A crucial book for understanding the nature of PTSD (specifically, combat-related PTSD, but I find a lot of the lessons transfer to childhood trauma-related PTSD) and the description of the symptoms suffered by Achilles in the Iliad. I've recently (as of this writing in 2018) renewed my study of Homeric Greek, and wanted to re-read this book as well, since it informs my understanding of the Iliad.

A fascinating and haunting explanation of how war decimates our soldiers' lives. This is exceedingly relevant in light of the suicide epidemic that has hit our war veterans. They deserve better than they are receiving. This is a definite reread.

A strange book but a good one and an important one, historically. This book does many things at once, and doesn't do many things you might expect it to. In principle about PTSD in combat veterans, this book offers an incredibly, gut-wrenchingly intimate portrait of the disorder's causes and manifestations but nothing in the way of a concrete treatment methodology (other than an injunction towards compassionate listening), despite the fact that all details are drawn from clinical settings. In principle a critical reading of the Iliad, this book has no need to read anything into the epic, since combat and combat trauma is the very stuff of Homer's work. Instead this book is something more like an excellent introduction to (or maybe celebration of) the Iliad. Plain-speaking, loving, and startlingly holistic (he pulls pretty much evenly from the entire work), it's an incredibly impressive piece of non-specialist classical scholarship.

Other reviewers have pointed out very real flaws in Shay's argumentation: most fundamental I think is that it's not always clear if Shay is diagnosing PTSD in Vietnam veterans or diagnosing Vietnam. Given how uniformly morally injurious Vietnam was to the soldiers involved, why did some but not others suffer the kind of "character damage" Shay describes so well? It's not a sin for Shay not to know the answer, but it weakens the book, at least rhetorically, to not address the question at all. Also it has to be said that this book is bloated. It repeats itself often, often literally reprints transcripts, and the bloat is worst in the weakest sections, especially the critique of "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" religion. But I think these are forgivable faults in a unique and experimental work of compassion. Shay's loyalty to his patients shines through these pages, as does his love for the Iliad.

I think there's a lot to say for Shay's straightforward reading of Homer. He is, for example, explicitly not interested in the homoeroticism between Achilles and Patroclus, which he characterizes an artifact of Attic (re)interpretation. Shay (bravely, I think) declines to take the usual critical distance most modern readers take when reading the Iliad; that is to say, he takes Homer at his word. Early in the book, he gives the following analogy to Agamemnon's seizure of Briseis: "A modern equivalent might be a commander telling a soldier, 'I'll take that Congressional Medal of Honor of yours, because I don't have one.'" I think this is an analogy you wouldn't get from most commentators on a moment where two ancient heroes bicker over a trophy slave-woman, but it is close, I think, to how Homer conceptualizes the moment, and explains why the act is so injures Achilles' pride. His diagnosis of Achilles as "Berzerking" (a technical term for Shay) seems apt to me as well, as does his reading of 'warrior restraint' as Homer's chief martial value.

Thankfully Shay only rarely pushes the Iliad-Vietnam thing farther than it can actually go (and it can go pretty far). A third of the book is dedicated to the divergence between the two, which nicely counterballences Shay's Illiad-based critiques of the American military with American-military-induced-trauma based critiques of Homer. Examples: in Homer, almost nobody lingers after injury; no named person dies of just disease; nobody suffers hunger or thirst or dysentery; when spears miss, they never hit comrades.

Anyway, it's a great book, but I wish it was written just a little better.

Just like Odysseus in America, this is an excellent book to understand the combatant experience during and after the Vietnam War. Be it PTSD or other issues, they don't come from nowhere. And this book delves with respect and understanding into the mind of those who suffered and did not want others to have the same experience.
First, the quotes from the veterans will stick to you. Both raw and brutal, as well as sensitive and filled with pain, they express a lot. The amazing job done by the actor reading the audiobook added to the experience.
The Iliad connection is again brilliant and an amazing intellectual exercise. I now feel I get more about both the literary work and the veteran experience. To be honest, I was kind of bored studying the Iliad in school, but now I want to revisit it.
As for the stories of the soldiers, I only hope they managed to find some peace and that now we know how to treat veterans much better. Hundreds of thousands are bound to return home soon and it will not be easy.

This book gives a inteuging view into the stories of soldiers during two of the most interesting wars in all of human history and mythology. This story is not only a dive into the lives and minds of soldiers during these two wars but for the soldiers experience as a whole. I would recommend this book to any aspiring psychologist, sociologist, or avid fan of history and the human experience.

"Here I did three fucking combat tours serving my country and I feel like a fucking fugitive."

This book was incredible through and through.

While this book is good on its own through its conscientious comparison of Achilles' fall in the Iliad to the steady demoralization of Vietnam soldiers, what truly makes this piece an emotional read is the transcripts Shay provides of the soldiers' words.

