Sophistry [lit., “persuasion with hostile intent”] was rank then too,
Mongering fictions, two-hearted, cultivating its vile sleights.
It desolates all splendor, then for obscurity
Raises some hollow monument.5
(Nemean 8, lines 32-34, Mullen, trans.)
The Olympics were contested with Achilles, so to speak, as their tutelary spirit. Professor Gregory Nagy writes,
We know from ancient sources that the traditional ceremony inaugurating … [the Olympic Games] centers on Akhilleus: on the day before the Games are to begin, the local women of Elis, the place where the Olympics were held, fix their gaze on the sun as it sets into the Western horizon—and begin ceremonially to weep for the hero.6
Pindar glorifies Achilles and treats us to visions of Achilles running down deer and lions at age six, and enumerates his combat kills to glorify him.7 Straightforward Achilles survived as the culture hero, not tricky-tongued Odysseus.
Sophocles, and the other Athenian tragic poets, detested Odysseus as a sleazy ass-kisser to the powerful Agamemnon and Menelaus, according to Homer scholar W. B. Stanford.8 In the Athenian poets’ eyes he is “quibbling, unscrupulous, corrupt, ambitious, self-serving, sophistic, rejoicing to make the worse argument appear the better.”9 Stanford’s chapter title on how the Athenian tragic poets presented Odysseus says it all: “Stage Villain.” Their hostility has been attributed variously to the politics of the day, pandering to popular prejudice, and dramatic utility. Euripides’ portrait of Odysseus is “without a redeeming feature.”10 However, I believe much of this attitude is explained by the simple fact that all the practitioners of Athenian tragedy—as indeed was everyone in the audience—were themselves combat veterans. Aeschylus fought at Marathon (his brother was killed there), Plataea, and Salamis; Sophocles was elected general at least twice—and this was no mere popularity contest, slanted by his successful theater pieces. The voters’ lives depended on his skill and leadership during the revolt of Samos in 441.11
Having rejected Odysseus’ remorse over Ajax’s suicide as insincere, I cannot use his visit to the Underworld as a metaphor for survivor guilt—except by way of contrast Typically, survivors of horrible trauma consider their own pain unworthy compared to that of others who “had it worse.” According to Army veteran Mary Garvey, women who served in the Vietnam era, but who were never in country, include women who—
are very very affected … and not just the women who were there … who are of course very very very affected … but women who weren’t … and feel that therefore their feelings, in fact their PTSD, are not legitimate….” I only was a nurse in a burn unit in Japan.” I only was a nurse in a psychiatric ward in the States. I only met the coffins at the Air Force base. I only worked with the medical films taken of the wounded. I only was a stewardess and delivered them there. I only typed up the lists of the dead. Or from yours truly, I only sent them off to die.12
Placing one’s self in a “hierarchy of suffering” to ones own disadvantage is widespread among trauma survivors. I have written about this phenomenon among Vietnam combat veterans in Achilles in Vietnam.13
“I WON’T FORGET A THING”—KEEPING FAITH
Elpenor, the most recently dead among Odysseus’ crew, greets him in the Underworld. He has died unheroically the morning of Odysseus’ departure from Circe’s palace, snapping his neck in an accidental fall from the flat roof where he had been sleeping. Either Odysseus was unaware of his death, or after lingering a year at Circe’s table and in her bed was suddenly in too much of a hurry to give him a proper cremation and burial.14 The ghost of Elpenor begs Odysseus to give him these rites, which will allow him to rest in death, rather than wander painfully through all eternity:
You and your ship will put ashore again
… [at Circe’s island] … then and there,
my lord, remember me, I beg you! Don’t sail off
and desert me, left behind unwept, unburied, don’t….
No, burn me in full armor, all my harness,
heap my mound by the churning gray surf—
a man whose luck ran out—
so even men to come will learn my story.
Perform my rites, and plant on my tomb that oar
I swung with mates when I rowed among the living.
