Odysseus in America (22 page)

I remember when I got out, man, I, I, all I did was look for some relief, some release and the only release was fucking. I'd fuck anything, fat, tall, that wasn't the point.

[After returning, but while still in the service,] we were sent to Nantucket Island, a bunch of guys, I think there were 110 of them. I went to Nantucket Island—what in the
fuck
am I doing on Nantucket Island?—and that was to study us, to give us our medication, whatever the fuck they were giving us, we didn't know…. We were on Nantucket, fucking everything that walks, drinking and fucking and here we are in the service on this island. It was mixed forces [not all Navy], Green Berets, a lot of us was shell shocked. They didn't know what the fuck to do with us. They just kinda kept us there. You could not leave the island for the first six months. I was there for a year. They was giving us medication. They had a thing called the pill line. I couldn't tell you what they gave us….

It is evident that
someone
in the military at the time recognized that personnel in units actively engaged in counterinsurgency warfare, such as Wiry and the counterinsurgency teams he inserted and extracted, could neither be turned loose on the American public nor simply given other noncombat military assignments—without some intervening “treatment.”

Nantucket in the summertime was a fucking playground. You meet broads, we're stationed there, we don't know what the fuck we're stationed there for. A different broad every night, twosomes, threesomes, it was a liberal fucking place. It was just fucking crazy, but it was a relief for a short period of time. It worked better than booze. In my mind it had intimacy. With booze I didn't have intimacy. You're fucking someone you don't know, but you know that
you're
fucking. I wouldn't even call it lust. It's what I'm supposed to do and I feel good doing it, but then you get up and leave. After you're done you couldn't wait to get the fuck outta there. Also on Nantucket. Once you're done everything popped back up [i.e., intrusive memories and emotions related to Vietnam]. But for that five minutes you forget everything. Then you get up and leave.

You know you're walking down the street [today] and you see a guy with his wife, holding hands, and you wonder “why can't I do that? Why can't I hold hands like that?” I want to, but I don't know how. It seems like there's a process to it, but we don't know the process. You know, people
hugging and shit like that? We do it in different ways. We take care of our wives, we give them what they want. We make sure they're not afraid of anyone—we're there if anything fucking happens. We have intimacy in
that
way.

You're drunk, you're slobbering over some broad—I touched it [intimacy]. I didn't touch it with the person I
want
to [i.e., his wife], but I touched it. Back then I didn't know what it was for. It felt good, and not too many things felt good lately and this is one of them. You know I can drink till I drop. Booze and fucking has a lot to do with all our scenarios, booze would lead to sex. Half of us don't drink anymore. The pact between booze and sex fucking ended.

And when I went home—you know, I think I still have a problem, I still have a problem today, approaching my wife for sex. I don't know if she wants me to approach her. I don't know the steps. Every once in a while it's okay, but most of the time it ain't. I won't say it's the punishment, but I'd say for us it's the way it's supposed to be. We don't put a lot of stock in it.

You got a wife and a family, and you can't abandon them, so, you just fuck. There's nights you don't come home. The wife, she figures you're out on a drunk again. And most of us did weird things, really, but we always left the money at home. Like, “That's for you, because this part of me isn't good.” [I would] fuck nasty, but you couldn't do that kind of thing to your wife. That's a whole different thing. That's the woman that nurtures you, and puts you back together and puts up with your bullshit.

If you look at a lot of us, we had solid women, the women were strong, they were solid. That's what we lost. We were in the fucking jungle while they were going to their prom, the holding hands. You know, the high school sweetheart, we gave that up. Willingly, we gave it up. We didn't know it. But we gave it up willingly and said “I'm going to do
this
[fight a war],” so we can't capture [what was lost], don't know how to. Before Nam, I remember going out with girls in high school, not fuck or anything, but making out all night, kissing and—I remember doing that. [Before Vietnam] not really fucking. It was that time in the early 1960s, you went home and took a cold shower half the time. But the intimacy was there, the hugging and the kissing and you could put your arm around the girl you went out with. These weren't sluts….

Wiry was conscious that prostituted women are in fact enslaved.

You don't want to degrade your wife to that level. [Like a slave?] Yes. There's times when she approaches me, and you know what? You're very careful making love. You're very careful in your mind. In your mind you don't want
to get dog-fucking-dirty. This is my wife, the mother of my kids. She's the one who holds the family together. I supply [the family's livelihood]. That's a whole different thing. I don't have a word for it.

It has a type of relief that's good for a while, sure as hell better than any booze. Some of us ain't drinking anymore so it's harder.

The way we, amongst ourselves, look at it is it's just another price we pay.

This very sad narrative is a remarkable example of persistence into the modern world of very ancient patterns of citizen-wife contrasted to slave-prostitute. The emotional distinction Wiry makes has been extensively discussed in terms of “the Madonna and the whore,” missing, I think, “the citizen and the slave.” Wiry was as addicted to sex as any alcoholic to alcohol or heroin addict to opiates. I do not use the term “sexaholic” as a metaphor.

