12 Apologies to “Longinus,” the unknown, probably first-century author of On the Sublime, who first speculated that the Iliad = Homer’s young maturity and the Odyssey = Homer’s old age, based on considerations of the differing style and form of the two epics. See Howard Clarke, Homer’s Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981), p. 207. As much as I am temperamentally drawn to Longinus’ account, I don’t need to see “Homer” as one person.
13 The dichotomy between achieved and ascribed status is a staple of sociological analysis.
14 See Ian Morris, “The Strong Principle of Equality and the Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy,” in Ober and Hedrick, Dēmokratia, pp. 19-48.
15 Donna Wilson, in Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), argues persuasively that the clash between Achilles and Agamemnon in the Iliad is fundamentally the clash between the meritocratic and aristocratic bases of legitimation of power.
16 See Hans van Wees, Status Warriors (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1992), for the Iliadic context and William I. Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), for the very Iliad- like setting of saga Iceland.
17 Especially with regard to their love of luxury and creature comforts. Ibid., pp. 32-33.
18 See John F. Lazenby, “Mercenaries,” in Hornblower and Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, p. 961f. A post-Homeric example is Xenophon, who hired out to the Spartan king Agesilaus and the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger. See Jon Hesk, Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens, p. 127.
19 The tensions between the “achieved” meritocracy and “ascribed” nobility never evaporated in ancient Greece nor have they since. However, once the Homeric poems got to Athens and the balance in Athens shifted in favor of meritocracy, the stock of Achilles soared and that of Odysseus crashed. The story of how the Homeric poems took up ritual and political residence in Athens is a complex and fascinating one. See Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Cook, The Odyssey in Athens. My thanks to a half-dozen classicists for helping me think this through. I have accepted many of their criticisms, but stubbornly resisted others. Credit for any merit in this conjecture belongs to them and to the cited works. Any defects of fact or reasoning are my private property.
13. Above the Whirlpool
1 The full text of “The Dodger Song” can be found on the Web at www.geocities.com/ Nashville/3448/dodger.html.
2 Portions of this section appeared in “Guilt and Good Character,” Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (online), June 1, 2001, www.thirteen.org/religionandethics/ week440/vietnam.htm, where the full commentary can be found.
3 Gregory L. Vistica, “What Happened in Thanh Phong,” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 2001, pp. 50-57, 66-68, 133. Kerrey was awarded the Medal of Honor for an act of heroism during a later action unconnected to the mission at Thanh Phong.
4 Ibid., p. 66.
5 Thomas E. Ricks, “Kerrey Team Takes Issue with Report: 6 of 7 SEALs Meet on Vietnam Killings,” The Washington Post, April 29, 2001.
14. Calypso: Odysseus the Sexaholic
1 1. The Veteran Comes Back, p. 140.
2 1:16ff and 5:1-160, Fagles.
3 Aphrodite Matsakis, Vietnam Wives (Kensington, Md.: Woodbine House, 1988). This book is currently available from the Sidran Press in a second edition, 1996. This citation is to the first edition.
15. Odysseus at Home
1 1. I do not respond quite so positively to Odysseus’ warmth and truthfulness toward his son, because his son, Telemachus, is not in any sense a separate being from Odysseus. He literally lives or dies with Odysseus. If he errs or falls short, it is akin to Odysseus’ throwing arm missing the mark with a spear. Penelope, despite the housebound existence of the well-born Mediterranean wife, is very much her own person, not a mere product of Odysseus’ imagination and agendas.
2 Clay, The Wrath of Athena, p. 196f.
3 Donald Lateiner, Sardonic Smile: Nonverbal Behavior in Homeric Epic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 245.
4 Clay, The Wrath of Athena, explores what’s behind this abandonment.
5 Some scholars reject the notice of the suitors in the Underworld as a later insertion in the text, and claim that Odysseus hears about the suitors for the first time from Athena on the beach.