(11:77ff, Fagles; emphasis added)
Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, no matter how humble and undistinguished, abhor being forgotten. Elpenor wrests a promise from Odysseus to cremate and bury him with full military honors. Odysseus can’t brush this aside, coming from a ghost:15
‘All this, my unlucky friend,’ I assured him, ‘I will do for you. I won’t forget a thing.’
(11:87f, Fagles; emphasis added)
The families of combat veterans, and sometimes even their therapists, demand in frustration, “Why can’t you put it behind you? Why can’t you just forget it?” Odysseus’ vow, “I won’t forget a thing,” is the vow of a combat soldier to his dead comrades to keep faith with them, to keep their memory alive. Bewildered families, hurt and feeling cheated by the amount of energy their veterans pour into dead comrades, apparently do not realize that to forget the dead dishonors the living veteran. In asking the veteran to forget, the family asks him to dishonor himself. For anyone, civilian or veteran, to be told to do something dishonorable usually evokes anger. Imagine, for example, that your mother has died within the last year or so, and your spouse or your employer says to you, “Just forget about her.”
The resuscitative function of memory—bringing the dead back to life—takes many, often unrecognized forms. Intractable guilt, rage, or grief, sometimes serves this honorable purpose of keeping faith with the dead. Many a well-meaning therapist has stumbled onto an exploding land mine of rage from a veteran by making the well-intended, supportive remark, “You don’t have to feel guilty about that.”
One of the founders of the modern trauma field, Yael Danieli, who has worked mainly with Holocaust survivors and their children and grandchildren, observed the four “existential functions of guilt”: to deny helplessness; to keep the dead alive by making them ever present in thought; to sustain loyalty to the dead; and to affirm that the world is still a just place where someone (even if only the guilt-ridden survivor alone) feels guilt at what was done.16 Danieli’s observations on guilt can equally be extended to grief and to rage. Grief rejects helpless acquiescence to the rupture of attachment and affirms that someone is still attached to the dead and still cares that they ever lived. Rage affirms that someone will still avenge the dead or at least never forgive those responsible. The other three functions are the same as for guilt.
Odysseus’ encounter with dead comrades in Hades can be seen as a metaphor for the pervasive presence of the dead in the inner worlds of some combat veterans. They are truly “haunted.” I have thought long and hard about how such haunting can be prevented, and now believe that the answer lies in changing the modern American military culture on grief. After battle, once it is safe enough for everyone to sleep, it’s safe enough to grieve; and the unit should do this together, with the unit’s direct leaders setting an example with their own tears.17
What follows is my own narrative of a recent encounter with a veteran I have known for all fourteen years I have been with the VA.
Timmy
The thirty-five-year-old flashbulb snap has a slightly greenish hue that makes the five young men look a bit sickly. In black-and-white photocopies that I make from it with the veteran’s permission, the youth and health of these men is easier to see. They are unmarked, unscarred. It was taken five or so days before Christmas 1967 and a small plastic Christmas tree is just visible at the bottom of the photo like the trunk of a tree—the five young men arranged in a triangle above it are the tree’s crown. The tropics—two of the five are not wearing; shirts. The flash picture, indoors, washes out the youngster closest to the lens, so I have to make the photocopies darker to see the trooper in front and lighter to see
the one in back.
“That’s Timmy, two days before he died.”
He points to another young man in the picture and tells me he went to Saigon shortly after the picture was taken. They never saw him again, never knew what happened to him.
I know how much Timmy meant to my patient. The picture was sent to him Christmas 2001 by Timmy’s mother, who had received it thirty-five years ago from the young man closest to the lens in the lower right.
Until about five years ago my patient had—inexplicably to his family—refused to answer the telephone or to collect mail from the mailbox. He was terrified that the person calling or writing would be Timmy’s mother, asking him how Timmy died. He was the only witness and had made the affidavit that allowed Timmy to be classified as KIA, rather than MIA.