It's so easy to romanticize war and trauma, but Shay eludes such pitfalls. What he says is important: hate war but not the soldier. While Vietnam vets were a critical part of the White Power and Alt-Right movement's inception, it is important to know where such rage comes from: it comes from pain, and most importantly it comes from the carelessness of a series of administrations spanning from Kennedy to Reagan that refused to treat their soldiers with dignity. We must learn to treat soldiers with the care they need to heal instead of alienating them because of our political ideologies.

Even though this book was explicitly about the PTSD derived from the Vietnam War, and its specificity (perhaps rightfully) renders it hard to apply to other situations, this did teach me a lesson about what we owe to each other. How do we help our friends recover from trauma and grief? How do we build communities that facilitate healing? The answer is not in sending them to therapists (though this is part of it), it is in becoming ourselves meaningful listeners.

Achilles in Vietnam is a fascinating and powerful examination of The Iliad as a soldier’s narrative that details Achilles’s moral breakdown that results from combat trauma and PTSD as viewed through the lens of equivalent suffering by Vietnam veterans. Written by a trained psychotherapist and amateur classist with years of experience treating Vietnam vets with severe and chronic PSTD, the book outlines the common sequential factors that led to PTSD in both his patients and Achilles, which include a betrayal of “what’s right” (what Homer calls thémis) by higher-ups, the shrinkage of the soldier’s social and moral horizon, his grief at the death of a special comrade, his guilt at the wrongful substitution of the comrade’s death in place of his own, and going berserk (a sustained and clinical state of being). To illustrate these similarities, the author provides numerous lengthy transcripts of Vietnam vets with severe PTSD describing their experiences and the state of their lives today, contrasting them with passages from The Iliad, all of which are essentially saying the same thing.

From there, the author discusses more experiences and reactions of both ancient and modern soldiers that are similar (e.g. conceptions of luck and the role of higher-up powers-that-be, be they the modern military top brass or the ancient Olympian gods), as well as some major societal differences in the procedural and logistical execution of war and conception the enemy (seen as honourable in ancient times vs. dehumanized during Vietnam) that made the Vietnam War in particular so psychologically damaging. He ends with a section on healing, posing the question of whether full recovery for Vietnam vets is possible (the short answer is essentially “it’s complicated”) and on how modern warfare needs to change to be more protective of soldiers’ mental capacity, which he views as an interim step to society hopefully someday evolving beyond the need for war at all.

The book is brilliantly educational and utterly compelling. The accounts of the Vietnam vets (which are masterfully performed by an actor in the audiobook to represent the diverse speech patterns of each person quoted) are harrowing to take in, both in terms of what they say, which is gruesome and heartbreaking, and also often how they say it. This latter negative reaction, the author explains, is a natural protective measure by the listener to deny how easily any of us could experience a similar moral breakdown under similar circumstances, yet at the same time is a wholly unhelpful reaction for the veteran. Rather, a veteran’s treatment depends on people being able to hold space in hearing about their experiences in order for the communalization of their trauma and grief since the absence of opportunities to do so can lock the person into chronic rage and leave them with other lifelong, debilitating symptoms of PTSD that incapacitate victims from participation in domestic, economic, and political life.

The author’s stated goal in writing this book is to educate and motivate mental health professionals in their work with combat PTSD patients, and to further educate all readers on the damage war does to both the mind and spirit with an even larger, underlying goal of working to prevent war altogether. The empathy and compassion present in the book is undeniable and I hope that his patients are able to realize some improved mental health under his care.

This book offers an original and poignant perspective into war and PTSD by putting the Trojan war and Vietnam war side by side. This book is an essential read if you want to understand more about Iliad, the Vietnam war, or PTSD. Reading this book also feels personal for me, as my grandfather fought on the other side of the war. I felt like the Vietnamese also owe their forefathers such an in-depth research into how the war has affected them.

This book was somewhat disappointing to me, and I almost abandoned it two-thirds of the way in, but the concluding chapters somewhat redeemed the book.

The basic problem is that the book starts with what seems a very intriguing premise: We can learn a lot about combat trauma and Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder by reading the Iliad, and we can understand the Iliad better by learning about combat trauma, particularly as it affected Vietnam combat veterans. Several interesting ideas are introduced early, and we are led to expect that a lot will be revealed about the specific traumas of some veterans and the results of these traumas. However, when we get to the middle sections of the book, it becomes apparent that the author is not going to provide a whole lot of extra depth in his analysis, that he does not approach his own ideas very critically, and that several short interview excerpts are recycled and returned to without revealing a whole lot more. That is to say, it feels as though the material for a short essay has been puffed out to full-book length without sufficient justification.

In the end, however, the author reveals a lot about the problems relating to combat trauma, and makes a persuasive argument for a need for several changes to protocol, procedure, and culture within the military to help minimize the psychological injuries that result from combat trauma. The book finishes well and has some valid points to make. However, along the road to reaching the end, the analogy of Achilles's experience as representative of the Vietnam vet's experience has kind of fallen by the wayside.

Which suggests that this book might better have been presented as a book on combat trauma and the lessons we should learn from Vietnam vets, including a short introductory essay about Achilles. Along the way, occasional reference back to the case of the Iliad could be made only where it is most apt. And more time, attention, and critical thought could be directed to the topic that this author knows best: the etiology of PTSD and methods for its prevention and treatment.

