Odysseus in America

by Jonathan Shay

  Odysseus, who is telling his own story at this point, neither explains why he alone moored outside the fjord nor expresses any remorse at having allowed the rest of his squadron to tie up inside. He dismisses the deaths of about 550 men, all but a twelfth of his command, with the words

  So we fared onward and death fell behind, and we took breath to grieve for our companions.

  (10:147f, Fitzgerald)

  Not all translators are as terse as Fitzgerald is here, but the frigidity with which this holocaust is narrated gives us cause to wonder.2 Some scholars have attributed this to the story line that Homer inherited. Homer was obliged, they say, to start with the twelve ships Odysseus had in the Iliad, weave them together with traditional sailor tales that are clearly about one ship and its crew, and finish up with no ship, with Odysseus arriving alone to face the suitors … mmm … How to get rid of all those ships?3

  Yet we should not let either Odysseus or Homer get away with such frigidity without remarking upon it. Twelve boatloads of tired, scared, homesick war veterans trying to get home to their families die horribly in this fiction because of their leader’s failings.

  But it is fiction, after all. It’s entertainment. So does it matter?

  Yes. The heartlessness with which the poet treats the loss of these “non-heroic” lives is the first example in the Western narrative tradition treating the doings of the “great” as all that matters. Ever since, the lives of all those “little people” have been treated as just so many stage props, sometimes necessary, and sometimes clutter to be rid of because they’re in the way of the Story.4 We could easily charge this to an aristocratic bias, if it were not for the contrast offered by the Iliad, where there is a greater inclination to treat each and every death as significant, and not as a mere plot device.

  What can we learn from this shocking episode as metaphor for the soldier’s homecoming? The veterans I serve in the VA clinic are all former enlisted men, not the generals, cabinet secretaries, or presidents. Their sense of being playthings of distant, capricious gods was explored in Achilles in Vietnam. Instead, I want to focus on the poet’s picture of the peaceful fjord as a death trap. Many times in the clinic, veterans have said that as much as they long for calm, peace, and safety, these conditions arouse a feeling of unbearable threat, a remnant of warfare in the Vietnamese countryside.

  One veteran arrived for a weekly therapy group very agitated, trying to calm down after an encounter outside the commuter rail terminal with a panhandler. The beggar, evidently drunk and sitting propped up next to the exit, had growled,

  “Gimme a buck, there.”

  “No!”

  “Gimme a buck, shithead!”

  The beggar was still sitting on the ground.

  The veteran became panicked that he was not carrying a weapon, having spent the train ride in rare pleasure at the sunny day, enjoying the sense of peace in the almost empty railroad car, not preparing himself for danger. He somewhat regained his composure when he found a stick pen in his pocket and clutched it in his hand, intending to stab the beggar in the neck with it, if attacked.

  “No, you’re a shithead!” he shouted and walked quickly away, the drunk still on the sidewalk.

  During the therapy group, he spoke about this incident as something that he “deserved” because he had gotten “too comfortable on the train.” It was “too peaceful.” To find safety in any place not specifically prepared for defense, especially an uncontrolled public space, is in this veteran’s view “stupid.” Veterans I have worked with scan the rooftops of the low-rise buildings near the clinic for snipers and look in the spaces between parked automobiles for people crouching for attack.

  This is the combat veterans’ metaphor I hear in the Odyssey episode of the Laestrygonians: there is no safe place. The more serene, the more peaceful the place, the surer they are that it’s a death trap.

  Where does this expectancy of attack come from? At the simplest level, it is the persistence into civilian life of valid adaptations to the lethal situation of battle. In Vietnam, patrols were put out around both fixed installations and temporary night defensive positions, because, factually, “the enemy is all around you.” But in the apparent safety of civilian life, a person who believes he is surrounded by enemies is considered paranoid—mentally ill.

