Odysseus in America (5 page)

Whether Odysseus made up his mind in an instant or over the thirty-six hours of watching his hosts, he decides three things about revealing himself: First, he will not tell these civilians
anything
about Troy—although his host, the king, has implicitly asked him to do just that, by inquiring whether he weeps for a “comrade” (
hetairos—
8:584, orig.) who died at Troy. Second, he will correct the implied civilians' misconception about combat veterans—that once the war ends, the losses and suffering end, too. The king assumes that Odysseus is tormented with grief only for deaths that occurred during the war. And third, he decides that he will fully satisfy the king's request to tell his story, “Where have your rovings forced you?” (8:643, Fagles) and will tell it in the only form that they are capable of taking it in: entertainment.

He reveals his identity: “I am Odysseus son of Laertes …”—his next words are extraordinarily ambiguous and surprising: “…
who am a worry
[or concern, or problem]
to all men by my wiles”
(9:19-20, orig., Segal, trans.).
⁶

What a way to introduce himself to powerful strangers he desperately needs! Odysseus is not quite so raw as this one line, taken out of context, suggests. Nonetheless the first thing he declares about himself is the cunning, guile, and trickery that make him famous “to the sky's rim.” Imagine you have taken in a complete stranger as a houseguest. He evades identifying himself for a day and a half, and then he boasts that he is famous the world over as a con man! What's more, you've heard of him, and of some of his more spectacular scams.

Odysseus is not quite so “in control” as he is usually pictured. He desperately manages his own emotions at the same time that he woos his hosts to give him quick passage home. He cannot tell the truth about “what it was really like” at Troy without risking his own composure. Odysseus could have introduced himself in any of a hundred flattering and safe ways, such as “architect of the Greek victory at Troy,” or “courageous fighter and master bowman,” or as the person to whom the Greek army awarded Achilles' armor as a prize of honor, or simply “the best of the Greeks.” But none of these would have created the diversionary distraction of his boastful, somewhat off-color self-introduction. It allows him the sleight-of-hand shift from the king's actual question about the war
to, “What of my sailing [
nostos
= homecoming], then, from Troy?” (9:41, Fitzgerald). Without missing a beat he launches into the adventures that will entertain, enchant, and dazzle his royal listeners for the rest of the night.

Just as some thieves are not bad soldiers, some soldiers turn out to be pretty good robbers, so nearly are these two ways of life related.

—Sir Thomas More,
Utopia
, published in 1516
¹

But will warriors lay down, together with the iron in which they are covered, their spirit nourished … by familiarity with danger? Will they don, together with civilian dress, that veneration for the laws and respect for protective forms …? To them the unarmed class appears vulgar and ignoble, laws are superfluous subtleties, the forms of social life just so many insupportable delays.

—Benjamin Constant, Swiss, 1767-1830
²

But all was not right with the spirit of the men who came back. Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again, looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone…. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to queer moods, queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many of them were easily moved to passion when they lost control of themselves. Many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening. For some time while they drew their unemployment pensions, they did not make any effort to get work
for the future…. Young soldiers who had been very skilled with machine-guns, trench-mortars, hand-grenades, found that they were classed with the ranks of unskilled labor in civil life.

—Philip Gibbs, British, 1920
³

Odysseus' first adventure after he leaves Troy with his squadron is the sack of Ismarus. It's a pirate raid—there's nothing particularly amazing or fairy-tale-like about it.
⁴
No one-eyed or six-headed monsters show up here, no witches, no gods either. The crews get drunk on captured wine and Odysseus loses control of them. They go wild and run riot in the town. This reflects no credit on the troops—they indulge themselves and put themselves in a weak position. The victims of this raid and their kin counterattack and inflict serious losses on the boat crews before they can escape out to sea.

Hardly what we expected! But here Homer shows us the first way that combat soldiers lose their homecoming, having left the war zone physically—they may simply
remain
in combat mode, although not necessarily against the original enemy.

Once discharged from the military, what civilian occupations are open to a veteran that employ the skills and capacities he has developed? While former military pilots may find civilian employment as airline, charter, or corporate pilots, what work does the combat infantry look for? In the course of my work I see many Vietnam War military discharge papers—Department of Defense Form 214—and always experience a sour amusement at item 23b, “RELATED CIVILIAN OCCUPATION.” For every veteran with Military Occupation Specialty 11B, “Infantry light weapons specialist”—a “grunt” infantryman—the related civilian occupation is given as “Firearms Proof Technician,” i.e., someone who test fires guns for their manufacturers. So just how many of the hundreds of thousands of infantry veterans were able to find employment in gun manufacturing? Very few, of course. And how much does this civilian occupation actually resemble the work of the combat infantryman?

A bitter joke.

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

For which civilian careers does prolonged combat prepare a person? Let's look at the strengths, skills, and capacities acquired during prolonged combat:

• Control of fear.

• Cunning, the arts of deception, the arts of the “mind-fuck.”

• Control of violence against members of their own group.

• The capacity to respond skillfully and
instantly
with violent, lethal force.

• Vigilance, perpetual mobilization for danger.

• Regarding fixed rules as possible threats to their own and their comrades' survival.

• Regarding fixed “rules of war” as possible advantages to be gained over the enemy.