That would be one way to approach it, but there are many other ways. Unfortunately, the way the author chose did not seem ideal to me. He pushes some points were they don't seem persuasive, and tries to force a fit where it doesn't always work. Particularly inapt is the author's attempt to contrast the different religions of the heroes of the Iliad and of the American soldiers in Vietnam, and drawing conclusions about how this affects the traumatic impact of loss. It just seems the author is speculating, but not so convincingly.

One example of a chapter ending in a muddle is Chapter 6, which approaches the topic of why it is wrong to dehumanize the enemy, with real-life examples from Vietnam and the Pacific War of WWII, but then a complaint about how teachers incorrectly teach the lessons of the Iliad is shoehorned in and the point that the chapter was building up to seems lost... and he didn't even bother to mention what he would consider the right way to teach the lessons of the Iliad. He manages to get in a little barb directed at "hostile biblical propaganda against pagan cultures" too. I mean, I get it, we shouldn't dehumanize the enemy, but the pieces seem lumped together, not cohesive.

Another assertion that stands out as false is this: "Everyone knows that people debate whether God exists, but no one questions the benevolent character of this possible God, if he does exist. Questioning his goodness simply does not enter the mind."

And here I find a lack of critical depth: The author deals with the effects on memory and emotion that arise from combat trauma. He manages to talk about the authority of memory over the veteran, how inescapable memories may arise that are charged with inescapable emotional intensity, and also the effect of having memories that are completely devoid of emotional content where it would be natural to be emotional. But I had to ask, is it legitimate to claim that intensely emotional memories (in certain patients) and detached memories without emotion (in other patients) are both elements of the same condition?

In one of the notes that actually brings attention to a somewhat controversial claim, the author comments on his assertion that a berserk soldier enters into an isolating state that divorces him entirely from all community with the living. The end-note points out that there is some overlap in the kind of behavior witnessed in an isolated berserk individual and the behavior of mob violence, and he concludes, "The exact relationship between the two, and particularly whether the postfrenzy consequences are similar, deserve serious study." Well, yeah, perhaps. Or perhaps this points to a flaw in the author's thinking. Berserking may not be a strictly isolating phenomenon if it is also witnessed in mobs.

Another question that was not resolved: If betrayal of what is right and the death of a dear friend are major components in the etiology of PTSD, and we conclude this because all PTSD patients from Vietnam report experiences of betrayal and loss... well, what about the veterans without PTSD? What if we determined that such experiences as betrayal of what is right, and the loss of a close friend in combat, were near-universal experiences of ALL combat veterans, and not just the ones with PTSD? I.e., what if what we're really analyzing here is what went wrong with Vietnam rather than what are the root causes of combat-PTSD, and we're confusing one for the other?

These questions do not in any way invalidate the author's claims. They simply pose a challenge which the book did not answer. The author should have addressed some of these topics to provide the kind of depth that would reward a full reading of his book.

And yet... and yet... I did come away feeling I know more about PTSD, the vet's experience, the consequences of betrayal and berserking, the value of grief and respect for the dead, the necessity of granting one's enemy the status of humanity, the traumatic effects of atrocity on the perpetrator as well as the victim, and I'm at least partially persuaded that Homer's Iliad reflects a true understanding of the combat veteran's experience. So the book did deliver well enough.

Holy crap I can’t say enough how amazing and important this book is.

4.5

". . . the Iliad can be legitimately read as a text concerning the human experience of combat."

Great read for anyone interested in PTSD/combat trauma, what causes it, how it affects soldiers, and what is at stake when we go to war. This is also a good companion piece for those interested in how PTSD plays a role in the story of The Iliad, particularly for Achilles’ character. Reading “The Iliad” with an understanding of combat trauma adds much more context to the story in my opinion.

Keep in mind that this book is a little outdated. (PTSD criteria has since changed with the DSM 5). However, it still provides a good overview if you want to learn about PTSD symptoms and how it affects soldiers. I learned about combat in Vietnam and its differences compared to ancient warfare with this book.

I'm looking forward to reading Shay’s follow up Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Analyzing/understanding Odysseus’ behavior after he leaves Troy and eventually returns home makes a lot more sense when PTSD is included in the conversation. (See Circe for a good overview at the end of the book of this behavior).

Shay's account of PTSD among Vietnam veterans is eye-opening to the horrors faced by soldiers both during and after the war. His juxtaposition of quotes from his patients and lines from The Illiad are well done and includes insightful analysis of the two. I found a frightening similarity between many of the Vietnam experiences and those of the recent wars in the Middle East. The military has learned, since Vietnam, to drastically curtail what the media can show of the war. In recent wars, this serves to hide, from the bits that leak out, many of the same misguided leadership decisions and atrocities that Shay discusses with his Vietnam veterans and so outraged the American public. It seems all too likely that returning soldiers today will experience the same traumatic effects as those in the book, despite supposed progress to the contrary.