Odysseus in America (8 page)

Ismarus was a real place, north-northeast of Troy on the Thracian coast.
¹
But once the flotilla pulls away it is caught in a violent storm and driven completely off the map. Odysseus will not set foot again in the known world until the Phaeacian rowers put him down, sound asleep, on the beach at Ithaca.

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

Taking the
Odyssey
as an allegory of real homecomings from war, we should not be surprised that the next landfall is on the Land of the Lotus Eaters, who come across as stoned flower children:

[they] showed no will to do us harm, only
offering the sweet Lotos …
but those who ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos,
never cared to report, nor to return:
they longed to stay forever, browsing
²
on
that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.

(9:96ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

Odysseus reacts with the moves of a tough disciplinarian, having possibly learned a lesson from letting wine flow at Ismarus:

I drove them … wailing, to the ships,
tied them down under their rowing benches,
and called the rest: “All hands aboard;
come, clear the beach and no one taste the Lotos,
or you lose your hope of home.”

(9:105ff, Fitzgerald)

We shall never know if Homer had some particular narcotic plant in mind, and if so what plant this
“lotus”
was, but his description is clear enough: you get into
lotus
abuse and you lose your homecoming. Forget your pain—forget your homecoming! This is the path to destruction taken by a horrifyingly large number of Vietnam veterans. Chemical attempts to forget with alcohol or drugs—reaching the American Psychiatric Association criteria for dependence or abuse—were sought by 45.6 percent in alcohol and by 8.4 percent in drugs. If a veteran has current PTSD, these rates are higher still, 73.8 percent and 11.3 percent respectively. These data unfortunately lump together all in-country veterans, both combat and noncombat. It is shocking to realize that male civilian non-veterans who are demographically similar to Vietnam combat veterans have a 26 percent lifetime incidence of alcohol dependence or abuse and a 3.4 percent rate of drug dependence or abuse.
³

The episode with the Lotus Eaters is actually the second time that Homer has suggested the complexity of combat veterans' “substance” use and chemically induced forgetting. We first encounter it during Telemachus' (Odysseus' son's) search for the truth of whether his father is
alive or dead. He comes to the court of King Menelaus, one of Odysseus' fellow officers. Menelaus guesses that Telemachus is Odysseus' son and bursts into tears of grief:

“His son, in my house! How I loved the man,
And how he fought through hardship for my sake!
I swore I'd cherish him above all others …
And so we might have been together often …
But God himself must have been envious,
to batter the bruised man so that he alone
should fail in his return.”

(4:181ff, Fitzgerald)

A twinging ache of grief rose up in everyone,
and … Telemakhos and Menelaos wept …

There's no hint that Menelaus wants to forget Odysseus, nor that he finds the pain unmanageable, nor that he finds his own tears humiliating. But Menelaus' wife, Helen, the famous beauty, Helen of Troy, over whom the whole war was fought, apparently thinks “it'll be good for him” to forget:

But now it entered Helen's mind
to drop into the wine that they were drinking
an anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness.

(4:235ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)

Whoever drank this mixture in the wine bowl
would be incapable of tears that day—
though he should lose mother and father both,
or see, with his own eyes, a son or brother
mauled by weapons of bronze at his own gate.

The opiate of Zeus's daughter bore
this canny power….

She drugged the wine, then, had it served …

While some veterans will say that they want to forget what they've seen, what they've been through, what they've done, they never say they want to forget the comrades they've lost. Veterans are more often distraught that they cannot remember the name of a friend who died or cannot envision his face, much as it's common for bereaved widows and widowers to go through agonizing periods when the pain is there but voluntary recall of
the beloved's face is impossible. The veterans I have worked with regard forgetting dead comrades as dishonorable as forgetting dead parents.

A third time, when Odysseus' men fall into the clutches of the witch Circe, Homer connects drugs with forgetfulness:

“[Circe] ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion—cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine—
but into the brew
she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thoughts of home.”

(10:256ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

The drug turns the veterans from Odysseus' crew into pigs—a ripe metaphor for moralizing on what drug and alcohol addiction can do. But the core of what Homer shows us is that drugs cause veterans to lose their homecoming. The Lotus and Circe's drug both make them “forget” their home. The drunk may literally be unable to recall how to get home, and the crack cocaine addict may be unable to remember anything worth going home to at all. In the subtler sense, the drug- or alcohol-addicted veteran may be physically at home, but his cognitive and emotional resources are entirely consumed by the next drink or fix.

Sometimes a veteran's desire to “stop the screaming” or “stop the nightmares” gets framed as forgetting, “If only I could forget …” But the inability to remember things that the veteran longs to recover and the inability to feel safe from ambush by flashbacks and nightmares are two sides of the same coin. The veteran has lost
authority
over his own process of memory. Restoring that authority is one dimension of recovery from combat trauma. A veteran who is actively drinking or actively using drugs can never regain authority over the processes of memory. Sobriety is one of the three essential
starting points
for recovery from complex PTSD after combat, the other two being safety and self-care.
⁴

Using drugs and alcohol for forgetting, to suppress nightmares, to get to sleep in the face of unbearable agitation, are examples of what has come to be called “self-medication.” Legally and illegally, the civilian world offers a range of psychoactive substances, which street lingo divides broadly into “uppers” (stimulants such as amphetamines and cocaine) and “downers” (sedatives such as alcohol and barbiturates, anxiolytics such as Valium and other benzodiazepines, and opiate analgesics such as heroin).

