Odysseus in America (12 page)

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 German
⁴
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.

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.

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.