It would be difficult to deny the importance of Achilles in Vietnam. An often insightful work, Jonathan Shay's study affirms the humanity of Vietnam war veterans by giving voice to their traumas, both collective and individual, and the ways in which these experiences have fundamentally re-defined their character and value system during and after combat. The Iliad provides an interesting comparative framework, through which Shay is able to find shared cultural resonances to further understand and validate their emotional experiences. As a work of Classical reception, Shay's inventive monograph is in many ways a pioneering and distinctive contribution to Homeric scholarship.

However, Achilles in Vietnam is also a deeply flawed work. While it understandably focuses on only American Vietnam war veterans, Vietnam serves merely as a backdrop to articulate the experiences of American soldiers. Vietnamese civilians and soldiers alike are deprived of any agency; they are either only characterized as victims or as the Vietcong enemies. Passing references to Vietnamese casualties or Vietcong tactics only serve to illustrate American soldiers' mentalities, almost as plot devices in a fictional novel. Shay claims that his use of the Iliad as reference does not indicate a desire to heroicize American soldiers, but throughout the work, Americans tower as Greek heroes and Gods over the voiceless and essentialized Vietnamese. Shay casually mentions many veterans' racist views, but does nothing to address them or even acknowledge them as systematic issues. In these ways, Achilles in Vietnam perpetuate harmful Orientalist narratives that seem to be characteristic of all American portrayals of the Vietnam War (Apocalypse Now, Miss Saigon...). While Shay advocates for a nuanced understanding of American veteran experiences, does Vietnam not deserve even a modicum of nuance?

In this book, Jonathan Shay, a staff psychiatrist in the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic in Boston, finds the commonalities and differences between the combat experiences of Greek and Trojan soldiers in the Trojan War and the combat experience of United States soldiers in the Vietnam War, focusing on the betrayal of “what’s right” by a commander and the onset of the berserk state.

I: Betrayal of "What's Right"

“No single English word takes in the whole sweep of a culture’s definition of right and wrong; we use terms such as moral order, convention, normative expectations, ethics, and commonly understood social values. The Greek word that Homer used, thémis, encompasses all these meanings.” pg 5

“Is betrayal of 'what’s right' essential to combat trauma, or is betrayal simply one of many terrible things that happen in war? … [W]hat I’ve come to strongly believe through my work with Vietnam veterans: that moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as 'what’s right' has not also been violated.” Pg 20

II: Shrinkage of the Social and Moral Horizon

"...[Achilles'] moral horizon was broader even than the whole Greek army. Before the psychological injuries recorded in the Iliad, Achilles' habit was to respect enemy prisoners rather than kill them. Achilles loses his humanity in two stages: He ceases to care about his fellow Greeks after betrayal by his commander, and then he loses all compassion for any human being after the death of Patrokles. The Iliad is the story of the undoing of Achilles' character." Pg 26

"The most ancient traditions of Western culture instruct us to base our self-respect on firmness of character. Many popular melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. A permanent challenge of working with those injured by combat trauma is facing the painful awareness that in all likelihood one's own character would not have stood firm. Merely allowing ourselves to hear the combat veteran's story threatens our culturally defined sense of self-respect. We have powerful motives not to listen to the veteran's story, or deny its truth." Pg 31-32

III: Grief at the Death of a Special Comrade

"Any blow in life will have longer-lasting and more serious consequences if there is no oppurtunity to communalize it." p 39.

"Modern American English makes soldiers' love for special comrades into a problem, because the word love evokes sexual and romantic associations. But friendship seems too bland for the passion of care that arises between soldiers in combat. Achilles laments to his mother that his phílos, his "greatest friend is gone." (18:89f) ... [T]he difficulty of finding the right word reflects differences between ancient Greek and modern American culture that need to be made clear. "Phília includes many relationships that would not be classified as friendships. The love of mother and child is a paradigmatic case of phília; all close family relations, including the relation of husband and wife, are so characterized. Furthermore, our [word] 'friendship' can suggest a relationship that is weak in affect ..., as in teh expression 'just friends' ... [Phília] includes the very strongest affective relathionships that human beings form, ... [including, but not limited to] relationships that have a passionate sexual component. For both these reasons, English 'love' seems more appropritately wide-ranging ... [The] emphasis of phília is less on intensely passionate longing than on ... benefit, sharing, and mutality...' Many individuals who experience friendship as one of the central goods in their lives find that their employers will not recognize phília between people whose relationship is not familiar. Veterans have lost their jobs because they left work to aid another veteran, in circumstances where the same absence would have been "understandable" and charged against sick or vacation time had the other been a spouse, parent, or child. Many people today view friendship purely as a leisure activity, or a sweetener that with luck arises among co-workers, neighbors, or members of a voluntary association such as a church or club but which will be put aside if it gives rise to any conflicting claims at work. Many veterans have also alienated spouses because they would leave home to go to the aid of fellow veterans. The ancient Greek, perhaps because their societies were so highly militarized (every male citizen was also a soldier), simply assumed the centrality of phília." p 40-41

