Odysseus in America (10 page)

His scheme is to blind the Cyclops with a fire-hardened stake, prepared while the giant is out with his flocks the next day, and to escape by clinging underneath the livestock when the blinded Cyclops lets them out to pasture the morning after that. To lull the giant before this attack, Odysseus offers the superpotent wine he had brought with him, presenting it as a gift to buy pity. The Cyclops loves the wine, demands more, and asks Odysseus his name so he can give him a gift in return. Odysseus pours out more wine and says his name is “Nobody” (
outis
). The Cyclops tosses off bowl after bowl of the wine and with loutish self-congratulation announces that his return gift will be to eat Nobody last of all the trapped men—and then falls down in a drunken stupor. Odysseus and four men drive the heated stake into his eye (which Homer describes in gross-out detail). The giant roars in pain and rage, attracting his neighbors, other Cyclopes. They call from outside his cave, “surely no one's (
mē tis
) trying to kill you now by fraud (
dolō
⁸
) or force!” To this he cries,
“Nobody (
Outis
),
friends, … Nobody's killing me now …!” (9:453ff, Fagles). The neighborly Cyclopes lumber off convinced their friend doesn't need help. At this point Homer's audience is elbowing each other in the ribs, not only because of the way Odysseus' tricky name, Nobody, has played out, but because the other Cyclopes have inadvertently made a pun: in Homer's Greek, “no one” (
mē tis
) is spoken aloud close enough to the word for “cunning” (
mētis
) for the audience to make the association.
⁹
The violently powerful Cyclops, the
biē-
monster in the cave, has been overcome by cunning intelligence,
mētis.

I'm going to milk the one-eyed monster for one more metaphor: Odysseus has no hope against the Cyclops in a force-on-force match-up. This is the way some veterans I work with feel when they face the
government.
They see themselves as powerless, liable to be eaten alive. Cunning, they believe, is their only defense. Like any one-eyed creature, government bureaucracies lack depth perception. They tend to see only the one thing they were set up for, and are blind to how things interconnect. A bureaucracy set up for vocational training sees one thing, another set up for law enforcement sees another, and one set up for health care sees yet another. When dealing with government, the veterans I work with have frequently felt trapped and liable to be eaten alive. Odysseus has saved his skin by denying his identity, humbly making himself Nobody.

Don't draw attention to yourself. Don't tell anyone who you are or your real name. When first discovered in the Cyclops' cave, Odysseus had
nonspecifically identified himself and his men as Greeks from the army of famous Agamemnon. Now he's “not someone” (
mē tis
). Vietnam veterans who at the time they enlisted had imagined themselves marching down Main Street, head held high with people gesturing, “There! You see him? That's him!” found themselves keeping silent about their military service or lying outright that they had never served. Because of both the political climate of the early 1970s and the well-founded fears of job discrimination, many veterans made themselves “Nobody” on the job, in school, or in social situations at a time when every fiber in their bodies demanded that they be “known.” Odysseus pursued an active strategy of Nobody-hood as a means to escape and revenge; veterans were galled by their “invisibility,” the comprehensive indifference of the civilian world.

Fame (
kleos
) was what Homeric Greeks risked and often lost their lives for.
Kleos
is the exact opposite of being a nobody, of not being someone. A key element in Odysseus' trickery lay in his ability to suppress his warrior identity and go against what was crying out in him, to do what warriors do. Remember that he saved himself and his men from slow death trapped in the cave by
not
killing the sleeping Cyclops that first night. He has saved them again by telling the Cyclops his name is Nobody, rather than proudly identifying himself by his father's name and his given name—as the heroic code would lead him to do.

The trick works and Odysseus and his men ride to freedom slung underneath the giant's fat sheep. Once out, they drive the flock down to the shore, board, and pull their ship away from the beach. But now Odysseus' self-restraint gives way and he begins to vaunt, to boast his triumph over the monster's
biē.

‘So, Cyclops, no weak coward it was whose crew
you bent to devour there in your vaulted cave—
you with your brute force!

(9:531ff, Fagles)

Throwing toward the sound, the blind Cyclops heaves a rock over them so huge that the backwash alone pushes them back to the beach. Frantically they pole and row themselves away, but again Odysseus taunts the giant. For a second time his shipmates beg him to be prudent and self-restrained, as they had when they first entered the cave of the absent Cyclops. Now, six grisly deaths later, he cannot resist arrogant taunting.

‘So headstrong—why? Why rile the beast again?'
…
‘Good god, the brute can throw!'
So they begged me
but they could not bring my fighting spirit round.
I called back with another burst of anger, ‘Cyclops—
If any man on the face of the earth should ask you
who blinded you, shamed you so—say Odysseus,
raider of cities,
he
gouged out your eye,
Laertes' son who makes his home in Ithaca!'

(9:550ff, Fagles)

With this boast, he seals the fate of his shipmates. This Cyclops is the offspring of the sea god, Poseidon, and Polyphemus prays to his Olympian father with this curse:

‘Hear me—
Poseidon….
Grant that Odysseus, raider of cities,
Laertes' son who makes his home in Ithaca,
never reaches home. Or if he's fated to … reach …
his own native country, let him come home late
and come a broken man—all shipmates lost …—
and let him find a world of pain at home!'