• Suppression of compassion, horror, guilt, tenderness, grief, disgust.

• The capacity to lie fluently and convincingly.

• Physical strength, quickness, endurance, stealth.

• Skill at locating and grabbing needed supplies, whether officially provided or not.

• Skill in the use of a variety of lethal weapons.

• Skill in adapting to harsh physical conditions.

This is a chilling picture. World War I veteran Willard Waller remembered what it was like on street corners after that war. In 1944 he wrote in anticipation of the return of the troops from World War II:

There is a core of anger in the soul of almost every veteran, and we are justified in calling it bitterness, but the bitterness of one man is not the same thing as the bitterness of another. In one man it becomes a consuming flame that sears his soul and burns his body. In another it is barely traceable. It leads one man to outbursts of temper, another to social radicalism, a third to excesses of conservatism.
⁵

Most of the skills that soldiers acquire in their training for war are irrelevant to civilian life…. The picture is one of men who struggle very hard to learn certain things and to acquire certain distinctions, and then find that with the end of the war these things completely lose their utility…. Digging a fine fox-hole or throwing hand grenades with dexterity, they are entirely valueless….

The boss, who hires and fires him, writes recommendations for him, raises or lowers his pay, and otherwise disposes of his destiny is nothing but a soft civilian. The foreman thinks he is tough…. While the veteran was risking his life for his country, the boss and the foreman were having an
easy time of it…. The veteran cannot help reflecting that a smash of a gun-butt, or even a well-directed blow at the bridge of the nose … might easily dispose of such a man forever.
⁶

Very few combat veterans have become mercenaries or “civilian defense contractors” who train, support, and/or fight for foreign governments or for insurgents at the behest of the U.S. government, such as for Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets. These ways of staying in combat mode have captured the public imagination in film and pulp fiction, as well as magazines such as
Soldier of Fortune.
As sociologist James William Gibson has described in
Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America,
⁷
this fascination with the mercenary shows us much more about ourselves as civilians than it tells us about veterans. I am less interested in the exotic and the glamorous than in what matters every day in South Boston, Somerville, or Quincy, Massachusetts.

Law enforcement in all its varieties has some military traits, and might seem most to resemble the occupation of the combat infantryman. Policemen carry guns. They wear uniforms. The images of the embattled inner-city cop whose precinct is a war zone, and of the specialized “tactical” unit, both suggest similarities. Many combat veterans have, in fact, joined the civilian uniformed services. Bear Mercer (a pseudonym) was one of these. He became an officer at a maximum-security prison.

Bear is the second son of a proud, hardworking family in a Boston multiethnic neighborhood. His father was a foreman, his mother, a health professional.

He joined the U.S. Army in December 1965, out of high school after learning that an older, admired friend in the ------ Airborne had been killed in Vietnam. Bear's father, a Silver Star honoree tank sergeant in Europe in World War II, opposed his enlistment, but acquiesced. His father was later to tell the Department of Defense official who [erroneously, as it turned out] notified him of Bear's death: “Go to hell! You got the wrong Mercer.”

Bear served one combat tour in Vietnam as a “grunt” forward observer sergeant. He was honorably discharged in December 1968. He never missed time, was never subject to disciplinary action, and was eligible to reenlist. He was honored with the Combat Infantry Badge, the Air Medal, and the Army Commendation Medal for Valor with Oak Leaf Cluster, which denotes a second separate act of bravery.

After his first month as the radioman for the 81mm mortar at the center of the perimeter, Bear felt like he was simply a helpless target for
enemy rockets and mortars that fell in the perimeter. He knew that in theory he was safer in the center than outside it patrolling and waiting in ambush, but he had come to fight, not to cower under bombardment. So he volunteered to serve as a forward observer, to patrol with the grunts and call in mortar, artillery, and air strikes in their support. He takes pride in the fact that he was never responsible for an artillery error that caused American casualties.

Sergeant Mercer did, however, see the results of the fires he called in on the enemy. His patrol found a Viet Cong, dying after his legs had been blown off by a strike Bear had called in. Over the radio, the CO refused to call a MedEvac for the enemy and ordered Bear to kill the wounded enemy soldier. Unwilling to order anyone in his squad to do it, he performed this mercy himself, and believes that the dying Vietnamese assented to it by gestures. Now in nightmares and flashbacks the color of his blood, changing from bright red to almost black after Bear cut his throat, comes back again and again, as does the evil grin of a man in his squad who crushed the dead man's chest with a boulder, drenching Bear with blood that squirted out of the severed neck arteries. Bear felt the enemy had “paid his dues” and is enraged at the disrespect shown by the other American soldier.

Four days later in the same patrol a friend named Kennedy, known for his joking and cheerful disposition, volunteered to throw the smoke grenade in a clearing to guide in a helicopter. He stepped out of the concealment of the jungle and Bear heard an “Uh!” sound and saw Kennedy fall back on a bush. “I ran over and took him off the bush. His front tooth was gone. I put my hand behind his head to lift him off the bush, and felt this warm sensation. I had part of his brain on my hand. I looked back and saw blood pouring down off the bush.” This scene, too, repeats endlessly in Bears nightmares. He knows there was nothing he could have done to save Kennedy.