Odysseus in America (43 page)

Apparently he has done this before enough times that it seems normal, and nobody says to him, “That's a
really
bad idea!” Odysseus never says, “Boss, you
sure
you want to do that?” Then, with the whole army mustered,
Agamemnon stands before them and says that even though they came ashore with a ten-to-one advantage over the Trojans, Zeus has decreed their failure after so much struggle and sacrifice: (2:150ff, Lombardo)

Now this is what I say, and I want us all to obey:
Let's clear out with our ships and head for home.
There's no more hope we will take Troy's … town.

There's a stampede for the ships, a mad rush that takes everyone by surprise. Apparently in the past, when Agamemnon had pulled this dumb trick, the troops had stood fast and said, “Hey, we're here for the duration.” Agamemnon is surprised; the Greek officers are surprised—even the gods are surprised—when the army bolts for the ships.

But should
we
be surprised? No, we should not be—because this is the predictable result of Agamemnon's betrayals of “what's right” the previous day with Achilles and with the priest.
²²
Motivation, loyalty, and perseverance go whooshing out of the troops like air from a balloon. In the modern world they desert psychologically, even if they can't desert physically. This scene in
Iliad
2, the stampede to the ships, carries one of the
Iliad'
s most important lessons for military leaders. “Command climate” is not the weather report of atmospherics and mood; it is the observed trustworthiness of how power is employed. What Agamemnon did to Achilles was no private wrong. As I said before, everyone is watching the trustworthiness of those who wield power above them. If any dared to ask, Agamemnon would have said that what went between him and Achilles was none of their business. But when a military leader violates “what's right” in the use of power, the injury afflicts everyone. Agamemnon caused Achilles' desertion and the next day caused the stampede to the ships, the desertion of his whole army.

When I speak of prevention of moral injury in military service, this Homeric episode is an example of what I want to prevent: betrayal of “what's right” in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power. The consequences for those still on active duty range from a loss of motivation and enjoyment, resulting in attrition from the service at the next available moment, to passive obstructionism, goldbricking, and petty theft, to outright desertion, sabotage, fragging, or treason. In a war, the consequences are catastrophic.

Agamemnon's main motivational tools were shame, humiliation, and
pitting one subordinate against another. He was weak, inconsistent, driven by self-gratification, and demonstrated egregiously bad judgment.

Heaven help a military force of any size with this kind of leadership!

Achilles stands out as a paragon of leadership, up to the point when Agamemnon's disastrous misuse of power destroys him. Achilles was an almost perfectly good leader; Agamemnon was an almost perfectly bad leader. Odysseus was a mixture of extremely good and extremely bad military traits. Don't laugh: Homer may have given us a basic message on military personnel management—“Put the right person in the right place. In the wrong place, he'll do harm.”
²³
As a staff officer, strategist, independent intelligence operative, and solo fighter, Odysseus was brilliant. As a troop leader, he was a catastrophe. Homer's great epics show him in full depth and perspective.

If you have read this far, you have found me an unashamed moralist. The reason for that is also plain: I regard the ethical use of power to be one key to prevention of psychological injury, particularly of complex PTSD and deformed
thumos.
Simply, ethics and justice
are
preventive psychiatry. But I trust that it's also clear that I am not what scholar W. B. Stanford called a “moralistic enemy of poetry” seeking to censor the
Odyssey
or dismiss it as childish, because it is so marvelously entertaining.
¹
I reject the view that the arts are intrinsically harmless, benign, or irrelevant. While we no longer believe that the arts can command physical nature, as in mimetic magical dances commanding the weather or the herds, they are undoubtedly a commanding force of nature where
human
nature is concerned. No soldier ever threw himself on a grenade for the laws of thermodynamics or even the categorical imperative, but has done so for a story. I stand with Aristotle, and against his teacher, Plato, in seeing the arts as essential to the moral education of citizens, even when the subject of the art is as slippery as Odysseus.

Epic heroes of the Homeric poems, Odysseus and Achilles, were both “men of pain,” suffering greatly, but also causing great pain and destruction to others.
²
The ancient Greeks venerated them like gods, composing prayers to them, bringing offerings at their tombs and shrines, marking them as sacred, holy. One of the veterans quoted in
Achilles in Vietnam
described the memories that he wanted to—and feared to—narrate as “sacred stuff.”

When we use the word “hero” today, we want it to mean only good and benign. In the same way we also want “holy” to mean only good and benign. The original meanings of both “hero” and “holy” included dark, destructive sides. Both hero and holy fascinate and rivet the attention, to be sure, but they are
dangerous.
³
They explode out of any container we
hope to put them in, burst any chains of agreed rules and reciprocity we hope will bind them.

Homeric heroes inflict trauma, but it is just as true to say that trauma creates heroes. Achilles suffered the one-two blows of Agamemnon's betrayal and the death of his closest comrade, Patroclus, which together powered his epic rampage in the
Iliad.
Odysseus' multiple traumas, starting in childhood, powered his epic rampage in the
Odyssey.
They both had a giant
thumos.
Whether giant
thumos
manifests as
biē
or as
mētis,
it is impossible to found civil society or for that matter a “well-regulated militia” on giant
thumos.
⁴
Very early in the development of democratic politics, giant
thumos
was recognized as a source of danger and disorder, a source of moves to tyrannize the entire populace.
⁵
Equal citizen respect does not preclude vigorous competitive struggles among citizens in politics and economics, but does require that the struggle restrain
biē
and
mē tis
to create a trustworthy setting in which no one ends up a slave. Ever since its origin, democratic struggle has been scorned as unheroic, because it renounces the fight to the death and the making of slaves. The rowdy and contentious Funeral Games for Patroclus in
Iliad
23, which are Achilles' great step back into human society, might be taken as an early metaphor for the rowdy and messy, but ultimately safe, struggle of equal citizens. If either safety or struggle is lost, democratic process ceases.