A soldier not in the picture—these were members of my patient’s tank platoon—tracked my patient down a few years ago to tell him that he had met Timmy’s mother with another member of the platoon, and that she was the nicest person. Wouldn’t he like to contact her? She remembered my patient very well and that Timmy and he had been closest friends on the tank together. Another member of the platoon had visited Timmy’s mother in her small farming community in Ohio, and the whole town turned out to welcome him and to honor Timmy—thirty years after his death.
In Achilles in Vietnam, this veteran remembered his friend:
He wasn’t a harmful person. He wasn’t a dirty person. He had this head that was wide up at the top, and his chin come down to a point. He had this hair he used to comb to his right side and he always had this big cowlick in back. Big old cowlick. And when he smiled—you ever hear “ear to ear”?—it was almost a gooney-looking smile. You know, it was just WA-a-ay—it was huge. He just had this big, huge smile. He never said nothing bad about nobody. He was just … he was a caring person.
And when you’re on a tank, it’s like a closeness you never had before. It’s closer than your mother and father, closer than your brother or your sister, or whoever you’re closest with in your family…. Because you get three guys that are on that tank, and you’re just stuck together. You’re there.
It should’ve been me.
I jumped first. It didn’t blow me up. Sa-a-ame spot. Same spot. Same exact spot.18
I sit across from the veteran in my tiny VA office with this old photo in my hand and begin to weep. I have known him for fourteen years. I have known the story of Timmy’s death in an antitank mine explosion and of its lifelong effects on my patient. These smooth, healthy, athletic young men in the long-ago picture remind me of my own son, who is now their age, and my teariness turns to uncontrollable sobbing. I think of the “grief fixed upon … [the] heart” of any parent who loses a child in war, and upon the hearts of their closest comrades.
After years of therapy, this veteran has worked through his fear that his story and his life will injure his therapists, and he waits tranquilly for my tears to stop. “It’s okay, Doc,” he says quietly. His native kindness and decency and sweetness—which war ripped out of him for a long time—are all in his voice.
He did visit Timmy’s mother, and they now are in regular phone contact.
ANYONE CLOSE WILL BE HARMED
The death of close comrades received a great deal of attention in the Iliad as the source of unbearable grief, guilt, and a trigger for the berserk state. The Odyssey shows in metaphor that veterans carry guilt for deaths and losses that happened after the war’s end. Odysseus’ mother, Anticleia, is the next specter who comes to him out of the darkness. Odysseus has no idea until this moment that she has died! He must, following Circe’s instructions, hold all the shades off until he has heard from the ghost of Teiresias, the great seer and prophet. But when that is done, his mother is the first ghost he reanimates with sacrificial blood, following Circe’s magic ritual instructions.
She died, she says, because, “yearning for you … robbed me of my soul” (11:202-3, orig., Ahl and Roisman, trans.).19 The word Homer uses for “yearning” is the same as Achilles used to describe his yearning for his dead comrade, Patroclus (pothos/pothē, Iliad 19:321, orig.). Because of this yearning Achilles can take neither food nor drink. Thus the text hints that Anticleia starved herself to death in a melancholic depression. In effect, she says to her son, “You killed me, that’s why I’m here in Hades.” When you add it up, nearly everyone who has anything to do with Odysseus gets hurt.20 He lives up to his odious name, “he who sows trouble for others.” If this is Odysseus’ perspective on himself, the Odyssey certainly adopts his perspective.
The point of this for veterans is not that they “spoil everything they touch,” but rather that many of the men I have worked with believe this about themselves. They see themselves as toxic because they expect to harm others with their knowledge of the hideousness of war—“if you knew what I know, it would fuck you up.” Some feel this way because of the actual cruelty, violence, and coercion they have committed after returning from Vietnam. These veterans shun closeness with others, because they are certain that others will be harmed by the contact.
But while Odysseus’ conscience was quite lethargic, but I can testify that some of the men I work with are profoundly troubled in their conscience by the harm they have done to others since returning to civilian life.21 Many of my patients experience shame and remorse for how the lives of their wives, parents, and children have been deformed by the impact of their own psychological and moral injuries. This phenomenon of “secondary traumatization” in close relationships has been extensively studied and documented22—and the veterans themselves are vividly aware of it.