  One veteran, who has never been my patient and asked not to be identified, wrote the following to me by e-mail:

  i live in scrub wood, in the florida panhandle. i cant stand crowds in—[a small city in northwest Florida], it aint no cicago. but even out her[e] it’s never rite. at nite i hav to check every sound i cant figgure out. when its quite [quiet] its worst. in the central hilands was always sounds from lizerds and I dont no what in the dark. when it got quiet you [k]new them nva [North Vietnamese Army] fuckers was on toppa you.

  Another veteran described how he had spoiled a very pleasant outing in the early autumn woods with his wife. When they stopped to picnic, she wanted to sit in a sunny meadow so as not to get chilled. He insisted on picnicking in deep shade “in the tree line,” because the meadow was too exposed. Exposed to what? To sniper and mortar rounds. In their argument over where to picnic, he agreed that it was chilly, but could not explain to his wife the nonnegotiable fear he experienced in open places. It’s not that the fear was “unconscious.” He knew he was afraid of snipers and mortars but was embarrassed to admit that he was afraid of these things in the pleasant woods of north coastal Massachusetts. This veteran and his wife had a nasty fight. In the heat of anger she said to him, “Why do you always spoil anything good? We were having such a nice day,” which made him feel ashamed and then angry. Embarrassed by its “irrationality,” he had never explained his reaction to open spaces to his wife. The near instantaneous replacement of the emotions of fear or embarrassment or shame with the emotion of anger does untold harm to veterans’ lives in their families, jobs, and communities.

  Continuous mental and physiological mobilization for attack is the result of having learned too well how to survive in combat. When left unexplained, it becomes a burdensome and debilitating disability in life with others, but does not inevitably wreck that life. The problem of recovery from simple PTSD afterward in civilian life becomes a problem of unlearning combat adaptations and particularly of educating those the veteran lives with. Just as with physical injuries such as the loss of a limb, many veterans adapt to symptoms of simple PTSD, e.g., this veteran’s fear of open fields, without loss of the ability to have a good human quality of life. But with unhealed complex PTSD, all chance of a flourishing life is lost. We shall look at this more closely in Part Two.

  At the Laestrygonian fjord, this “great man,” Odysseus, does not trust his subordinates with the insight he has into the dangers of the place. His betrayal of responsibility could have caused lifelong mistrust in any sailors who escaped this and later death traps. Odysseus has surely betrayed what’s right by protecting himself and doing nothing to protect his men.5 Many World War II vets see Douglas MacArthur at Corregidor in the same light as I see Odysseus at the Laestrygonian fjord.

  “I don’t trust nobody,” is the voice of complex PTSD.

  8 Witches, Goddesses, Queens, Wives—Dangerous Women

  One of the ugliest characteristics of some psychologically injured Vietnam combat veterans we work with is their hostility and habitual disrespect toward women. They know that all members of the clinical team to which I belong, both men and women, find it hateful to hear them refer to women as “bitches,” “roadkill,” or “ho,” or obscenely as “cunts,” or condescendingly as “girls.” During a therapy group devoted to relationships, one veteran advised another, with no apparent moral or psychological distress, “Why don’t you just kill the bitch?” When called on it, he claimed to be joking. Not all these veterans are hostile to women; in fact, some of the most influential veterans in the program make their displeasure clear when there is such talk around them. Nevertheless, negative attitudes toward women are a conti
nuing obstacle to veterans feeling at home.

  Turning back to Odysseus as a veteran (rather than as a military leader), the Odyssey shows how dangerous a woman may be to returning veterans: she can trick you onto a fragile sea raft from the safety of dry land and then drown you (Calypso), she can betray you to assassins who lie in wait for you (Clytemnestra and—who knows?—maybe Penelope), she can see through and betray your disguise, getting you killed (Helen’s chance to blow Odysseus’ disguise to the Trojans), she can accidentally get you killed by seeing through your disguise (Odysseus’ old childhood nurse, Eurycleia), she can hand you over to toughs who habitually kill strangers (Nausicaa), she can turn you into a caged pig eating acorns or castrate you in her bed (Circe), she can fill you with such obsession that you forget to eat and starve to death (Sirens), she can literally eat men alive (Scylla). She may ave gotten you and your friends into the war to begin with, where most of them were killed (Helen).1

  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

  The cumulative impression of female dangerousness and untrustworthiness in the Odyssey is overwhelming.