6 W. B. Stanford’s Enemies of Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 131ff, warns against “stereotype fallacies” in imagining what ancient poets could or could not do. This subject, however, is vigorously debated among scholars.
7 See Mark W. Edwards, Homer: Poet of the Iliad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). “Double motivation” and “overdetermination” are the terms critics have used. Peradotto, in Man in the Middle Voice, pp. 60-67, adds an additional dimension to the critical theme of multiple motivations. Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey, p. 217, refers to “double determination” as a “common Homeric device.”
8 See Achilles in Vietnam, pp. 32f and 82f, for more of this tank veteran’s words.
9 When Odysseus and Telemachus meet at the swineherd’s hut, Odysseus levels with his son because they live or die together. He is a useful ally, but he cannot reside absolute trust in anyone else but his son. They have an identity of interests not shared by Penelope. If the suitors take down Odysseus, Telemachus is dead or exiled. Penelope survives as the new wife of the leading suitor, not the enslaved spoil of war.
10 The translator here uses the word “palace,” but we should not imagine an enormous structure built over generations by a hereditary monarchy. It is more apt to imagine a hacienda, walled for defense and with little refinement.
11 The story of two angels visiting Sodom in Genesis 19 is one well-known example.
12 Odysseus actually declines an invitation to visit her immediately, as she asks when she hears that there is a stranger from abroad in the house. He subtly puts himself on an equal footing with the suitors by telling Eumaeus that his going to see her might further anger the suitors (17:629).
13 Unwittingly, when they send out their pages—thus sending out the news that Penelope is finally going to make her choice and be wed—the suitors also set up Odysseus’ final strategic deception, when he has killed off all the suitors behind locked doors. Odysseus tells the harper to strike up wedding songs and dances to buy time before the townspeople figure out what Odysseus has done and that they want his blood.
14 1:149f, Fagles, describes the row on row of spears in a rack (or jar) by the entrance of Odysseus’ hall.
15 Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 308.
16 Eurybates is mentioned in Book 2 of the Iliad as Odysseus’ lieutenant, so he has survived the first nine years of the war.
17 After she awakens, she looks around for her geese and sees that they are not dead, subtly hinting that she is relieved and likes having them around. This is but one of several hints that Penelope is on the verge of defecting. Athena’s warning to Telemachus in Sparta is one, an even subtler one is the parallel between the jaw-gripped fawn on the brooch she gave to Odysseus and the jaw-gripped fawn in Menelaus’ simile for what Odysseus would do to the suitors—and to Penelope, who is the doe! Telemachus repeats this as a subtle warning to his mother on his return. See Nancy Felson-Rubin, Regarding Penelope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 21f. Elsewhere in this book Professor Felson-Rubin assembles the did she/didn’t she evidence on whether and when she recognized Odysseus.
18 Waller, The Veteran Comes Back, p. 98.
19 NVVRS, p. II-45-1, and Richard A. Kulka et al., Trauma and the Vietnam War Generation (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990), p. 28, citing U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1987.
20 Matsakis, Vietnam Wives, p. 33.
21 Patience C.
H. Mason, Recovering from the War: A Woman’s Guide to Helping Your Vietnam Veteran, Your Family, and Yourself (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 241. Robert Mason wrote Chickenhawk (New York: Viking Penguin, 1983) and Chickenhawk: Back in the World (New York: Viking Penguin, 1993).
22 Mason, Recovering from the War, p. 248.
23 The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 37.
24 PTSD clinicians and researchers Lizabeth Roemer, Brett T. Lidz, Susan M. Orsillo, and Amy W. Wagner have investigated this intentional withholding of emotion in “A Preliminary Investigation of the Role of Strategic Withholding of Emotion in PTSD,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 14:149-56 (2001).
