (pseudonym), a Navy veteran of the vicious “brown water” war in the canals of the Mekong Delta, had worked well and happily (and for killingly long hours) for ten years in a high-tech company producing equipment for the pharmaceutical industry. His perfectionism was a highly valued trait in the custom manufacture of this equipment for ultra-pure chemical processes. He felt respected and valued, and the interpersonal conflicts in the workplace so prominent in the “Vietnam Vet Stereotype” were blessedly absent. Then the parent company, a huge international pharmaceutical firm, sold the business to its main competitor “for market share,” and all ninety employees, including the president, lost their jobs. Destruction of his livelihood and work community by distant powers acting on highly abstract and—to him—unreal motives set off numerous traumatic triggers for this Navy veteran. But most of all, he lost the setting in which he could perform his “mission.” He became depressed, suicidal, and flooded with intrusive symptoms related to the ambush of his assault support patrol boat in the Mekong Delta the night before Thanksgiving 1968.

  Every one of the workaholic veterans with a “stable work history” would have responded with an abrasive comment like, “I’m all right. What the fuck’s your problem?” if someone asked if there was any way his pattern of constant overtime or multiple jobs was related to his war experience. Their pattern of arriving at work earlier than anyone else is often in the service of avoiding contact: two veterans in our program have worked for different public utilities as solo service men or installers, and arrived earlier than anyone else so as to be in the truck and gone from the yard before others arrived. Both considered themselves very good at what they did and were openly contemptuous of the attitude, dedication, and competence of their fellow employees. The families of such veterans have often done quite well—financially—but frequently will tell you that the veterans never brought themselves home with their paychecks. They were absent, emotionally aloof, irritable, and perfectionistic as parents and husbands, with the marriages often ending in divorce.

  After World War I and again after World War II, the German government’s approach to post-combat readjustment to civilian life was work, work, and more work. There was little in the way of disability pensions, nothing in the way of treatment for combat trauma, but a great deal in the way of vocational training, job placement, and veterans’ preferences. Even the most grievously wounded were trained to do something and put to work. From the point of view of economic reconstruction, this was a “success”—I find myself wondering how much of the German post-World War II “economic miracle” was the product of the convergence of government policy and the workaholic strategy to keep a lid on the memories and emotions of war. When it was published in the United States, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character was just one of a full shelf of books on combat trauma. When it was translated into German4 it was greeted with astonishment as something previously unheard of, a startling new perspective. Germans are just now beginning to wrap their minds around the idea of combat trauma, having suffered—as well as caused—so much of it in the first half of the twentieth century.

  Workaholism is a very successful strategy for keeping a lid on things, for those whose luck and makeup permits it to function reliably. While the numbers for the economy may look good, the families and the veterans themselves bear hidden costs that economists measure very badly.5

  I do not feel comfortable recommending efforts aimed at preventing workaholism, in the same way that I’d endorse any reasonable strategies to prevent alcoholism and drug abuse among returning war veterans. But to sanctify workaholism as an unmixed blessing, something to be encouraged or even somewhat coerced, as in the German rehabilitation practices, seems profoundly wrongheaded to me. My goal is a flourishing, good human life for veterans, their families, and their communities.

  Odysseus has served us as a metaphor of the veteran—in this instance in the workplace, where by not trusting anyone, by trying to do it all himself, by making a mission out of it, he fails and loses the job. However, he also stands very well for exactly what he his, the commodore of a flotilla, who does not trust anyone beneath him to do anything right, and thus micromanages and fails to take care of himself. When this leader breaks, people often die. In the episode with the King of the Winds miraculously no ships are lost in the hurricane, but they easily could have been.

  7 A Peaceful Harbor: No Safe Place

  Six men on each ship in Odysseus’ flotilla have died in the pirate raid on Ismarus; the Cyclops ate six more from Odysseus’ own vessel. Visits to the lands of the Lotus Eaters and the King of the Winds at least have cost no more lives. But now the twelve ships of despondent men pull their oars, clueless and chartless, away from the island of the wind king. They row for days and nights with no idea where they are. On the seventh day they find a steep-walled fjord with a narrow mouth that keeps out the ocean waves, wind, and currents. The tired sailors pull into the glassy-calm harbor and moor close together.

  Only Odysseus ties up outside, on the seaward side of the headlands. Did he have another premonition, like the one that led him to take strong wine to the Cyclops’ cave? He sends a small scouting party overland. Survivors rush back to warn that scouts have discovered and been eaten by the giant, cannibal Laestrygonians. The Laestrygonians swarm from their town to the top of the cliffs that hem the fjord and rain down boulders, smashing the fragile wooden hulls lashed below.

  They speared the crews like fish

  and whisked them away home to make their grisly meal.

  But while they killed them off …

  I pulled the sword from beside my hip and hacked away

  at the ropes that moored my blue-prowed ship …

  and shouted …

  ‘Put your backs in the oars—now row or die!’

  In terror of death they ripped the swells …

  Phaeacian Court

  Raid on lsmarus

  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

  clear of those beetling cliffs … my ship alone.

  But the rest went down en masse. Our squadron sank.

  … we sailed on, glad to escape our death

  yet sick at heart for the dear companions we had lost.

  (10:135ff, Fagles)

  Eleven of twelve ships and crews are now lost.

  We now look at Odysseus as a military leader. What can we say now about this hero, Odysseus, their commander? What are we to believe about the narrator in the first lines of the poem (1:5ff, Fagles), who, announcing Odysseus as its subject, blames the men for their own deaths? He says they ate the sun god’s cattle. The men in these eleven ships who drowned beneath the rocks rained down on them or were butchered for the Laestrygonian meal had never even reached the island where the sun god kept his cattle. Is Homer just careless, or is he saying that troops—as a category, not individually—are always the cause of their own deaths, never the commander?1

  So far the portrait of Odysseus is complex and many-sided. We have learned from the Iliad and the song of Demodocus about the Trojan Horse that he is a brilliant planner and strategist—that counts for a lot—and he’s brave and effective in a fight. That counts for a lot, too. But we also know that as an independent troop commander, he doesn’t keep control of his men (allowing them to get drunk and ignore his withdrawal order from Ismarus), shows impulsiveness and poor judgment (
entering and then remaining in the Cyclops’ cave, and perhaps attacking Ismarus to begin with), unable to delegate authority (sole helmsman for the nine-day sail home from Aeolia), and lacks consistent leadership backbone. While he did not indulge his troops in the free and abundant narcotics in Lotus Land, he lacked the leader’s will to deny his men the comforts of the Laestrygonian fjord, even though he apparently suspected it was a death trap and moored his own ship outside. Odysseus and the rest of his own crew might well have felt claustrophobic in the fjord, for what is a fjord if not like a roofless marine cave. Now more than nine-tenths of his men, the flower of the Ithacan region’s youth that sailed with him ten years earlier, are at the bottom of the fjord—or worse, at the bottom of a cannibal stew pot. If I am unforgiving about Odysseus’ failures as a leader that caused the deaths of his men, I am mirroring not only the angry criticism of enlisted soldiers who pay the butcher’s bill, but also the demanding standards of the current American officer corps. They make no allowances at all for fellow officers who lose lives in their command out of self-serving or self-protective motives. Some officers go beyond this to the extreme of strict liability—any operational failure is culpable in their eyes, even if no misconduct or negligence was involved.