The veterans' counselor and prolific author on trauma Aphrodite Matsakis, now retired from the Vet Center system, wrote on this subject in her book
Vietnam Wives,
where she devoted a whole chapter to “PTSD and Sex.” She writes,

For some vets, sex is more than sex. It is a form of tranquillizer or sedative for their anxieties and other tensions. Not only does sex provide a sense of physical peace, but emotional peace as well. “Sex takes away my anger,” explains Tom. “After satisfying sex, for a few moments at least, all seems well, both within and without.” … Furthermore, for some vets, orgasm functions as a form of “shock treatment” for their depression. “If I don't have at least three orgasms a day, I get so blue I can't stand it. The minute I start feeling down, I reach for my wife …” [said another veteran]. When his wife refuses him sexually, it is not just sexual frustration which he suffers, but the full weight of some of his symptoms of PTSD.
³

Homer, it could be said, thought that Odysseus spent eight of the ten years getting home taking the sex cure, one year for Circe and seven for Calypso. The Circe and Calypso episodes in the
Odyssey
may be interpreted as real attempts at calming the violent blowback of war with sex—lots of it.

Calypso, under Zeus' orders, helps Odysseus build a large, seaworthy raft, provisions it, and sees him off. Twenty days later, nearly drowned and stripped naked by the storms that Poseidon sent to torment him, Odysseus washes up on the shores of the Land of the Phaeacians, bringing us to where we first met him at the beginning of Chapter 2.

From the Phaeacians he has succeeded in winning a wealth of guest-gifts and a swift ride home to Ithaca. We now turn to what he does and what kind of person he shows himself to be when he gets home. Homer isn't through with us.

By now you must wonder if I have not so turned against Odysseus as a military leader that I cannot rejoice in his long-sought reunion with son and wife as a veteran. Indeed, it is hard to warm to someone who has done so much harm. The portrait Homer gives us of his doings once actually at home on the island of Ithaca is hardly more endearing than the one painted by his adventures on the way. Constant lying, coldness toward his wife, cruelty toward his aged father, killing off more than a hundred townsmen, and ordering the extermination of a dozen of his women servants, and then after all that—he takes off again! The only thing that stands in the way of finally and completely writing him off as a stage villain is the rich and humanizing relationship revealed with his wife, Penelope—who amazingly turns out to be his equal and “better half.”
¹
For all the terrible things he has done to others, Odysseus emerges not as a monster, but as human like ourselves. The
Odyssey
shows us ugly deformities of character that trauma can cause, but these deformities are fully human such as might happen to ourselves, and, in fact, did happen to many of the veterans I work with.

Odysseus speeds home to Ithaca on the automated ship (it reads the minds of the Phaeacian sailors) belonging to King Alcinous and Queen Arete. For a third time in the
Odyssey,
he falls asleep, but this time without a bad outcome. The crew puts him ashore in a cove, still sleeping, with his treasure hoard of guest-gifts, and they leave.

Great Odysseus woke from sleep on native ground at last—he'd been away for years—but failed to know the land.

(13:213f, Fagles)

Many veterans experienced that disorienting bewilderment. This wasn't the place they left. The rapid pace of social and cultural change in
America, starting in the early 1960s, has been often remarked and often blamed by Vietnam veterans themselves for their sense of estrangement. But for a returning combat veteran to “fail to know the land” is typical for the return to civilian society. The whole middle third of Willard Waller's 1944
The Veteran Comes Back
is titled “The Soldier-Turned-Veteran Comes Back to an Alien Homeland.” Homer saw this first, and what he saw wasn't pretty.

After stomping around in a rage at the deceit of the Phaeacians in marooning him (he thinks) on yet another foreign shore, Odysseus consoles himself by checking his treasure and finding it intact. This done, he wanders homesick and aimless by the shore and encounters an elegant youth—resembling the scion of a local noble's house—who the poet tells us is the goddess Athena, Odysseus' patroness, in disguise. He asks for sanctuary, for guest-protection and … what land is this anyway? With a flowery buildup, the youth replies, Ithaca.

Ithaca
… Heart racing, Odysseus that great exile
filled with joy….
He stood on native ground at last
and he replied with a winging word to [Athena],
not with a word of truth …
always invoking the cunning in his heart:
“Ithaca … yes, I seem to have heard of Ithaca,
even … far across the sea …”

(13:284ff, Fagles)

And then for another thirty lines he spins a fluent stream of lies about who he is, where he comes from, and how he has landed here. This self-introduction is surprising in the same unsettling way that his self-introduction to the Phaeacians as master of cunning was surprising. He tells this utter stranger, who is armed, and from whom he is asking safe sanctuary, that he is a fugitive murderer from Crete. Is this aimed at intimidating the noble youth? I killed him, I could just as easily kill you, if you don't give me what I want—all told in a breezy, confident, here's-my-story-because-I-trust-you tone. Odysseus chatters on in this confidential way, mixing momentous revelation with trivial fictitious details about the boat and crew that provided his getaway. In the course of these thirty or so lines Odysseus spins a verbal web that says, I can kill you if I want; I am noble like you; I have reinforcements; I'm willing to bribe you; there's lot's more where that came from; and where's my food, anyway. All of this was already recognized by ancient commentators, known as scholiasts, and the twelfth-century Greek churchman Eustathius.
²

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

I have encountered this sort of threat by indirection in the VA Clinic. One veteran told me offhandedly about another psychiatrist he had choked—his tone suggested that I was not to worry, because I'm smarter and more understanding than the other psychiatrist was and that the veteran trusted me already. That was in the other building. This is a fresh start in a new building … and other easygoing and reassuring details.

Unlike a merely mortal VA psychiatrist, the goddess Athena doesn't even break a sweat. With a big grin she drops her disguise and says,