Democracy is deeply related to the healing and prevention of trauma. Healing requires voice. The circle of communalization of trauma, which is essential to the healing of trauma, is much aided by the arts. Sometimes these are highly cultivated arts, as in the Homeric poems or Athenian tragedies, but human groups engage in the arts in many other ways when grappling with trauma. This book and
Achilles in Vietnam
are about the arts, especially the narrative arts, as social responses to trauma.

Prevention of trauma lies squarely in the realm of justice, ethics, and recognition of one another's humanness, recognition that we are in this together and part of one another's future. As such, prevention is intrinsic to the goals of our own polity and of any future world polity based on democracy.

Judith Herman eloquently pointed out in
Trauma and Recovery
⁶
that the trauma survivor must be permitted and empowered to voice his or her experience; the listener(s) must be allowed to listen, believe, and remember;
the listener(s) must be allowed to repeat what they have heard to others. Each of these steps is forbidden in a tyranny, whether it is a public, official tyranny, like the “Republic” of Iraq, or private tyrannies like those created by domestic batterers, incest perpetrators, or on prison tiers. When trauma survivors hear that enough of the truth of their experience has been understood, remembered, and retold with enough fidelity to carry
some
of this truth—no one who did not experience their trauma can ever grasp
all
of the truth—then the circle of communalization is complete.
⁷

The arts can and usually do play vital roles at each one of these steps. Often the artist is the trauma survivor himself or herself—but this is not essential. The Muses can implant the truth of experience in the imagination of artists who have never “been there,” so long as the artist is able to listen to trauma survivors. Professional artists are
not
required for this. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the arts in creating the supportive social movements that permit trauma to have voice and the voice to be heard, believed, remembered, and respoken.

While I have couched this in terms of the verbal, narrative arts of poetry, narrative history, narrative fiction, theater, and film, I trust the reader has already understood that this applies equally to the visual arts and the arts of music and movement. Often with trauma survivors themselves, the non-verbal arts are the door that is most readily opened.
⁸
Creating art has far greater potential for healing trauma than consuming art as a reader, listener, or viewer—as valuable as these are. I believe that a trauma survivor gets more out of composing and performing his own poem, which may not be a masterpiece, than he would hearing Homer himself perform his masterpiece.

Part of the genius of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington—the Wall—is that it invites both active doing and passive viewing. Walking down the gentle slope next to the panels is an act of entering the sacred space. Many people leave letters and poems. As fine as the many books on the Wall are, they are very different from physically entering its precinct, making rubbings, watching the Three Fighting Men statuary group gaze at the Wall with their stunned look.

I have appealed for renovation in our military institutions to protect service members from psychological and moral injury. In addition to political demands for such renovation, the American citizenry has other
work to do. As a society we have found ourselves unable to offer purification to those who do the terrible acts of war on our behalf. I believe this is something to be done jointly by people from all our religions, from the arts, from the mental health professions, and from the ranks of combat veterans—
not
from the government. What I have in mind is a communal ritual with religious force
⁹
that recognizes that
everyone
who has shed blood, no matter how blamelessly, is in need of purification. Those who have done something blameworthy require additional purification and penance, if their religious tradition provides for it. The community as a whole, which sent these young people to train in the profession of arms and to use those arms, is no less in need of purification. Such rituals
must
be communal with the returning veterans, not something done to or for them before they return to civilian life. This new cultural creation also must stay free of the taint of sectarian, political, and ideological partisanship, which would willingly kidnap such a ritual. All modern soldiers go into battle under constraint—they have enough to carry without being blamed or credited with the political decision to fight that battle.

I do not know how the creation of a new and widely accepted cultural practice can be accomplished, but I do know that we need it.

What have we learned from Vietnam veterans and from Odysseus about being home? So much resonates in the one syllable, “home,” that we should not be surprised if unpacking the idea makes quite a heap. Reach into the heap and pull something out, and you discover it's tangled with almost everything else.

Safety:
Neither Odysseus nor the Vietnam combat veterans with complex PTSD found safety in the place that was supposed to be their home. In Ithaca, Odysseus was literally surrounded by young men who would kill him if they were given the chance. Danger was what PTSD veterans expected The expectation of harm was itself a result of their psychological injuries, but subjective or objective, it wasn't home.

Acceptance:
Can Odysseus or the veterans say who they are without fear? Vietnam veterans experienced everything, from others feeling awkward to outright abuse.

Value and respect:
Odysseus was told, “Get away from my table” by one of the suitors (in Odysseus' own home!). An airline stewardess moved one of my patients, in uniform, because the person in the next seat didn't want to sit beside “the likes of him.” Returning infantrymen found their hard-won
skills without value and they were pigeonholed as “unskilled labor.” What value will this veteran's contribution have? Odysseus returned disguised as a beggar, whose social value was seen as a net negative.

Knowing one's way:
Odysseus spent ten years completely lost, metaphorically speaking. When he finally returned to Ithaca, he couldn't recognize the place at first. Through a combination of the changes that had taken place in themselves and taken place in American society during their years of military service, many Vietnam veterans could not “get around” socially and economically.