  Just two lines of the poem carry Odysseus’ ship from the carnage in the fjord, to the island home of the witch-goddess Circe, “the nymph with lovely braids, an awesome power too … the true sister of murderous-minded Aeetes” (10:149ff, Fagles). Nymphs were minor goddesses, usually associated with wonder-arousing natural features, like caves, waters, forests.

  The one remaining ship and its crew land on a wooded island, Circe’s island, but they don’t know that yet, being utterly lost. They grieve and panic for two days on the shore. On the third day Odysseus does a reconnaissance. From a lookout he sees smoke. Returning to the shore, he divides his crew in two and puts one platoon in the charge of Eurylochus, his kinsman. Everyone is scared that this is another death trap, and they cast lots to decide which of the two platoons will go inland to see where the smoke came from. Eurylochus loses the toss and heads inland with his platoon. They get to Circe’s palace and find it surrounded by strangely tame lions and wolves. Quaking with fear, they make their way to the door, hear a woman’s enchanting song, and call out. They are immediately admitted, but Eurylochus smells a trap and doesn’t go in. The others enter and are treated to luscious mulled wine in royal style. It’s a honey trap!—the men’s wine has been drugged and she taps each with her magic wand, turning them into pigs. Eurylochus sees them being driven into sties and flung acorns by the contemptuous witch. He breaks for the ship and, speechless with terror, finally gets the story out. Odysseus puts on his armor, straps on his sword, and says, Lead me back there. Eurylochus is too scared. Odysseus shrugs and says, Never mind, I’ll find my own way.

  We already know that Odysseus has friends in high places, and one of these, the god Hermes, pops out of nowhere just short of Circe’s palace.

  Where are you going now, my unlucky friend …?

  And your men are all in there …

  cooped up like swine, hock by jowl in the sties.

  Have you come to set them free?

  Well, I warn you, you won’t get home yourself,

  you’ll stay right there, trapped with the rest.

  But wait, I can save you….

  Look, here is a potent drug. Take it to Circe’s halls …

  She’ll mix you a potion, lace the brew with drugs

  but she’ll be powerless to bewitch you, even so—

  this magic herb I give will fight her spells.

  Now here’s your plan of action …

  The moment Circe strikes with her long thin wand,

  you draw your sharp sword …

  and rush her fast as if to run her through!

  She’ll cower in fear and coax you to her bed—

  Like a good fairy tale, the magic herb will counteract the magic spell. And Hermes warns of another peril, once the first is overcome:

  But don’t refuse the goddess’ bed …

  but have her swear the binding oath of the blessed gods

  she’ll never plot … to harm you,

  once you lie there naked—

  never unman you …

  (10:310-34, Fagles)

  What do these two dangers mean?

  Circe has transformed Odysseus’ crew into pigs. Pigs were an honorable form of wealth, second only to beef cattle and horses.2 But still, calling someone a domestic pig was no flattery, in the sense that calling him a lion or wild boar might have been. Circe has destroyed the dignity of the crewmen she has transformed, made them her slaves, and caused them to eat animal fodder—utterly demeaning them. Who eats what is enormously important in the moral and social world of the Odyssey, marking the difference between animal and human, between god-fearing and sacrilegious.

  One metaphorical reading of she-turns-men-into-pigs is this: if returning veterans behave like pigs to the hometown women, it must be—according to the veterans—the women’s own doing. They turn men into mud-wallowing swine. As implausible as this may seem as an “eternal verity,” first recorded by Homer, the beliefs that some veterans have about their womenfolk support this. The prejudicial stereotype of Vietnam veterans as chronically violent domestic tyrants turns out to have another side, the veteran who allows himself to be a doormat, a domestic slave to his wife or girlfriend. These overly compliant veterans hate their domestic lives, hate themselves, and often hate the partners whom they blame for their own passive slavishness in the home.

