10 What Was the Sirens’ Song?: Truth As Deadly Addiction
[After discharge in 1971] I spent a great deal of time in my old stomping grounds, Oceanside, home of Camp Pendelton Marine Base…. I rarely let on that I was a vet. I learned to enjoy hearing the stories told by vets to (what they thought) was a non-vet. A whole new genre emerged….
—George “Sonny” Hoffman,1 “The War Story”
When I entered the college classrooms in 1977, I met Vvets attending school under the GI Bill. Again, I kept a low profile. I can’t believe Vvets say they couldn’t talk about the war. That’s all they talked about. It seemed that no matter what the subject being discussed, some clown in a boonie hat would throw his shit digger up in the air and somehow make a tie-in to the war. “Excuse me professor, but I was in the Nam, and I can assure you that you don’t need a microscope to see amoeba. In the Delta, two of ’em carried off my buddy.”
In the years I have been working on Odysseus in America, I have asked many people who claimed to have read and loved the Odyssey if they remembered what the Sirens were singing about. With the exception of professional classicists, I have never received a correct answer. The overwhelming majority of people incorrectly recall that their song was about sex,2 with a smaller number saying it was about what was going on at home in Ithaca. Here, in Homer’s words, is the answer:
Come this way, honored Odysseus, great glory of the [Greeks], … so that you can listen here to our singing;
for no one else has ever sailed past this place in his black ship
until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice …
for we know everything that the [Greeks] and Trojans
did and suffered in wide Troy….
Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens.
(12:184ff, orig., Pucci, trans.3; emphasis added)
The Sirens know the complete and final truth about what happened in the Trojan War! It is the complete truth that trapped Trojan War veterans on their way home like bees in syrup, and they died. Circe’s advance warning about this peril allows Odysseus to stop the ears of his crew with wax and sail safely by:
… woe to the innocent who hears that sound!
He will not see his lady nor his children
in joy, crowding about him, home from [war];
the [Sirens] will sing his mind away
on their sweet meadow lolling. There are bones
of dead men rotting in a pile beside them
and flayed skins shrivel around the spot.
(12:50ff, Fitzgerald)
In the language of metaphor, Homer shows us that returning veterans face a characteristic peril, a risk of dying from the obsession to know the complete and final truth of what they and the enemy did and suffered in their war and why. In part, this may be another expression of the visceral commandment to keep faith with the dead. Complete and final truth is an unachievable, toxic quest, which is different: from the quest to create meaning for one’s experience in a coherent narrative. Veterans can and do achieve the latter.
Linc is a marine veteran of the Vietnam War, who has large gaps in his memory of what happened to his company and what they did during the summer-fall offensive of 1969. For several years—he has come out of it now—his life was organized around trips to the Marine Corps historical archives in Washington, D.C. He photocopied every After Action Report and every entry of the Company Diary and Battalion Diary for his unit in the period in question. I can recall spans of months during which he came and went from the Clinic with a gym bag containing the photocopies, afraid to look at them, but unable to part with them even temporarily. He feared what he would find there, things that would inflame his rage, grief, or guilt to unmanageable intensity—but paradoxically, he was also terrified that he would discover that the things he did remember “for sure” were untrue. What if the marine who had died “for” him when the two had exchanged jobs at the last moment had actually died on a different day in different circumstances?
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
Linc no longer carries his gym bag of historical “truth” with him. He and his individual therapist slowly and patiently worked through its contents. It contained no disorienting surprises; he learned that he could master his emotions.
Nothing is simple, of course. Other things have contributed to his recovery. Linc’s trips to obtain Marine Corps records coincided with visits that veterans in our program made to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall. In the four years I had known him as a patient prior to this period of two or three years in which trips to the Wall and examination of records took place, he had inhabited only a very few moods or emotions. Sarcasm, cynicism, rage—these were easy and frequent when in the Clinic. Apathy, just staring into space, is how he described his mood at home. Alternations between apathy and rage were the rhythms of his life at the beginning of his participation in our program. But after a few months of contact with the other veterans, a new mood became more and more prevalent: worry about his physical health. Extensive medical workups and careful investigation of these worries failed to reassure him, and he would respond to any “How’s things?” with a repetitive droning recitation of his ailments. Some mental health professionals would deny that this was “progress,” calling it symptom substitution with hypochondria, but we defined it for ourselves and him as progress, if only because during the decades before he came to the VA, he was a severe, apparently intractable alcoholic—a dilapidated, sleeping-in-the-gutter drunk. This new preoccupation with bodily health was at least basic self-care. While never noted for his sense of humor, he was able to take some teasing about his bodily preoccupations. Even while I paid strict attention to his medical complaints, and referred him for medical evaluation to other physicians within the VA, I began to welcome his recitations of symptoms as musical performances, as “organ recitals,” and he could see the humor in my response.