25 Leukos is not identified by his place of origin, and ten years into the war, could have come from anywhere, not necessarily Ithaca or the nearby towns. Based on the Iliad alone, it would appear that the casualties at Troy among Odysseus’ original Ithacan contingent appear to be few to none! A search using the names of places, such as Ithaca, Neritos, and Korkyleia, contributing to his battalion in the Muster of the Ships in Iliad 2, does not turn up a single death identified with these “hometowns” anywhere else in the Iliad.
26 In the episode with the King of the Winds, Odysseus (who was asleep, you recall) reports his crew as saying, “‘Heaps of lovely plunder he hauls home from Troy, while we who went through slogging just as hard, we go home empty-handed’” (10:45ff, Fagles). Despite this mention of plunder, I find the otherwise total absence of mention of booty in Odysseus’ ships—and particularly of captive women—quite a noteworthy silence.
27 Criterion A:2 of Code 309.81 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV) (Washington: American Psychiatric Association Press, 1994), pp. 424-29. The three symptom clusters (criteria B, C, D) are reexperiencing symptoms, withdrawal and numbing symptoms, and symptoms of increased psychological and physiological mobilization (“arousal”). The detailed DSM-IV descriptive criteria can be found on literally hundreds of places on the World Wide Web, and do not require reproduction here. In the Cyclops and Scylla episodes, Odysseus has a hard time owning fear and horror. When he admits to them at all, he usually uses “we,” including himself in the fear of his men, which he then rises above, contrasting his own subsequent responses.
28 This is typical of Homer’s fictional method—to salt the essential information on the motivation of character and action throughout the narrative, rather than in the chronological, case-history manner found in some modern fiction. For example, Homer salts the full picture of Achilles’ good character prior to the thunderbolt opening of Iliad 1 in little data packets throughout the Iliad. This is discussed in Shay, “Achilles: Paragon, Flawed Character, or Tragic Soldier Figure?”
29 Nancy Felson-Rubin, Regarding Penelope, p. 70f. Astonishingly, Autolycus surfaces in Iliad 10 in connection with the boar-tusk helmet (lines 261ff, orig.) that Odysseus puts on for the night reconnaissance with Diomedes. The text gives the helmet’s provenance with its theft by housebreaker Autolycus, then passing through various hands, presumably as guest-gifts finally to his grandson Odysseus. See Brian Hainsworth, The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 179ff, particularly the commentary to line 10:267.
30 Erwin F. Cook, The Odyssey in Athens, p. 85.
31 Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus”; also “The Man of Pain” in that author’s The Unity of the Odyssey, pp. 246-63. John Peradotto gives it simply as “Hate” in Man in the Middle Voice, p. 128.
32 Nancy Sultan, Exile and the Poetics of Loss in Greek Tradition (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 43.1 have no inclination to entangle myself in the controversy that rages to this day as to whether a disposition to criminal behavior is inherited or learned, nature or nurture, physis or nomos. You can see that I lean to the latter. Homer does not make us privy to the stages of “violentization” laid out by Lonnie H. Athens in The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals.
33 Personal communication, March 2002.
34 Vengeance is “payback,” taken by the avenger and involuntarily given by its target in compensation for the damage done to body, possessions, or honor (which in that world encompasses the first two). The thinking and ideology underlying the Homeric honor concepts of compensation, so clearly voiced here by Eupithes, are laid out in the Iliad. See Donna F. Wilson’s brilliant University of Texas doctoral dissertation (1997), now reworked into Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
16. Introduction
1 Portions of this chapter and the next are reedited by permission from Shay and Munroe, “Group and Milieu Therapy for Veterans,” pp. 391-413, and from Shay, “Killing Rage,” pp. 31-56, available online at www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm.
2 See note 27 to the previous chapter for access to the full APA criteria for PTSD. The implicit idea of “normal” in the official diagnostic system of the American Psychiatric Association derives from the historically and cross-nationally not typical psychology of someone who has been spared—who has never been ridden down by any of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “Normal” means: never been in war, never in famine, never in pandemic, never been raped or tortured, never lived in a tyranny. Mr. American Normal may even mean that neither of Normal’s parents were ever trampled either, nor even his grandparents! I do not praise the Apocalypse and say it’s good for us to be trampled by its Horsemen. I want nothing more fervently than the elimination of famine, plague—and war.