The Odyssey’s particularly poignant example that Odysseus can never hold his mother in his arms again, or be held by her, can stand as an emblem for a large, varied category of losses.
How I longed to embrace my mother’s spirit, dead as she was!
Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her,
three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away
like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time
the grief cut to the heart, sharper, yes, and I,
I cried out to her….
‘Mother—why not wait for me? How I long to hold you!—’
(11:233ff, Fagles)
The poignancy and anguish of this scene is true to the experience of real combat veterans with PTSD. Both the original traumas of war and the wreckage caused by their psychological injuries have caused irretrievable losses of this magnitude.
IRRETRIEVABLE LOSSES
When one’s closest comrade dies in combat, his death is permanent and irreversible. This painful truth needs no explanation. Indeed it rivets our attention to such a degree that many combat veterans and those who want to understand them often overlook the many losses that occur after the war has ended. These irretrievable losses take many forms.
Men that I work with have children they have not seen in twenty years, parents who died while they were estranged, or who have been estranged for all but the last few years since Vietnam. Many have shared the same domicile with their wives and children but have been utterly detached from them, living on a separate floor. The overwhelming sense of futility and waste: “For fifteen years I was completely insane, drinking and drugging and fucking people up, what do I got to show for it?” Our culture values occupational achievements almost to the exclusion of anything else, so it is not surprising that many of our patients have felt humiliated by their inability to be “successful” and prosperous. Others feel like the veteran whose words are an epigraph to the Introduction—“My regret is wasting the whole of my productive adult life as a lone wolf.” He feels he has missed the sense of belonging, recognition, and mutual appreciation that his talents and hard work should have earned him. He has been reasonably successful in his profession, but he believes he is not nearly as successful as he would have been if he could trust other people enough to collaborate with them—instead of always being a “lone wolf.” A lone wolf feels
at home nowhere.
Odysseus’ mother’s death while he was absent is but one way to lose a mother. Others are no less painful: One of my patients, a marine veteran whose dignity and “command presence” are an important contribution to the veteran community—I tease him about being the colonel of the Southie [South Boston] Marine Regiment—returned home after his service in Vietnam in a state of boiling anger, overwhelmed by suffocating grief at so many killed and the sense that all ideas of “what’s right” had been utterly discredited. He drank heavily and fell in with—or sought out—“bad company” He says he was in his room in the family home and overheard his mother say, “That’s not my [his name].” He says, “I was so mad, I just walked out of the house and didn’t come back for ten years.” During those ten years he did a lot of harm to himself and to others. And those ten years are irretrievable.
Lawrence Tritle, a Vietnam veteran and professor of history at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, recounts the following story, which links the haunting presence of the dead and the loss of a mother:
This grip of the dead on the living was related to me … by Emma, the mother of a Vietnam combat veteran. She told me of talking with her son soon after his return from Vietnam, where he had once been the sole survivor of his ambushed platoon. As he recounted one horrific incident after another, sometimes confessing his own brutalities, Emma thought to herself, “This isn’t my son.” As he continued his confessions, she began to look for birthmarks and childhood scars, to prove to herself that the man sitting before her was an imposter. Quickly her son sensed what she was doing and, like many another veteran, “went off” as he realized that his own mother did not believe or trust him.23
Odysseus was absent from home for twenty years. Ten of those were the Trojan War itself. The remaining ten years were … what? The only account we have of them is Odysseus’ fabulous tales told to the Phaeacian courtiers in Books 9-12. Might they have been ten years at home, but not home? Ten years of wildness, drinking, drugging, living on the edge, violence, sex addiction, not-so-petty crime, and of “bunkering in,” becoming unapproachable and withdrawn? If so, would not Odysseus have been just as “absent” a son to Anticleia, just as “absent” a husband to Penelope, and “absent” a father to Telemachus as if he still had been overseas? Could not these ten years have been told in metaphor as the very same story told in the Odyssey?
Odysseus in America Page 11
