Odysseus in America (16 page)

“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.

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 documented
²²
—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.

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 in
sane,
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?

[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.