Odysseus in America (25 page)

I mean to announce a contest with those axes,
the ones [Odysseus] would often line up here inside the hall,
twelve in a straight unbroken row …
then stand well back and whip an arrow through the lot.

(19:644ff, Fagles)

Now I will bring them on as a trial for my suitors.

The hand that can string the bow with greatest ease,
that shoots an arrow clean through all twelve axes—
he's the man I follow, yes, forsaking this house
where I was once a bride.

To this the beggar replies, don't put it off, “royal wife of Laertes' son,” Odysseus himself will be here before the contest.

The preceding chapters asked the reader to view Odysseus' adventures in wonderland as metaphors for generic experiences of real combat veterans. The contest of the bow, which Odysseus uses to ambush, rout, and
slaughter the suitors, connects to real veterans in a different way: it is a fictional rendition of real fantasies, real wishes to seek revenge upon various classes of civilians back home for the veterans' damaged honor. We get a multifaceted picture of ways that civilians bruise the honor of veterans and arouse the growling, bristling rage that Odysseus finally puts into action.

The very first time Odysseus hears about the suitors—from Teiresias in the Underworld—two major themes are set. Teiresias says:

You will find a world of pain at home,
crude, arrogant men devouring all your goods,
courting your noble wife, offering gifts to win her.

(11:133ff, Fagles)

Eating up his food is put first! Because most Americans alive today have never experienced starvation or even persistent hunger—and many have had parents and even grandparents who were spared this also—it is hard to grasp the significance of being “eaten out of house and home” in a world of constant shortage. We tend to blow past it to the more accessible theme of sexual rivalry.

But the sense of some Vietnam veterans that civilians have been eating their lunch is a powerful source of resentment, even hatred. This takes the form of viewing civilians as having advanced educationally and occupationally while the infantryman “humping the boonies” stood still or lost ground because of discrimination against veterans in hiring and promotion. World War I veteran Willard Waller wrote the following about how this feels to the veteran:

It is easy to understand why the soldier hates the young man of his own age who manages somehow to escape military service. The draft board in its wisdom decides that Tom Jones must go to war, and off goes Tom to be a soldier. But Henry Smith next door, has had the foresight to get entrenched in a necessary industry; he stays home, works for high wages, wins a promotion, gets married, and buys a little home in the suburbs. When Tom returns, Henry is still a necessary man in industry, still entrenched; he keeps his job and Tom goes on relief.
¹⁸

The GI Bill was created at the end of World War II to address this very concern, with historically generous educational benefits, home mortgage assistance, and so forth. Despite the erosion of the value of Vietnam veterans' benefits by inflation, the raw lumped statistics on household
incomes of Vietnam veterans do
not
support the idea that veterans as a whole got the short end of the stick, financially. In 1986, when the
National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study
was done, 17.4 percent of male in-country Vietnam veterans had family incomes below $20,000 a year, compared to 40 percent in the country as a whole. On the high end, 25.2 percent of male in-country Vietnam vets had incomes of $50,000 or more, compared to 17 percent in the country as a whole.
¹⁹
However, the point of this section is to understand the
beliefs
that some Vietnam veterans have about their homecoming experience that led them to hate civilians. Homer's Odysseus saw it in very concrete terms: “They're eating my food!” Vietnam veterans I have worked with saw it as “They took my job!” Women in the workplace compounded economic competition with the misogyny described above. Women were, after all, mostly civilians.

The more familiar theme of the suitors trying to steal Odysseus' wife needs little further comment as a cause for his vengeance. Despite the prominence in folklore of the Jody who steals the Vietnam soldier's girl, this theme has been notable by its
absence
as a general source of hatred against civilians among the veterans I have known. If general misogyny originated in women's supposed readiness to be seduced by Jody, I have not heard this from my patients decades later.

However, many other causes for veterans' hatred and resentment toward civilians emerge from the encounters between Odysseus and the suitors, once we begin to look for them.

I have already described the hurt and bitterness that a skilled infantryman encounters in civilian life when he is defined by the state employment bureau as “unskilled laborer.” The skills of a truly expert ground warfare fighter are of a very high order, analogous to an NBA basketball player or professional musician. Imagine a world-class musician being dropped into the land of the deaf, where people shrug and say, “unskilled laborer.” This lack of social acknowledgment of the value of a person's hard-won skill is a great blow to his self-respect, regardless of what social class he comes from and regardless of personal wealth. Most returning infantrymen did
not
have personal wealth, so the layering of the humiliations of poverty and low social class on top of disvaluing their skills was a potent and dangerously explosive combination.

Odysseus returns to his house and hometown disguised as a destitute beggar. Much of the dramatic spice of
Odyssey
14-23 comes from the tension between his apparent position at the bottom of the social hierarchy and real position at its top. The audience and Odysseus know who's who, but the characters in action around him do not. The suitors treat Odysseus
in a demeaning and dishonoring way,
because he is poor.
Many Vietnam vets felt that they experienced just such treatment in their first years of reassimilation.

Let us return to the remarkable picture of Odysseus being as still and cold as a block of stone while his wife wept so piteously.

Odysseus' heart went out to his grief-stricken wife
but under his lids his eyes remained stock-still—
they might have been made of horn or iron—
his guile fought back his tears.

(19:242ff, Fagles)

In a chapter that Vet Center counselor Aphrodite Matsalds tellingly titles “Living with the Ice Man” she describes wives of Vietnam veterans whose husbands are emotionally blank. One such wife said, “He doesn't want to talk that much and when we're in bed, he's like an ice man. He says he doesn't care whether we have sex or not, doesn't care whether we stay married or not. If I start crying, he'll tell me he loves me, but he just can't help it, he doesn't care about anything.”
²⁰
Unlike this veteran who will not talk to his wife, Odysseus and Penelope talk to each other in their olive-tree-founded bed at such length that the gods have to miraculously lengthen the night to give them their fill. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, to me Odysseus' relationship with his wife is his most human feature.

