Odysseus in America (9 page)

I found General Cushman among enlisted veterans from his brigade. He took me over to one of his aviation company commanders, who immediately wanted me to know about a former trooper who had been having a rough time with his memories and with alcohol. The local chapter of the 101st Airborne Association had recovered contact with him after many years of not knowing where he was or how he was doing. They had drawn him into their circle and persuaded him to join Alcoholics Anonymous, and were immensely proud of their continued ability to be a “Band of Brothers.” Unit associations appear more capable of fostering this sense of mutual support and obligation than the mass-oriented veterans service organizations.

There are many other military unit associations—large, such as the First Marine Division Association, and small, comprising former members of a single company or even platoon. Prior to the twentieth century, each American military unit was raised from a specific geographic area, and usually bore the name of the place it was raised. This resulted almost automatically in every local veterans association, both formal and informal, being a unit association. The spectacular political power of the main mass membership veterans association in the nineteenth century, the Grand Army of the Republic, has obscured this history. The GAR was accused of raiding the U.S. Treasury for Civil War veterans' pensions.

Today, because of a conscious policy of both promoting national unity and protecting any single town from being bereaved of a whole generation of its young men, every unit is made up of recruits from anywhere in the country. However, modern technology, starting with the telephone, and now with the Internet, permits scattered veterans to form and maintain unit associations that are little impaired by geographic scatter. I have personally witnessed the beneficial, even lifesaving power of the social support that veterans can gain through Internet communities, and shall expand on this in Chapter 18.

So Captain Odysseus drives his men away from the silky embrace of the addicting Lotus, and gets his flotilla back out to sea. The sullen sailors pull away from Lotus Land, but they have no clue where they are. The dope dealers of Lotus Land were recognizably human, but on their next landfall, they encounter monsters.

After a mile or two I said to Boanerges [“Son of Thunder,” the name Lawrence had given his motorcycle], “We are going to hurry” … and thereupon laid back my ears like a rabbit, and galloped down the road…. It seemed to me that sixty-five miles an hour was a fitting pace … but often we were ninety for two or three miles on end, with old B. trumpeting ha ha like a war horse…. [In Oxfordshire, where traffic moved at about thirty miles per hour] Boa and myself were pioneers of the new order, which will do seventy or more between point and point…. Boa was round the next corner, or over the next-hill-but-two while they were sputtering.

—T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1926
¹

In popular culture the Cyclops is the part that stands for the whole of the
Odyssey.
It's what shows up in the Saturday morning cartoons. Oceans of ink have drowned continents of paper explaining this episode. Homer lays it on thick, with suspense, marvels, clever twists, gore, and gross-outs. Not only does the Cyclops snatch up pairs of Odysseus' shipmates, bash their brains out across the floor, and munch them down raw, but at one point he even barfs up undigested pieces of eaten Greek. Like a stage magician, Homer controls our gaze with stunning gestures of one hand, while the real action is in the other hand in plain sight. What mostly concerns us here is the conjurer's
other
hand.

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

The Cyclops is adventure number three that Odysseus recounts to the Phaeacian civilians. It comes after the plundering of Ismarus, where his flotilla lost about one man in ten when the natives counterattacked,
²
and as the end point of their flight from the sweet oblivion of Lotus addiction. These themes of random fighting, loss of friends (after the war is over!), and forgetfulness are fresh when the flotilla is carried by the winds to the “land of the high and mighty Cyclops, lawless brutes” (9:119f, Fagles). Odysseus tosses off a
few
more disparaging remarks about Cyclopes and then describes making camp on an island just offshore. He leaves his squadron and takes his own ship and crew across the narrow water to

probe the natives over there.
What are they—violent, savage, lawless?
or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?

(9:194ff, Fagles)

At the time, Odysseus the naval officer had no reason to know anything about where the wind had blown him, even though as he relates the tale to the Phaeacians, Odysseus the storyteller knows exactly what he faces: giant cannibals. But in the context of the story, it would seem a reasonable reconnaissance that he hazards. Yet Odysseus goes on to tell us that his “bold heart” (
thumos
) prompted him to bring along a large skin of especially potent wine, because

… I'd soon come up against some giant …
a savage deaf to justice, blind to law.

(9:239f, Fagles)

What's going on here? He's the captain of his own ship and commodore of a flotilla of twelve. He has told us repeatedly how sorry he is that not one of the six hundred or so men he was responsible for made it home alive, but it was their own damned fault … or so he says. And the narrator says. And the gods say. The families back at Ithaca reasonably will hold him responsible for all
six hundred
young men who shipped out with him, but here we are looking at Odysseus' conduct only with regard to the six men who get eaten by the monster.

The squadron has lost its bearings. Reconnaissance is called for, and any responsible commander would see it competently done. Odysseus and his
crew cross the small stretch of water. Now closer, looking up from the shore, Odysseus can see that the cave is a giant's lair. This prompts him to take the skin of extra-potent wine, much as a modern commander might take extra, nonstandard weapons he thinks the mission requires.
³
Odysseus leaves most of his crew with the ship, and with twelve picked men climbs up to the giant-scale den. They enter it wide-eyed. The owner is not at home. Odysseus' men plead with him—This is bad shit, Cap'n! Let's grab what we can carry and get out of here! But Odysseus turns stubborn and says,

But I would not give way—…
not till I saw him, saw what [guest-]gifts he'd give [me].