(9:586ff, Fagles)

Homer says that the god heard his prayer, and the rest of the story shows that Poseidon fulfilled the curse in the Cyclops' prayer.
¹⁰
Odysseus returns alive, alone of the six hundred or so from Ithaca and its environs who sailed with him. Odysseus has greatly underestimated the potency of his adversary, just as the Cyclops has underestimated this cunning mortal, Odysseus. The Cyclops lost his eye, and Odysseus lost all his men and almost ten years of his life. A modern parallel, where both sides bled and bled as a result of their mutual underestimation, can be found in the history of World War II: the Americans suffered for their underestimation of the Japanese capacity to build and fly modern combat aircraft, and the Japanese suffered for their underestimation of American fortitude in withstanding the rigors of long-range submarine patrols.

Odysseus
and
Homer-as-narrator
and
the gods blame Odysseus' comrades for their own deaths:

Many were the pains at sea that he suffered in his heart
striving to win his spirit, and the return of his companions.

(1:5ff, orig., Erwin Cook, trans.)
¹¹

But not even so did he save his companions eager though he was,
for they were destroyed by their very own reckless acts,
fools, who devourd the cattle of [the sun god],
and he in turn took from them the day of their return.

But his crew was not responsible for deciding to stay in the giant's cave and eat and await his return. They had pleaded with their captain to make it a straightforward pirate snatch-and-run:

Why not take these cheeses …
and make a run for it?
We'll drive the kids and lambs aboard. We say
put out again on good salt water!”

(9:241ff, Fitzgerald)

And his vaunt after their escape provides target coordinates for the deadly curse that the Cyclops calls in like a cruise missile strike from his father, the sea god, Poseidon.
¹²
But Odysseus is determined to reclaim his warrior identity—is the need to “live on the edge” a psychological component of warrior identity?—with disastrous consequences for his people.
¹³

Can the thrill seeking and danger seeking by combat veterans after their homecoming be prevented? Can they be induced to use prudent foresight about the consequences of their actions for themselves and their families? Among Israelis I have heard a widely circulated belief that Israel has escaped the worst effects of post-combat wildness by sending its young veterans abroad for novelty and adventure, before they settle down as sober civilians upon their return. If this is true, it deserves unprejudiced study. It would be unconscionable for any country simply to export its troubles. However, if the novelty and risk taking, for example, of going by foot along almost the whole west coast of South America (a post-combat adventure I have heard about from an Israeli veteran who is now a very sober citizen) harmlessly burned off what might otherwise have ended in death or jail, we ought to know about it, so that we can do right by our own combat veterans.

One of the most common stories by and about Vietnam veterans is their experience of being discriminated against in hiring: “Once I said I was a Nam vet, it was strictly, ‘Don't call us. We'll call you.'” One marine veteran recalls applying for a manufacturing job. The personnel department interviewer asked him brightly, ‘What was your job in the military?” perhaps expecting a veteran trained in electronics, or helicopter maintenance. “Machine gunner,” he replied. “We don't need many of those,” she said, smiling at her own wit. The veteran, already on the verge of becoming what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls a “discouraged worker,” did not find it funny. He got up and walked out of the office and out of the building without saying another word.

In response to employment barriers for veterans, formal hiring (or rehiring) preferences were set up, or hiring preferences originally established for World War II veterans reactivated. These formal systems were put in place; mainly in government or quasi-governmental organizations such as the post office, public utilities, and defense contractors. In some large corporations, several veterans I know were automatically rehired into the job where they had
last
worked before enlisting in the service. These might be called
public,
or at least publicly announced, veterans' preference in hiring.

States, corporations, even mom-and-pop grocery stores are modern inventions. In the blood-feuding honor culture of the Homeric poems, it is a stretch to say that government—in the sense of institutions that exist apart from the ad hoc creations of specific people who create them through conflict and coalition—existed at all.
¹
But the ancient and eternal persist in the modern world: there has always been what might be called
private
veterans' preference, based on family or friendship networks, sentiment, and cultural ideals. Such networks allowed the returning Vietnam combat veteran to get in to see a “big man,” who himself is often a veteran of an earlier war. Whether he was a veteran himself or not, the powerful person considered this a pleasurable exercise of patriotic responsibility. Usually this patron was a successful businessman, a union boss, a politician, or—there's a dark side here, too—maybe a mob boss.

Phaeacian Court

Raid on lsmarus

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

Here is the pattern: A veteran tells his combat service story to the big man. I can't say how much and how often the story is embellished, as we may suspect Odysseus of embellishing. (Powerful men are widely believed to “check out” what they are told, so my guess is that usually the veteran's stories were told modestly, truthfully, and with self-deprecation.) And this powerful person responds with an offer of help, a leg up, an offer of “clear sailing.” What the big man offers is a job,
not
charity. The vet will have to earn his pay. But the powerful patron offers a position far more desirable than any the vet could have found through the state unemployment office or newspaper want ads.

Yet combat veterans have ruined opportunities that their war service has earned them in a thousand different ways. Homer portrays some heart-breakingly characteristic pieces of the pattern in the episode of King Aeolus, the King of the Winds. After fleeing the Cyclops, Odysseus tells it straight to King Aeolus, as many veterans have done.