Odysseus (The Vatican Museums, Rome)
By Todd DePastino
You would think that if the ancient Greeks told a story about a triumphant soldier returning home from a far off war, they’d fill it with banquets and celebrations, orations, and commemorations, all hailing the conquering hero.
But that’s not what they did. Instead, the Greeks gave us something deeper and better: Homer’s The Odyssey. It’s one of the oldest and most important stories in history.
The hero, Odysseus, a veteran of the Trojan War, returns home all right, but only after ten years of wandering hardships where he battles monsters, escapes captivity, survives storms, and suffers from his own bad decisions.
Homer considered the experience of coming home so momentous, he gave it a single word, nostos. He coupled nostos with another Greek word, algos, connoting pain and grief. “Nostalgia” is the watered-down concept we inherited from Homer’s deep understanding of the suffering entailed when you attempt to return from a life-changing adventure.
Odysseus’s suffering doesn’t end when he washes ashore in his beloved Ithaca. In fact, he doesn’t recognize the place. The goddess Athena has cloaked the island in a mist. Everything looks strange and foreign.
Odysseus has also changed. He’s dressed in beggar’s clothes and no one recognizes him. The young men he meets are energetic and have never known war. Some are hitting on his wife, Penelope. Even she can’t see that this raggedy old man is her husband.
The story of Odysseus isn’t meant to be taken at face value. It’s an allegory with hidden meanings tucked within the story’s bizarre twists and turns. For veterans, The Odyssey’s main lesson is this: coming home from war can be as tough as fighting the war itself.
We’ve been re-telling The Odyssey’s story and re-learning Odysseus’s lesson ever since Homer recorded it with a reed brush on papyrus 2,800 years ago.
Hemingway wrote about it (“Soldier’s Home”), and Winslow Homer painted it (“Veteran in a New Field”). Filmmakers have told versions of the story from King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) to Daria Sommers’s (yes, our own Daria Sommers) “Lionness” (2008).
Armed Services Edition of Homer’s The Odyssey, 1943, distributed during WWII. Translated by T.E. Shaw, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia.
The greatest movie made about World War II, William Wyler’s 1946 film “The Best Years of Our Lives,” doesn’t contain a single combat scene. Instead, it tells an understated story of three World War II Veterans—one named “Homer”—returning to their Midwestern hometown. Almost three hours long, the movie is an epic. Coming home isn’t an event. It’s an agonizing process.
The problem of veteran suicide—22-a-day, we’ve been told—suggests we need to keep learning from The Odyssey. When Service Members take their lives, they usually do so back home during that “deadly gap” between the end of their military service and passage to civilian life. It’s this transition period that’s most hazardous.
Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay spent decades treating Vietnam Veterans and comparing their experiences to Odysseus’s and found fascinating parallels. In his 2003 book Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, Shay argues that Vietnam Veterans’ sour homecoming compounded their trauma. American society failed to embrace these warriors and, instead, lacerated them with criticism or, at best, turned away from them in malign neglect.
A key part of healing, argues Shay, is reconnecting with a trustworthy community that will listen to veterans’ stories without judgment. Veterans, he says, “must be permitted and empowered to voice his or her experience. The listeners must be allowed to listen, believe, remember, and repeat what they have heard to others.”
The oldest-known manuscript fragment of The Odyssey, produced in Ptolemaic Egypt during the 3rd century B.C. (Public Domain)
Sharing stories in a group is what the Veterans Breakfast Club is all about. We call it a “community of listening” that creates bonds of recognition and restores social trust. Without such community, the algos that comes with nostos will turn inward and fester.
The Odyssey, in the end, is as much about those of us back home as it is about the returning hero. It’s about the quality of the community needed to welcome back the warrior.
Our VBC veterans, and by extension all veterans, are Odysseus, washed up on American shores trying to explain where they’ve been and what they’ve seen. Our duty is to honor their journey by listening so that we can understand just what they risked and sacrificed for all of us.