With the story of the Lotus Eaters, echoing Helen's “anodyne, mild
magic of forgetfulness,” Homer suggests that if you forget your pain, you forget your homeland—you “lose your hope of home.” To really
be home
means to be emotionally present and engaged. Even without alcohol, stimulants, opiates, or sedatives, some entirely clean and sober combat veterans endure civilian life with all of their emotions shut down, except for anger, the one emotion that promoted survival in battle. Homer seems to be saying that if you are too successful in forgetting pain, forgetting grief, fear, and disgust, you may dry up the springs of sweetness, enjoyment, and pleasure in another person's company. This fits our clinical experience.

Veterans use many strategies to numb their pain, to silence the nightmares, to quell guilt. Chemicals are only one such strategy, danger seeking is another, workaholism is another, sexaholism another still
⁵
—and it is not an exaggeration to say that Homer has seen it all (see
Chapters 5
,
6
, and
14
). These have in common that they cut the
emotion
out of the veteran's homecoming. Even when he's physically with his wife, his children, his parents, he's not
there.
Many men go through the motions, but emotionally speaking, they're; like ice. The second chapter of Aphrodite Matsakis's
Vietnam Wives
carries the grim title, “Living with the Ice Man.”
⁶

Selective suppression of emotion is an essential adaptation to survive lethal settings such as battle, where numbing grief and suppressing fear and physical pain are lifesaving. Whatever the psychological and physiological machinery that produces this emotional shutdown, it appears to get jammed in the “on” position for some veterans. Do not imagine that this is a comfortable or pleasant state of being. Veterans in this state say they feel “dead” and that they watch life through a very dirty window. They are never
in
life. More than one has described it as like being wrapped in cotton wool. Such deadness prompts some who sufferer from this hateful numbness to self-medicate with “uppers.”

In parallel, mobilization of the mind and body for danger, the vigilant sharpening of the senses, the tense readiness to kill an attacker, is also an obvious survival adaptation to combat. When this is stuck in the on position and persists into civilian life, the veteran may embark on a frenzied search for calm. Such a state directly interferes with sleep, often causing a vicious cycle, because of the physiological and psychological “jacking up” that comes from going completely without sleep. “I've got to get some sleep!” is a cry of many veterans. The easy, cheap, legal availability of the sedating drug alcohol has been irresistible to many veteran insomniacs. Most have learned, to their sorrow, that it is a poor choice, full of its own dangers and ambushes. The other downers have their own characteristic problems, some different from alcohol's, but problems no less.

I argued in
Achilles in Vietnam
that simple combat PTSD is best understood as the persistence into civilian life of valid survival adaptations to combat. Both hyperarousal and numbing may persist into civilian life, paradoxically coexisting as constantly inflamed anger, but numbing of everything else. Or they may alternate with one another, giving the veteran a history of “cycling” between overexcitement and numb withdrawal. No wonder many have been labeled “manic-depressive,” or the more recent term “bipolar affective disorder.” Combat veterans with PTSD sometimes come to our clinic dragging behind them a long history of alternately self-medicating
both
numbing and hyperarousal and carrying the dismal label of “polysubstance abuser.”

Can drug and alcohol abuse among veterans be prevented? Clearly, when one in four
civilians
⁷
meets the criteria for alcohol abuse or dependence currently or some time in their life, we are talking about something that no one has an easy answer to. There are many encouraging developments in today's U.S. military services in the form of alcohol awareness, the availability of treatment for alcoholism, reduction of the semiofficial practice of using alcohol as a reward for a unit's doing well at some challenge, considerable institutional discouragement of drunkenness—all of these may result in a future veteran population less inclined to alcoholism. What about the major role I advocated in the last chapter for unit associations in easing the transition back into civilian life? Were not American Legion and VFW posts mostly cut-rate bars and drinking clubs? I shall not address this prejudicial stereotype of these mass membership veterans service organizations, but rather describe my personal experience with one unit association with which I had a brief, but informative, contact.

In 1996, Lieutenant General John H. Cushman, U.S. Army, retired, invited me to attend the reunion of the 101st Airborne Division Association at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, after reading
Achilles in Vietnam.
He had commanded the 2d Brigade of the 101st in Vietnam, and had subsequently commanded the whole division. At the time of this invitation he was president of the 2d Brigade Association, which appeared to nest comfortably inside the larger 101st Airborne Division Association. I went with expectations based on the unexamined stereotypes of boozy, loud, and argumentative local VFW posts. When I arrived, somewhat late because of the vagaries of air travel, the banquet was already in progress in the Enlisted Men's Club. On a large-screen closed-circuit TV another event was in progress, a full-dress affair at the Officers' Club, which few seemed to be watching. What impressed me were the comfortable hum of conversation
and an almost palpable atmosphere of mutual love. Yes, there were pitchers of beer on the tables, but the noise level was so quiet that I doubt that much of the beer had been consumed. People shout when they're drunk, in part because they themselves are somewhat deafened from the neurological effects of alcohol.