3 J. Douglas Bremner, Steven M. Southwick, and Dennis S. Charney, “The Neurobiology of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: An Integration of Animal and Human Research,” in Saigh and Bremner, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, pp. 103-43. See also R. K. Pitman, L. M. Shin, and S. L. Rauch, “Investigating the Pathogenesis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with Neuroimaging,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 62S17:47-54 (2001), for the remarkable pace of scientific progress that the new, noninvasive, in vivo imaging methods permit. The two years between these two reviews showed palpable progress.
4 I believe that I am referring to the same phenomenon that Judith Herman described under this name in Trauma and Recovery and “Complex PTSD: A Syndrome in Survivors of Prolonged and Repeated Trauma,” Journal of Traumatic Stress, 5:377-92 (1992).
5 Odyssey 9:20f, Fitzgerald.
6 Bernard J. Verkamp, The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1993). Cf. Numbers 31:19ff.
7 See Leon Golden’s excellent monograph, Aristotle on Tragic and Comic Mimesis, American Philological Association, American Classical Studies monograph No. 29, 1992.
8 Georges Dumézil, The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 23f.
9 Every atrocity strengthens the enemy. There were not enough officers in the U.S. Army in Vietnam who saw this clearly at the time. Returning to the situation of young Lieutenant Kerrey, the way SEAL teams were employed in the Mekong Delta was an advantage to the enemy and a setup for harm to the SEALs. One officer who saw this was Colonel Carl Bernard, an Army infantry officer who fought in both Korea and Vietnam. During part of his time in Vietnam, Colonel Bernard was a province senior adviser in the Delta, working for John Paul Vann, the career Army officer and critic of the war who was the subject of Neil Sheehan’s book about Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie. A few days after the Kerrey story broke, Bernard wrote: This episode proves again the very old conclusion about how little Americans knew about the “people’s war” that Kerrey and the rest of us were in. Simply stated, we did not know how to fight such a conflict at its beginning, and we learned very little during its course, in significant part because of the constant transfer of personnel [causing their knowledge and experience to be lost]. We were hurt even more by bringing the wrong lessons from Korea, and our dedicated, enduring refusal to learn anything at all from the French experience.
We knew almost nothing of our enemy; we knew very little more of our supposed allies beyond our assumption of common goals. And we knew far too little of our own forces and those who manned them. The SEAL teams had no more capability to accomplish their so-called counterinsurgency missions one month (!) after they arrived in country than I have of doing brain surgery. The difference is that I know that I do not have these exotic skills, and I stay out of hospital operating rooms. I was damned unkind a couple of months after Than Phong in restricting the activities of the SEAL team in Vinh Binh, the province below the one in which [Kerrey was] operating. As I told them in some dudgeon, their activities were sustaining the Viet Cong’s recruiting effort even better than the Air Forces activities. (Personal communication, e-mail, May 10, 2001.) In a “people’s war,” the enemy recruits the uncommitted and unmotivated in the civilian population to its side when they can entice us to respond indiscriminately or massively against the civilian population. Second, every atrocity potentially disables the service member who commits it. When I speak here of atrocity disabling the service member, I am not pointing to that person’s distant future as a guilt-ridden veteran, as important as that may be. I refer to the immediate question of whether he or she is lost to the force today because of the psychological injury incurred by committing atrocities. Sober and responsible troop leaders and trainers, who have personally “seen the elephant” and cannot be painted as cravenly “PC,” are concerned about prevention of psychological injury as a readiness issue. An injured service member is lost to the force, whether the injury is physical or psychological.
10 R. Severo and L. Milford, The Wages of War: When America’s Soldiers Came Home—From Valley Forge to Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). See also the fascinating study by John P. Resch, Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
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