Patience Mason, the wife of Vietnam helicopter pilot Robert Mason, writes, “Maybe you can't understand why your vet feels nothing when his mother dies.”
²¹
She explains such suppression of emotion as the persistence of a valid adaptation to combat. “He's cold and unresponsive because he learned to be that way as a survival tactic in Vietnam. It's more than a habit. It's how he stays alive.”
²²
Mason quotes World War I poet Wilfred Owen's crushing “Insensibility”:

Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers.

…
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling
…
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
²³

Now we have two different reasons for combat veterans to be emotionally distant, emotionally unresponsive: The first picture is given by Homer, calling Odysseus' nonresponse to his wife's anguish a result of his “guile.” That is, Homer says his coldness is intentional, a strategic withholding of emotional expression, but says explicitly that “his heart went out to her”—i.e., he did feel it.
²⁴
The second picture is given by Owen, who tells us that insensibility, numbing, feeling nothing is an adaptation to the pain, fear, and grief of combat. Which is true?

I am inclined to say that both are true. Odysseus is not yet in a safe, civilian setting. His life is as much on the line as it was on the plains of Troy. It
is
strategic for him to show no emotion. But he is as entitled to this emotional coldness as Wilfred Owen's “happy” ice man in the trenches. He is still in combat mode.

However, Homer complicates our understanding of Odysseus' character by a second scene of emotional withholding that strikes most readers as gratuitous cruelty—his reunion with his father, Laertes, at the very end of the epic in Book 24.

The suitors are all dead now. Odysseus, Telemachus, the swineherd, and another loyal retainer all slip out of town at first light before the cry for revenge has been raised. They head for Laertes' farm, where he has been living in seclusion since his wife's death. The picture is of a sorrowing old man, who keeps a lid on his grief for son and wife by constant hard work, clearing land and planting vineyards and orchards. The group arrives at the farmhouse—his father is already out in the orchard. Odysseus is no longer in disguise and has no need of any. He orders the others to prepare food while he finds his father, saying,

And I will put my father to the test,
see if the old man knows me now, on sight,
or fails to, after twenty years apart.

(24: 238ff, Fagles)

What need does he have to test his father? For what? If this is a practical joke, Odysseus has a perverted sense of humor. He spies his father at a distance,

spading soil around a sapling—clad in filthy rags,
in a patched, unseemly shirt …
and on his head he wore a goatskin skullcap
to cultivate his misery that much more….

Long-enduring Odysseus, catching sight of him now—
A man worn down with years, his heart racked with sorrow—
Halted under a branching pear-tree, paused and wept.

Now it seems he is warmhearted toward his old father, but then, inexplicably, he holds a debate with himself:

Debating, head and heart, what should he do now?
Kiss and embrace his father, pour out the long tale—
…
or probe him first to test him every way?
Torn, mulling it over, this seemed better:
test the man first,
reproach him with words that cut him to the core.

(24:260ff, Fagles)

The scene is too painful to spin out. His father does not recognize him. Odysseus approaches Laertes, his father, with breezy sarcasm about the old man's dilapidated appearance and—lying as usual—says he's looking for Odysseus, whom he entertained abroad and sent off with lavish guest-gifts. His father begins to weep, saying Odysseus is dead. The unrecognized stranger then piles it on, essentially shaming Laertes with the gay words that, “We had high hopes we'd meet again as guests, as old friends, and trade some shining gifts” (24:350ff, Fagles). Laertes knows he cannot discharge his son's obligation to reciprocate and thus is
shamed
on top of his grief. He is completely undone and begins to soil his hair and beard with dirt.

This finally brings Odysseus to his senses and he reveals himself. Laertes demands proof of identity—he, too, has had his hopes raised by scammers. Odysseus' first sign of his identity is the same wound on his thigh, by which his old wet-nurse Eurycleia had recognized him. And Odysseus reminds his father of the specific kinds and numbers of fruit trees his father had given him in this very orchard as a child. When the proofs sink in, Laertes throws his arms around his son's neck and his knees go weak. We now return to the boar-tusk scar as we consider the whole question of what pathogenic burden of trauma Odysseus has carried.

I imagine myself locking eyes with Odysseus, perhaps in my office in the VA, perhaps across the table in the room where the veterans meet for their groups. I'm asking myself, how did this level of mistrust and manipulativeness come to be? So much wildness and so much violence, what am I missing?

I review his combat history in my mind … Homer tells us that Odysseus was in on the Trojan War from the beginning; that means ten years of fighting, right through and beyond the war's end. The
Iliad
mentions Odysseus more than 120 times, but by comparison mentions the great Ajax about twice as often and young Diomedes more than 150 times. He shares the highly dangerous night reconnaissance with Diomedes in
Iliad
10. In
Odyssey
4, Helen recalls that Odysseus scarred “his own body with mortifying strokes,” to disguise himself before infiltrating Troy on an even more dangerous spy mission into the heart of the enemy city (4:274, Fagles). Agamemnon relies on him when a job needs doing that requires brains and diplomacy. Although he is noteworthy for the staff jobs he does for the commander in chief, Agamemnon, he's no rear-echelon pogue. He'd seen plenty of front line fighting, killed many men, seen many Greek fighters die, during heavy combat in
Iliad
4, 5, 8, 11, and 14. One of those killed, Leukos, is called Odysseus'
hetairon,
someone who followed Odysseus as his military chief (4:491, orig.). Homer tells us that Leukos was
esthlos,
brave and stout.
²⁵
Odysseus cared enough about him to fly into a rage at his death and kill his killer in the battle. He does not, however, go berserk.