  Wilson (pseudonym for a composite of several veterans) is a handsome, athletic man with thick black hair who was in our program at the time I joined it fourteen years ago. He had served two tours as an infantryman in Vietnam. His ex-wife (also a composite) refused while they were married ever to meet or speak with the treatment team. This is a normal part of our program, and rarely refused. She told the team members who called her that she was not going to waste her time “talking about that moron.” Yet every day she would leave him a detailed written schedule of tasks, as if he were a domestic servant, and berate him if he failed to accomplish any of them. Their only child, a daughter, whom he now hardly ever sees because of the divorce, was the apple of his eye. For many years he daily made her lunch, took her to school, and picked her up each day, in between housework, yard work, and home repair. His wife did the family shopping, because he had panic attacks in public places such as the supermarket.

  While the marriage lasted his wife treated him with open contempt in front of their daughter. His wife’s mother would join her in verbal abuse of the veteran, switching off every so often with abuse of their daughter, who they said was “just like her father.”

  He struggled constantly against violent images of how he would make his wife beg for her life as he had with suspected Viet Cong during the war. When these impulses became overwhelming, he would ask our assistance to get him admitted to the VA hospital. Once, two years before he joined our program, he had lost control and beaten his wife unconscious and the police took him screaming in Vietnamese to the VA hospital. She refused to cooperate with the police in prosecuting him. Then she repeatedly threw this incident in his face over the years that followed. She once even had him taking phone messages from a man who turned out to be both her lover and her cocaine dealer.

  For many years in the clinic he spilled torrents of what can only be called “hate speech” against women, blaming all women for his unhappy and demeaning home life. “All” women were “always” out to control, manipulate, rip off, and humiliate men. “That man-hating bitch” was his usual moniker for his wife.

  Much of the treatment with veterans like Wilson consists in strengthening two sets of seemingly opposing mental m
uscles: strengthening control over impulses to violence, while at the same time strengthening their ability to assert their own need for respectful treatment in their own homes and to assert authority over their own time, rather than allowing their wives to schedule it entirely to suit their convenience. Unfortunately, sometimes their wives find their husbands’ newly revealed personal dignity intolerable and file for divorce. In a number of cases they have successfully used police records of past violence toward them in court to paint the veterans as unfit to have visitation with their children.

  Wilson grieves over the loss of contact with his daughter and tries to take solace in the other veterans’ advice to be patient, that his daughter will return to him when she is no longer under her mother’s thumb. He now has a new girlfriend with whom he has been able to negotiate a safe and mutually respectful partnership. While he still spews hatred of his ex-wife and her mother, he no longer speaks in violent or demeaning ways about women in general. Because he now has confidence in his own self-control, he no longer needs to be a compliant puppet to protect others from his own violence. His fear of his own violence had paralyzed his capacity for even dignified and nonviolent self-assertion. If Wilson was passive and overcompliant with his ex-wife it was because he feared himself, not her.

  Homer seemed to understand men’s capacity to blame women for everything. Unfortunately, he also seems to say that this blame is entirely justified. I cannot detect a shred of doubt or irony in his picture of Circe. Recall the god Hermes’ instructions to Odysseus. If she turned into a tame sex kitten, it was only because Odysseus was ready to stab her with his sword. As a goddess, she could not be killed, but she could be temporarily hurt. Perhaps more important to her submission was Odysseus’ demand for the magic oath Hermes had instructed him to exact. Presumably this oath is unknown to ordinary mortals and tipped off Circe that Odysseus had the backing of another, stronger god.3

  The second half of Hermes’ warnings and advice to Odysseus touches on a very different source of woman hating: fear that they conceal deadly weapons in their alluring beds and sexual parts. Hermes warns him of Circe’s counterattack, once he defeats her drug and magic spell: she will lure him into her bed for sex and then cut off his sexual organs. In the world of fairy tales, we are willing to believe Hermes’ instruction that Odysseus can protect himself from this second attack by exacting a special oath from Circe not to “unman” him.