I conduct a monthly wellness and preventive medicine session with the veterans in our program. They are now in their fifties, never having expected to live to twenty-five? Past thirty? Past forty? “Neva happen!” When the future isn’t real, why take care of your body? As one veteran put it, “This is the first time I have something to live for, and now—aw, shit!—I’m old and I’m gonna get sick before I can enjoy it.” Transient but intense preoccupation with illness, what seems like hypochondria, is partly the utter newness of paying attention to body sensations that previously were numbed out or stoically ignored. It is as though all of the suppressed health worries of thirty years and what came to others as a gradual awareness of the threats of aging hit them all at once. Another veteran said, “After so many years of not feeling anything, this sucks!” Another, who spent many years in abandoned drugging and drinking, now lives in terror of irreversible harm he might have done to his organs, problems that have not yet announced themselves. “When you expect to be dead by next week, you just don’t think about what you shoot in your vein or put down your throat,” said this other veteran. Linc had been a very severe alcoholic, so his constant preoccupation with the state of his bodily organs was not entirely irrational or neurotic.
Photos of Linc from his first trip to the Wall show emotions that he had never allowed. One photo shows his face as a mask of sorrow and grief—emotions he never gave voice to in the Clinic. Another shows him with a grin so big even his eyes are smiling. I had never seen this smile in the years I had worked with him, only an occasional wry, cynical, knowing, they-may-be-trying-to-fuck-me-over-but-I’m-smarter smirk. Apparently the human heart works this way: shut down the pain of grief and you lose the capacity for joy as well.
Helens “anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness,” seems quite sinister in this light.
THE LANGUAGE OF TIMES THAT MAKE A WORLD
As often with great poetry, language carries much that cannot be reduced to the factual or narrative content of the words. Because Homer sang in a special dialect of archaic Greek, we need the help of scholars to “hear” it. The language of the Sirens episode in Odysseus’ yarn does more than reinforce the content—the potentially life-sapping snare of obsession with finding the absolute, complete, and final truth—it draws our attention to one aspect of the workings of that obsession. The “voice” of the Sirens, scholars tell us, is the “voice” of the Iliad,4 the voice of a wartime past experienced as more real and meaningful than the present. One veteran speaks of his most painful war memories as “sacred stuff.”
There is also a pleasurable5 side to the use of jargon, speech rhythms, tones of voice that combat veterans take in talking to each other about their experiences. Civilian friends and family members may be by turns bewildered, amazed, bored, and then annoyed by veterans’ ability to talk with each other for hours on end about details of weapons that they used, of the contents and texture of different C rations. This is what it sounds like: You never carried a Thumper? I once used a Willy Peter round to fire up a hooch/Bull-sheeet, there wasn’t no Willy Peter6 for the Thumper, you musta put a flare into it, you fucking turkey/Ever see a belt-fed Thumper? That musta been something/Yeah, on our boats it was hand-cranked, but I heard they were putting the automatic ones on the boats, too, but I never saw one, I think they were trying to use the same kind as on the Cobras, but like I said, I never saw one … and on, and on.
The speech rhythms, the jargon, the technical minutiae are sometimes the only doorway a veteran finds into the rooms full of pain that they carry: Farmer, the veteran of the brown water Navy we met above in Chapter 6, once spoke at length in group therapy about the 20mm cannon in the turret of his boat. This powerful weapon helped Farmer and his comrades survive. The cannon had originally been designed as a World War II aircraft dogfighting and ground attack weapon, to function in the well-cooled setting of an aircraft in flight. (Years later he and I stood silently together, in the World War II museum in the Marine base at Quantico, staring at a display of this weapon and the entire aircraft in which it had been so successfully used.)
However, the riverine model could also kill or maim the sailor using it. These guns were not suited to steamy tropical rivers where they over-heated and jammed. When they jammed, they had to be cleared by hand by the gunner in the turret. The heat of the gun barrel added to the extreme environmental heat, for which the ammunition had never been designed, causing jammed rounds to “cook off,” i.e., to explode. A friend of Farmer’s named ------—, “the nicest guy in the whole division,” had requested transfer from the flamethrower on his boat to the 20mm cannon, because the flame weapon horrified him.
Farmer’s personal log notes the visit of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird around Christmas. A weapons demonstration—a show—was put on for the secretary, during which ------’s cannon jammed. He cleared the weapon, and as he held the round up to throw it out the turret hatch, it exploded, blowing all the fingers off his right hand and destroying the right side of his face and right eye. Farmer carried this needless waste in his belly like something curdled, until he was able to talk about it to his brother veterans. The language of weapons, of the military setting, was his doorway into the traumatic material of his friend’s maiming, and his sense of betrayal that it was not in battle against the enemy, but as part of a show for a dignitary.
MEMORY UNCONNECTED TO COMMUNITY
One of the good things that marine veteran Linc did for himself (with our vigorous encouragement) was to start attending ------ Marine Division Association reunions, attempting to find people from his unit. He has become progressively more engaged with the unit association. The social nourishment it gives him has eroded much of his habitual bitterness and expanded the scope of his life. The absolute truth of the Trojan War that the Sirens sang was utterly detached from any community that remembers and retells it. Instead of nourishing and sustaining, it killed—much like crack cocaine sometimes; kills—by starvation.