(9:256ff, Fagles)

This “curiosity” to see what
xeinia,
hospitality gifts, the giant would give him costs six men their lives. This is no ominous hunch. He knows that a giant inhabits this cave, but nevertheless he keeps his men there in danger!

One of the veterans I have worked with for many years once punched his sister's husband in the side of his head as he passed him in the back hall of their house. What happened in the ensuing fight matters less than why he did it: “I just wanted to see what happened.” Another veteran says that a couple of years after returning from Vietnam he dove off a roof. Was he trying to commit suicide? No. “I wanted to see what would happen—sometimes you do that.”

Commentators on Odysseus' behavior are divided between those who emphasize his “curiosity”—praising him as a sort of ancient proto-scientist—and those who emphasize his greed—that he hoped for a guest-gift of some immensely valuable item.
⁴
I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans' attraction to danger, an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives
after returning home,
and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their survival. To quote from a veteran's poem you will read later, in Chapter 18:

I drive Chu Yen [the veteran's motorcycle] to the Wall in a Demon rage, we make the trip in eight minutes; if she'd been flesh and blood I would have ridden her to death.

Vietnam veteran bikers did not invent dangerously fast motorcycle riding, as we saw in this chapter's epigraph by the famous World War I combat veteran Lawrence of Arabia, who died from it.

Veterans' behavior has been variously called irresponsible, impulsive, judgment-impaired, thrill-seeking, and danger-seeking, but these adjectives don't quite get at the sense that the dice
must
be rolled. In addition to hungering to acquire the guest-gifts, Odysseus just wanted to “see what would happen” in the Cyclops' cave. Prolonged combat leaves some veterans with the need to “live on the edge” to pose the same question to the cosmos over and over again: yes or no? The veteran who dove off the roof was not “curious” about what broken bones feel like. Odysseus' irresponsible impulse to see “What
are
they—violent, savage, lawless?/or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?” (9:195f, Fagles) and what guest-gift he would receive from the giant makes perfect sense, as something that veterans of much fighting simply
do.
It is as if, having lived in a world where the dice were constantly rolling, the calm, plan-filled responsibility of civilian life (or for that matter, of peacetime military service) is intolerable. They speak of it as a “boredom” that somehow grows to unendurable proportions. Tennyson captured this boredom in the opening lines of his poem
Ulysses:

It
little profits
that an
idle
king
By this
still
hearth, among these
barren
crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I
mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That
hoard,
and
sleep,
and
feed,
and
know not me.
[Emphasis added.]

So, in part just to see what happens, Odysseus has his men settle down to dine on the giant's stored food and wait. Who are the “lawless brutes” here? Homer has made the point just a few dozen lines earlier that they have plenty of stores in their ships and have just gorged themselves on wild goats; these men are not starving. Necessity is not driving them. No learned commentator on the Cyclops episode has claimed that the customs of the ancient Mediterranean permit uninvited strangers to walk into someone's home in his absence and eat up his food. In fact, a refined version of this same misconduct has occurred earlier in the epic, in Books 1 and 2, when Penelope's infamous suitors back in Ithaca eat her, Telemachus,
and
Odysseus himself out of house and home. Over and over, we are given to understand that the suitors deserve the death that Odysseus rains down on them in the climactic Book 23 for eating his supplies uninvited.
⁵

Polyphemus the Cyclops returns and tidies up some domestic chores, at first not noticing the intruders. And like a householder returning for
the evening, he locks his front door: Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave when Polyphemus deftly plugs its entrance with a rock so big that twenty-two wagon teams could not budge it. When finally he discovers them,

‘Strangers!'
he thundered out, ‘now who are you?
Where did you sail from, over the running sea-lanes?
Out on a trading spree or roving the waves like pirates,
sea-wolves raiding at will, who risk their lives
to plunder other men?'

(9:284ff, Fagles)

Fitzgerald translates the last words even more bluntly: “Or are you wandering rogues,
who cast your lives like dice,
and ravage other folk by sea?”
⁶
[emphasis added]. Because Homer has put these words in the mouth of a brute, it is easy to overlook that this is
exactly
what Odysseus and his crews have become—men “who cast your lives like dice, and ravage other folk.” Odysseus has indulged in
atasthaliai,
irresponsible, wanton recklessness, leading his men into it, rather than holding them back. We have already seen that war smoothes the way to criminal conduct after the war. One twentieth-century sociologist credits Erasmus of Rotterdam in the fifteenth century with being the first to notice this.
⁷
I'd say it was first shown by Homer in the
Odyssey.

They are well and truly caught. Odysseus, at least, “deserves” it within the moral code of the
Odyssey.
But two by two seized at random—supper, breakfast, and supper—six of his twelve men pay the price, brains dashed out like unwanted puppies, and eaten raw.

When the Cyclops falls asleep after his first meal of shipmates, Odysseus' great
thumos,
his fighting spirit prompts him to take his sharp sword and stab the sleeping giant in his liver. But he restrains himself when he realizes that heroic revenge for his eaten shipmates—the angry resort to
biē,
force—would leave him and his ten remaining men to starve and thirst to death behind the enormous door plug. When the path of force,
biē,
is blocked, Odysseus does what Achilles would never do in the
Iliad:
he calls upon
mētis,
craftiness. The tricks and deception he uses to get out of the monster's cave are as famous as they are entertaining: