Odysseus in America (11 page)

To this city of theirs we came, their splendid palace,
And Aeolus hosted me one entire month, he pressed me for the news
of Troy and the [Greek] ships, and how we sailed for home,
and I
told him the whole long story, first to last.

(10:16ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

Aeolus offers to help with an open hand, holding nothing back:

And then, when I begged him to send me on my way,
He denied me nothing….
He gave me a sack …
binding inside the winds that howl from every quarter,
for Zeus had made that king the master of all the winds …

(10:20ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

The King of the Winds gives Odysseus a double benefit. He gives him a perfect following wind—a straight shot for home—and in a big bag that he stows on Odysseus' ship, Aeolus bottles up all the winds that can blow him off course. As a general metaphor Aeolus offers Odysseus an obstacle-free return, a “painless” (thus unheroic) return, a homecoming without personal tempests. Occupationally, it is clear sailing with a following wind—what a metaphor for opportunity!

Nine whole days we sailed, nine nights, nonstop.

(10:32ff, Fagles; emphasis added)

On the tenth our own land hove into sight at last—
We were so close we could see men tending fires.

But now an enticing sleep came on me,
bone weary
From working the vessel's sheet myself, no letup,
Never trusting the ropes to any other mate,
The faster to journey back …

Odysseus has stayed awake nine days and nights managing the sail! He doesn't
trust
anyone else to do it right, even though Aeolus has given him a perfect following wind.
²
Odysseus has, in the words of many veterans, made a “mission” out of it, and he didn't trust anyone else to do it right while he himself caught some sleep. Sailing directly downwind was probably within the skills of even the least capable of his crew, but he wouldn't “delegate.”

One veteran in our program, an African-American man I shall call River, because he is intensely proud of his service in a riverine unit in Vietnam, got in to see the head of the authority that operates the toll bridges and tunnels in the Boston area. A job as a toll taker was regarded as a plum in his community at the time because of its good pay, stability, benefits, and relative protection from racial discrimination. After landing the job, River worked shift after shift without resting, until the police took him away after he assaulted a motorist as a result of his sleep-deprived irritation and confusion. He lost the plum job.

Odysseus had also not trusted his shipmates enough to tell them what was in the big bag under his bench. Woe to the leader who starts from the assumption that his men must be kept in the dark on everything except their orders. In the absence of trustworthy information from the leader, they fill in the blanks from their imagination, often imagining the worst. After Odysseus falls asleep, they begin to mutter among themselves,

‘Look at our captain's luck—so loved by the world …'
‘Heaps of lovely plunder he hauls home from Troy,
while we who went through slogging just as hard,
we go home empty-handed.'

(10:43ff, Fagles)

‘Now this Aeolous loads him
down with treasure….'
‘Hurry, let's see what loot is in that sack,
how much gold and silver. Break it open—now!'

The hurricane winds in the sack come roaring out and blow the ships back out to sea.

Odysseus awakens with a start and instantly realizes what has happened. For a moment, he bleakly thinks of suicide, the only time we hear Odysseus consider taking his own life. (In this Odysseus is very
unlike
the veterans I work with in the clinic. Almost every one thinks daily of suicide—it seems to sustain them as a bottom line of human freedom and dignity. Having touched that talisman each day, they continue the struggle.) The implied lesson that falling asleep is dangerous is a very common gut sense among combat veterans. Being able to stay awake is one of the fundamental survival adaptations of soldiers in modern war, and persistence of this survival adaptation into civilian life creates endless problems. Falling asleep while on bunker guard duty on the perimeter of a base could mean severe punishment if caught, but in a night defensive position while “humping the boonies”—long-distance combat patrols on foot—it could mean “waking up dead.” Vietnam veteran folklore, very possibly based on truth, recounts the enemy “mind-fuck” of silently cutting the throats of every man sleeping in a position,
except
the one sleeping soldier who was supposed to have been alert.

The 101st Airborne reconnaissance sergeant with four combat tours in Vietnam, whose voice and narrative figured prominently in
Achilles in Vietnam,
developed his own personal aversion to sleep. He became suicidal and panicky when the medication I prescribed caused him to sleep soundly. Toward the end of his first combat tour in Vietnam as the sergeant in charge of a five-man reconnaissance team, he had contracted pneumonia and been hospitalized. While he was in the hospital, his team was sent out under another leader, and his closest friend on the team, the Patroclus to his Achilles, had been killed. He felt that he was to blame for his friend's death because he allowed himself to relax in the hospital—and to get one good night's sleep for the first and only time in Vietnam. He
carries in his soul the guilty belief that had he not been sick, had he not
slept,
his friend would still be alive. He now cannot sleep. Whatever his reason may say, his heart tells him: “You let down, you go to sleep—people die.”

Within sight of home, Odysseus' squadron is blown all the way back to Aeolia. Depressed, Odysseus drags himself from the beach to the palace and sits down on the threshold. Aeolus, the powerful patron, spots him and shouts,

‘Back again, Odysseus—why? …
Surely we launched you well….'

(10:70ff, Fagles)

I replied in deep despair,
‘A mutinous crew undid me—that and a cruel sleep.

Set it to rights, my friends. You have the power!'

Back again? Give me another chance. Back again? Give me another chance. How many times this has replayed itself in the lives of the veterans I work with. They have screwed up the golden opportunity that their war service has earned them and they go back, humble supplicants, to the big man.

Aeolus gives him only one bite at the apple, and harshly turns Odysseus away with words that ring like a curse:

Away from my island—fast—most cursed man alive!
It's a curse to … [help] a man …
when the blessed deathless gods despise him so.

(10:79ff, Fagles)

Crawling back like
this—
It proves the immortals hate you! Out—get out!

Hated by God—this is how many veterans feel.

Homer identifies some characteristic ways in which combat veterans blight valuable chances offered by influential benefactors:

• He turns it into a “combat mission,” such as working the job for days and nights without sleeping.

• He doesn't trust anyone else to “do it right.”

• He doesn't trust anyone with the facts they need to know to help him do the job.

Many a veteran has felt his “real homecoming” just within his grasp and then lost it, leading to despair, demoralization, and thoughts or attempts of suicide, whether before or after going back to the benefactor to beg for a second chance. The drama of homecoming is in part a drama of rejection or acceptance. Many a veteran has had the experience that people who formerly helped them “turn cold and still,” and greet him with the question, “What, again?” They have been left feeling humiliated by their own pleading for another chance. They have been driven out of factory offices, union halls, government offices and felt “cursed by heaven.”

In American culture, one's claim to automatic esteem, respect, and recognition is determined by having a “good” job. The generation of young men who grew up in households of World War II veterans believed that simply serving one's country, especially in war, established a claim to automatic esteem, respect, recognition, and employment. That was what they expected to come home to. To repeatedly lose jobs became a bitter way to lose their homecoming.

The experience of returning from war to civilian society is universal, something that's been with us as long as war has been a human practice. In the Homeric world, what a powerful man could do for a veteran was to offer material help of some sort, such as food, shelter, transportation on the way home, as King Aeolus does. Homer shows us several examples of exiles settling as dependent retainers in the household of the powerful man.
³
“Employment” as we know it hardly existed, although the bards appearing in the
Odyssey
and the heralds of the
Iliad
seem to be in some sense “employees” of the princes they are attached to. So could any of the singers known to tradition as Homer have “intended” this metaphor that I find in the story of Aeolus, King of the Winds—of ruining an opportunity from a powerful patron? Maybe not. But mistrusting others so much as not to let them help, or not to tell them what you know, and thus causing a disaster—these were not invented in the twentieth century.

A Vietnam veteran, who has never sought a VA disability pension or psychological treatment from the VA, contacted me by e-mail after reading
Achilles in Vietnam,
and we met when he moved to the Boston area for his wife's graduate studies. We talked about the King of the Winds chapter, and I sent him my first draft—resulting in e-mail with these reflections on his own work life:

I've never screwed up a job because of sleep deprivation. I have however, screwed up my relationships on the job by making that job a mission.
More to the point, my life is a mission. I don't know how not to be on a “mission.” Intellectually, it's not a problem. Emotionally, it is.

Insofar as employment, I've never been fired. Instead, I have pissed people off by making them look bad. I do this by working harder than anyone else, and I never stop. In more than one case, I've quit because none of my co-workers could stand to be around me, and I would end up hating all of them, fantasizing about killing them, etc., until I couldn't stand the idea of going there anymore. My wife calls it my obsessive mode. On the job, I don't know how to stop, and I'm nearly always on the job….

Someday I'd like very much to rest, and feel rested. I think that that's got something to do with not having any real friends. I can't relax, and no one else seems to when they're around me. My wife's the exception, but even that's only sometimes. You know, those times when I'm absolutely clear that she needs me to be there for her, then I'm okay.

Nobody else has had the guts to be that way with me for twenty-five years. I respect her for that.

Dedication, sometimes going over the line into fanaticism, is normal for combat veterans in the workplace. It accounts for the success in the world that many do achieve. They typically work
much
more than forty hours a week. The truism “Money isn't everything” has an unusual application here. I have never known a group of people so little interested in money as the combat veterans I have worked with. If they have worked like madmen, like they are on a “mission,” it is not for the money, but for the sake of having a mission that shuts everything else from their minds.

One veteran formerly in our treatment program—a giant of a man who left school in grade school—worked so much overtime as a stevedore on the docks that he was able to purchase a large house in an upscale suburb of Boston for his wife (now ex-wife) and children. They never saw him.

When I write these words, I have been working with Vietnam combat veterans for fourteen years. The veterans are now more than a decade older than when I started. While I have not attempted to go back to clinic records and do a count, my impression is that the typical civilian employment history of the veterans newly coming into the program a decade ago was fifty or more jobs since Vietnam, none longer than a year. Now the typical Vietnam veteran newly admitted to the program worked the same job for ten to thirty years making good money, and then “broke down,” incapacitated by combat-related symptoms and emotions. The life courses of the veterans with fifty-plus jobs in twenty years and those who held a single job in that time are very different, with very different consequences for
the veteran, his family, and society. But what impresses me most, having gotten to know veterans in both groups quite well, is not how different they are, but how
similar.

The event triggering a “breakdown” from a long successful job history has usually been some external event that prevented the veteran from keeping the workaholic schedule he had followed. One veteran currently in the program worked his way to top site supervisor in a nationally prominent demolition firm. Arrest and incarceration for assault—probably facilitated by the amphetamines that he used to support his workaholism—led to his collapse. Another “broke down” when cardiac bypass surgery interrupted his fourteen-hour-a-day work habits.

Farmer (pseudonym), a Navy veteran of the vicious “brown water” war in the canals of the Mekong Delta, had worked well and happily (and for killingly long hours) for ten years in a high-tech company producing equipment for the pharmaceutical industry. His perfectionism was a highly valued trait in the custom manufacture of this equipment for ultra-pure chemical processes. He felt respected and valued, and the interpersonal conflicts in the workplace so prominent in the “Vietnam Vet Stereotype” were blessedly absent. Then the parent company, a huge international pharmaceutical firm, sold the business to its main competitor “for market share,” and all ninety employees, including the president, lost their jobs. Destruction of his livelihood and work community by distant powers acting on highly abstract and—to him—unreal motives set off numerous traumatic triggers for this Navy veteran. But most of all, he lost the setting in which he could perform his “mission.” He became depressed, suicidal, and flooded with intrusive symptoms related to the ambush of his assault support patrol boat in the Mekong Delta the night before Thanksgiving 1968.