"Thetis is an 'imaginary companion' such as has sustained many in extreme danger and deprivation. One veteran in our program conversed regularly with a guardian angel while on long-range patrol in enemy territory. These dialogues became part of the shared life of his team, with his men asking him what the angel had said. Because we have become accustomed to condescening to Homer's gods as the products of 'primitive' or 'magical' thinking, or treating them as purely artistic or mythic sumbols, we are prone to overlook their function as dramatized embodiments of combat soldiers' inner experience. Guardian angels, imaginary companions, and personal patron saints to whom one appeals in extremis are probably considerably more common and 'normal' than mental health professionals care to admit." p. 51

This book is more about Vietnam than it is about the Iliad, the story of the "Wrath of Achilles." That is, the book uses the story of Achilles and the fall of Troy to explain the experience of thousands of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. More immediate to me, it specifically explores the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder, and why it manifests itself in some but not in others. The author's thesis is that PTSD isn't just from enduring a stressful situation--in Vietnam, it was most likely to affect those who felt they'd been betrayed by their leaders, or by someone they trusted. It is this violation of trust, along with the experience of traumatic events, that is most like to bring about PTSD.

I read this book because I teach The Iliad in high school and was looking for some insights I could use in the classroom. But in a wonderful bit of serendipity, I just happened to pick up Achilles in Vietnam not long after my wife of twenty years had suddenly left me and our three children, and I was trying to cope with that, along with a whole bunch of psychological issues I was grappling with as a result of that desertion. And in reading Achilles in Vietnam, in reading Achilles' reactions to his perceived betrayal by Agamemnon, and American soldiers' reactions to what they perceived as betrayal by their leaders in Vietnam, I recognized the same behaviors in myself at my perceived betrayal by my wife of twenty years. So I got a three-for-one: I gained some insight into Achilles' behavior in The Iliad, I gained some insight into what traumatized so many American servicemen in Southeast Asia, and I gained a powerful insight into what was going on inside my own head during the greatest crisis in my life.

Stunning work -- comparing the soldiers of The Illiad to the vets in Vietnam, what they come home with in terms of PTSD. Amazing insights and such a contribution to the scholarship in this area.

Finally finished the last couple chapters upon getting the book from the BPL — fascinating study of the Iliad. So many interesting parallels. I keep bringing it up to people at home as a segue into discussing reception studies and the importance of thinking about classical texts through a plethora of different temporal/situational angles and perspectives.

Currently working on Odysseus in America!

"To all readers I say: Learn the psychological damage that war does, and work to prevent war. There is no contradiction between hating war and honoring the soldier. Learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in military institutions and culture that needlessly create or worsen these injuries. We don’t have to go on repeating the same mistakes. Just as the flak jacket has prevented many physical injuries, we can prevent many psychological injuries."

Reading about war will never not be interesting. Specifically, the psychological impact of war it does on a soldier. This book is a big promoter of society not doing enough to welcome soldiers back into society after coming back from war; Vietnam for this book. The author covers an array of topics in the book about the psychology of man in war and also compares it to Homer’s writing of The Iliad. I didn’t necessary think the author had to talk about Homer’s writing in this book to get his point across. I am of the opinion that he presented the book this way just to add a bit of uniqueness to it from other Vietnam War writings. This is still a pretty good book though. It dragged in parts, but the message throughout remained strong and consistent.

Jonathan Shay is a psychotherapist – and impressive amateur classicist – who has spent decades treating Vietnam veterans with severe PTSD. In this fascinating book, he analyzes what he sees as the moral breakdown of Achilles in terms of factors common to the Vietnam War. The first section of the book outlines these factors: a betrayal of “what’s right”; the shrinkage of the social and moral horizon; grief at the death of a special comrade; guilt and wrongful substitution; and going berserk (a clinical condition, not slang). In each of the chapters he describes these conditions as revealed through years of treating veterans, often quoting transcripts of therapy sessions, and analyzes their presence in The Iliad. In the second section he goes through soldiers’ common reactions to these conditions, again drawing from Vietnam veterans’ accounts, and demonstrates the same reactions in Achilles. It’s convincing and utterly compelling.