One source of obsessive attraction to the Sirens could be their appeal to the veteran’s vanity. Certainly, the Sirens are blowing smoke when they address Odysseus as the “great glory of the [Greeks].” At this point after the fall of Troy, and considering how and why Troy fell, Odysseus certainly deserves this greeting. But the flattery of it is what scholars Frederick Ahl and Hanna Roisman have in mind when they write that the seductive power of the Sirens’ song was “the musical reenactment of his own past, his own self, his own reflection, his own narcissism.”7 However, another scholar, Pietro Pucci, offers a different slant, which I have sometimes heard confirmed in the veterans’ words. Pucci writes: “The Siren’s invitation and promise … is ‘written’ in strictly Iliadic diction…. The paralyzing effects … [are] because their song binds its listeners obsessively to the fascination of death.”8
I have heard a marine veteran of Vietnam say, “I never expected to come home alive. We were marines. Marines die. That’s what we do. I think I failed.” What this marine veteran refers to is the sacrificial cult of the “beautiful death” that is part of the Marine Corps culture. Marines give their lives willingly, it says, so that the battle and the war can be won quickly, sparing so many more lives that would be lost in a slow slugging match of attrition. In some settings, especially in wartime, this has blurred over into a cult of death, akin to Japanese bushido. Some readers of the Iliad come away with the idea that it is the original militaristic document praising the “beautiful death” of the hero in battle and thus praising war itself, totally missing its antiwar, tragic message.9 But as a portrait of how the story of a war can “bind its [veteran] listeners obsessively to the fascination of death,” Professor Pucci’s observation is on the mark.
TOTAL CERTAINTY IS JUST AS DAMAGING
Linc’s obsession was to find the absolute, complete, and final truth. He did not find it. But he now has his own narrative, his own understanding of what he was part of. He is intensely interested when he meets someone from his company who remembers something he has forgotten or never knew or even contradicts some aspect of his own narrative. His life-sapping obsession to fill a void of forgotten experience with absolute truth has moderated to a life-sustaining sense of belonging to a community with a meaningful history, his friends in the ------ Marine Division Association. Human memory is physical in the brain, psychological, social, and cultural—it is all of these things at every moment.
The Greek word for truth, alēthea, means literally that which is unforgotten (a— not + lēthe— forgetting). Homer’s near contemporary Hesiod represents Lēthe as a divine personification of forgetfulness. The word lēthe appears at Iliad 2:33 meaning forgetfulness, but never appears as a goddess or a river. Remembering that Odysseus has just come from Hades when he encounters the Sirens, we can see an intriguing interpretation—he just escaped the land of Death and its river Lēthe and the very next mortal danger he faces is alēthea so seductive he risks death hearing it. First he escapes forgetfulness and then he escapes its opposite, absolute truth. We do not know if Homer believed Lēthe was around Hades, as is familiar to us from Plato’s Republic,10 hundreds of years after Homer, and from Milton’s geography of Hell in Paradise Lost: “Lēthe the River of Oblivion.”11 According to a study by the French scholar Marcel Detienne, called The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, “ALēTHEA is … structured around the major opposition between memory and oblivion.”12 Particular types of men—the seer, the bard, and the “king of justice”—were “masters of truth.” Curiously, the Sirens only “speak of ‘knowing,’” as scholar Charles Segal has observed, never “of ‘memory’ or of ‘remembering’”13
This is no small distinction, because much still hinges today upon whose understanding of the war and its consequences becomes genera
lly accepted Truth. Who are the masters of truth on the Vietnam War? This war lies in our midst like a dead elephant being torn apart by hyenas—who then fight viciously among themselves for control of the nutrient-rich carcass.
The modern world has its own masters of truth, some of them very public and visible, like judges and broadcast media commentators. Others are faceless, anonymous bureaucrats who “adjudicate”14 veterans’ disability claims.
Doc, both a conventional nickname for a medic and here a pseudonym, was one of two suicides “on my watch” during the fourteen years I have been the psychiatrist for our specialized intensive outpatient treatment program for Vietnam combat veterans with PTSD.
Doc volunteered for the U.S. Army in 1964, and trained at Fort Sam Houston as a medical corpsman. He then served in Germany and upon reenlistment in 1967 volunteered for duty in Vietnam. Doc arrived in Vietnam in June 1967, and was assigned to the Military Assistance Command as a medical adviser, based in a military compound in Hue City. The five-man advisory unit traveled with an ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) unit up and down Highway 1 as far as the DMZ in the north and Phu Loc in the south. These movements along Highway 1 invited repeated ambushes, mortar attacks, and mine explosions. The American advisory unit became extremely close-knit, because they found that in a firefight the ARVN abandoned them and that they could only rely on themselves. During one such ambush four of the five men on the team were hit, two died immediately and two survived, but Doc, the only one not hit, felt then and until he killed himself, that he should have kept his two dead buddies alive.
Odysseus in America Page 12
