Odysseus in America — Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming

Odysseus in America is the second of Jonathan Shay's two Homeric clinical books, published by Scribner (Simon & Schuster) in 2002, eight years after Achilles in Vietnam. The structure of argument is the same — a sustained reading of a Homeric poem alongside the clinical material from Shay's twenty-year practice with Vietnam veterans at the Boston VA — but the subject is different: where Achilles was about combat trauma proper, Odysseus is about homecoming, the difficulty of returning from war into civilian life that the Odyssey treats over ten years of wandering. The book carries forewords from Senator John McCain and Senator Max Cleland, both Vietnam veterans, which signals the policy audience the book was reaching for.

The clinical argument turns on a set of mappings: Odysseus's mistrust, his lies, his concealment of his thoughts and emotions, his serial violence and womanising, his obsession with proving himself, his vagrancy, his visitations by the dead — all of these, Shay argues, are recognisable patterns in his Vietnam-veteran patients, and the Odyssey offers a narrative grammar for them that contemporary psychiatry lacks. The most important policy claim attached to the clinical reading is that combat trauma ought to be prevented, not only treated, and that the principal preventable cause within the gift of military leadership is the unit-cohesion problem produced by individual-rotation personnel systems. The book is unsparing on this question.

For the moral injury literature specifically, Odysseus in America is the more under-cited of the two Shay books, partly because the discussion of moral injury proper is concentrated in Achilles and partly because the homecoming theme cut across what later became the clinical-research focus on combat-event-based morally injurious events. But Shay's account of the unhomecoming of veterans — the failure of civilian society to make a place for the return — prefigures much of what Brock and Lettini's Soul Repair would later articulate as the theological project of moral repair. Shay describes the problem and gestures at the practices required; the chaplaincy and theological literature took up the gesture and built it out.

Scribner's editorial filter is trade-academic. The book is more accessible than most clinical-psychiatry monographs and was meant to reach the policy audience the forewords name; the Bryn Mawr Classical Review notice from 2003 is again admiring and notes the book's classics-side accuracy. The second-tier place this book occupies in moral-injury syllabi (relative to Achilles) is worth resisting — the homecoming argument is doing genuine analytic work and is the better of the two books on what moral repair requires.