I’m no classical scholar, but I have read The Iliad many times and can appreciate his deep understanding and meticulous examination. His book is worth multiple readings. In fact, Achilles in Vietnam has filled a role in my understanding similar to movies of favorite novels, like “Gone With the Wind” – now I can’t read The Iliad without this as context and subtext! I also was stunned by the descriptions of combat in Vietnam — both the conditions of guerilla warfare against the Viet Cong and common U.S. military practices seemed designed to inflict maximum psychological damage on our soldiers. Be forewarned: this is not for the faint of heart. If you’ve studied the Vietnam War then much of this will be familiar. If not, brace yourself; the accounts are from men whose combat trauma was debilitating enough that they sought professional help. Also, Dr. Shay quotes veterans’ words verbatim, and the profanity is almost as stunning as the substance. I have no tolerance for profanity and felt like I needed to wash out my head with a power hose, yet at the same time I couldn’t help feel sorry for both the lack of education that often produces such a low level of language and the obvious crutch that profanity was for these men; if the eloquent can’t find words to describe such horrors, what hope had they? (Not all the interviewees swear four or five times in a sentence; there are distinct levels of language corresponding to levels of education, a fact that the Vietnam veterans I know are quick to assert.) The final section of the book focuses on PTSD and possible healing, with less analysis of Achilles; nonetheless, it’s fascinating reading.

Failures of the American Army
30 September 2012

tThis is one of the toughest books that I have read to date and pretty much halfway through the chapter on grief I found that my brain had been reduced to slush. Now, I have never been to war and never experienced war, but when Shay says in his introduction that this book will have a tendency to bring flashbacks to combat veterans he was not kidding. As I suggested, I am not a combat veteran and I found this book very hard going myself, and in a way, reading this book also brought about flashbacks from my past, and I would hardly say that I suffer from PTSD or have had a hard life compared to many others in our society.

tJonathan Shay is a psychiatrist that works with Vietnam vets helping them cope with civilian life and helping them (I feel that the word recover would be an inappropriate word since there are some things that one can never recover from, such as an amputation, and some psychological trauma simply cannot be healed) live with the psychological trauma that is likely to be with them for the rest of their lives. When somebody once coined the phrase (I cannot remember who it was but I believe it was some American General in World War II) War is Hell, he wasn't kidding, and the testimonies that we are told from the Vietnam Vets who had agreed shared their stories go a long way to demonstrate this.

tAs I read through this book the nagging feeling that kept gnawing away at me was whether the United States, in the way that they run their army as one would run a corporation, can really expect to be able to win a modern war. The way the army is constructed may be able to win a war where two nations throw armies up against each other, such as what happened in World War II, and even in Korea, but when the war that one is fighting is against insurgents who continually melt back into the civilian population, then the way one fights a war and constructs the armed forces, may need to be reviewed. An army is not a police force and a police force is not an army, and the Americans discovered that when they attempted to use the national guard to attempt to put down anti-Vietnam protests in the United States. The role of the police is to protect the order of society and to thoroughly investigate crimes to make sure that the real perpetrator is arrested. However, the job of an army is to defeat the enemy: in effect to shoot first and ask questions later.

tOne of the problems that Shay has pointed out, and this is something that is not new because this is the way wars have been evolving over the last half a millennium, is that the commanders are becoming more and more removed from the battlefield, to a point where they do not see that action and do not understand the nature of war. Von Clausewitz indicated this in his book 'On War' when he talks about the concept of the fog of war. The best way to describe this is that what may look good on paper does not necessarily work on the ground. It should be interesting to note that when a general actually joins the troops and leads the troops (as opposed to directing the troops from a bunker behind the lines, or even thousands of miles away) the effectiveness of the army actually increases, and we only need to look at Napoleon's successes to be able to see that.

tHowever the nature of war has changed a lot since Napoleon's day. As technology advances we continually distance ourselves more and more from the enemy, to the point where it is almost becoming like a computer game. Shay talks about how the modern Judeo-Christian ethic seeks to demonise the enemy to make the enemy easier to kill. To some people it is easier to kill a dog than a human because the dog is not a human, so to get over humanity's resistance to killing another human, we turn the enemy into an animal. However, the opposite also works true in that by turning the soldier into an animal the human loses all concept of their humanity and becomes like the animal. Of course, the problem that arises is that the human can no longer return to human society, a concept that is explored elsewhere.

tI particularly appreciated his discussion of the way troops were trained. One particular movie that I have seen about the Vietnam war clearly brings this idea out (the movie is Full Metal Jacket) and that is where the trainer (and in cases commanders) are constantly focusing on where the person is failing rather than their successes. The belief is that by constantly denigrating the soldier it forces the soldier to overcome his or her weaknesses and thus becomes a better soldier. This is not the case (and I shall explore this when I discuss the nature of warfare and the corporation below). In Full Metal Jacket, the poorest performer in the group ends up shooting himself in the toilet, and we learn from this book that this is not as far fetched as it seems. We are told the story of a helicopter pilot that was torn to pieces for refusing to do something, then going out and killing himself.

