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Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Jonathan Shay. 1995. New York: Simon & Schuster. 246 pp., $12.00. ISBN 0-684-813211.
In one of his routines on deceptive euphemisms, comic George Carlin takes his audience through the evolution of the term used to describe a common combat affliction. In World War I, a soldier was said to be suffering from the strongly onomatopoeic condition of "shell shock." By World War II, the same condition became the more euphonious (and innocuous) "battle fatigue." In the Korean War the number of syllables rose from four to eight, and soldiers now experienced the antiseptic "operational exhaustion." Finally the Vietnam Era added a hyphen, extracted the humanity, and dubbed the condition "PostTraumatic Stress Disorder." Maybe, Carlin reasons, if we still called it "shell shock," more Vietnam veterans would have gotten the help they needed.
I thought of this ironic routine as I read Jonathan Shay's powerful linking of the condition he abbreviates as PTSD with the characters and events in Homer's Iliad. Shay, a psychiatrist whose patients are Vietnam combat veterans with severe PTSD, contends that not only can Homer teach us about a kind of wound that has been suffered by soldiers probably since the inception of war, but that readers can enlarge their understanding of the Iliad by listening to the experiences of modern soldiers. Juxtaposing the haunting personal narratives of Vietnam veterans told in their own words with the vivid literary text of the ancient epic, Shay demonstrates how ancient and modern soldiers share surprisingly similar combat experiences despite differences in weaponry, training, and attitudes toward the enemy.
Like Achilles, whose character undergoes a radically negative transformation, many Vietnam veterans came back from combat as literally different people who could not resume a normal life. Fighting for their country, Shay says, had paradoxically rendered them unfit to be its citizens. By targeting his book for both...