tShay refers a lot to the Illiad in this book, and uses the story to show us what war is about. There are a lot of differences, but there is also a lot of insight into the effect of war upon the individual. Remember, in the ancient world, all males were warriors so all males had experienced war. Tragedy was a way to help the citizens to cope with returning to civilian life. Also, we note, that the main characters in the Illiad are all commanders, and they are all involved in the fighting. This is not the case today. Where the commanders in the Illiad knew what it was like on the ground, the commanders today do not. As such, the orders that are passed down come from people, in many cases who have not seen or experienced action, and expect the soldiers to obey them. I remember when I explored a military position after completing university, I discovered that I could walk into the army at the rank of major, which meant that I would never have to see combat action, and with my law degree, I would be dealing with people who had seen action with no understanding of what it would have been like to have been out there. Fighting a war on the ground requires quick thinking and a willingness to do things on the spur of the moment, however the chain of command does not allow the soldier to do this. The soldier must obey his commanding officer, and any deviation from that is punishable. They say that the back bone of the American Army is the chain of command, and by ignoring the chain of command will undermine the army. However, as we have seen in Vietnam, and more recently, in Iraq, it was the chain of command that proved to be the armies undoing.

tNow, I will speak of the idea of the corporation as the army. Having worked in the corporation, I have seem many elements that have come out of the book. We take the idea of the manager as the commander. When you are on the floor, you may be exposed to direct customer contact, and in some positions that can be really draining. However, the higher up the managerial chain, the less customer contact you have. However the higher up you go, the more you are expected to have the people beneath you perform to a high standard. If the people beneath you fail, you fail. However, consider an irate customer screaming at you, and you are not permitted to terminate the call because the customer is everything. The customer pays the company money, and it is expected that the customer continue to pay the company money, however it is not the manager's job to take the call. The company has upset the customer, however the person on the floor is expected to resolve the complaint, and sometimes, even to convince the customer to upgrade their services. In some companies (McDonalds for instance) the managers are expected to be on the floor and to deal with customers alongside the staff, however many others do not.

tI have also seen instances where beratting employees with the belief that that creates a better employee is used. This, once again, is not the case. Granted, if an employee that makes a mistake is not shown the mistake, then the employee is not going to learn. However, by constantly hammering the employee for their mistakes, without actually acknowledging what the employee has done right, and rewarding the employee for what they are doing right, will end up destroying the employee. The same goes with religious institutions. We get so caught up with trying to create better people by hammering them for their mistakes, that we actually are blind to the damage that is being done to that person.

I cannot even begin to describe how important this book is, regardless of one's political viewpoints regarding war. Not only is the professional information communicated in a systematic yet caring manner, but the compare/contrast examples with The Iliad are real eye-openers into the psyches of combat soldiers.

Dr. Shay: brilliant . . . . citing "The Vietnam War," Harry G. Summers Jr., 1985, Facts on File Publications, p. 113; Shay's footnote on CH 8 says: KIA [killed in action]: 34,436; Died while POW/KIA: 3,639; Died of Wounds [KIA]: 5,169 which already equals 43,244. Add to that those Died of Disease/Accident: 10,446 which makes it 53,690. Then consider Wounded in Action 303,704; Hospitalized 153,329; Not Hospitalized 150,375. This makes Vietnam killed, wounded, damaged 661,098 of my generation killed, wounded, hospitalized and . . . . traumatized, not to mention their families. According to statistics [not in book]: during the Vietnam War era, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. This book is a 'must-read' for anyone who lived through that era, whose brothers, husbands, boyfriends, fathers, uncles . . . . themselves. Read this book.

I've read the Iliad multiple times and taught parts of it on several occasions. The comparisons to modern soldiers in combat situations brings new life and immediacy to the ancient characters and their actions.

The reader should be aware, though, that Shay in his interpretation of the Iliad in an historical context regards 'Homer' as the single author of a unified text, a bard living in the 8th century BCE; thus he explains, e.g., the immediate deaths on the battlefield (as opposed to drawn-out deaths of septic wounds) as a way of pleasing the customers/listeners, by giving their forefathers a more illustrious death than was realistic (he gives a statistic on the ratios of wounded to dead in the Iliad and in Vietnam). And in the same vein, the 'lack of bad guys' - how the Trojans are heroes, too - is in this optic explained by the customers being products of generations of intermarriage between Greek and Phrygian families.

Apart from this rather simplified view on the Homeric question, the comparison as a whole stands. Classical scholars can gain from this perspective; where we usually speak of Achilleus' kleos being damaged by Agamemnon's theft of Briseis - as if this were something rather alien - we would do well in remembering that this is a superior officer publicly humiliating a fellow (and slightly, in one sense at least, lower-ranking) officer in view of the whole army. What Agamemnon does simply ain't right.