I was writing a paper about Bill Anderson and his Civil War experience when I stumbled upon this work. Completely changed the direction of the paper, and my relationship with a friend who recently returned from combat in Iraq.

This book was published in 1994. For some reason it slipped through the radar for me and my reading about Vietnam. That date also means one needs to be careful about using the material to help a veteran. Also I did have some doubts about the veracity of some stories, but who am I to judge.

I was totally immersed in the book which accounts for the many notes I took.

The cover photo is known as "Reaching Out." It brings tears to my eyes every time I look at it. I can get lost in the tiny details of this photograph. It is included here in this collection of the most famous shots from the Vietnam War:

http://time.com/vietnam-photos/

Chapter 1 is called "What's Right." It is a bold move on Doctor Shay's part. In comparing the American soldier in Vietnam, he refers back to Achilles in the Iliad. Achilles felt wronged. Achilles deserved to have the slave girl Briseis. The fact that Agamemnon would not allow this to happen meant that the great warrior could go and sulk in his tent and refuse to fight. See what I mean by bold move? Achilles "deserved" the slave girl? Shay is saying the American soldiers felt the same way about Vietnam. There was a lack of fairness. Weapons malfunctioned. Whose fault was that? Who got picked to be the point man? Why did officers send soldiers down well travelled paths when off the road would have meant fewer chances of hitting mines? The officers were just in a hurry. And those bastards did not have to die. Only 8 colonels were killed in action in the whole god damn Vietnam war.

I have a new appreciation of a best friend in college. I always ignored Achilles as a big baby sulking in his tent. My friend totally defended him. Achilles had nothing to prove. I am looking at Achilles now with a totally new outlook.

Chapter 2 is about the shrinking of the social and moral horizon. Achilles gradually cares only about a few men around him. He desecrates the body of an enemy, something he never did before. The American soldier in Vietnam slowly only cares about a few people around him. In Vietnam the enemy struck at the body and the mind. Compared to WWII and Korea the deaths and injuries from booby traps triple. Soldiers felt tortured. Some common expressions to deal with it all were "Don't mean nothing" and "Fuck it."

Chapter 3 deals with the death of a special comrade. In the Iliad we have Achilles and his friend Patroklos. Veterans will often say, "I died in Vietnam." Of course, it was their close friend who died. Achilles is treated by Homer as if he is already dead. Following the death of that friend, the soldier often acts with rage. In Vietnam that can mean killing of innocents and mutilation of bodies, just as Achilles did with Hector. While Achilles could wash the body of Patroklos, in Vietnam a body was just zipped up in a bag.

Chapter 4 deals with guilt and wrongful substitution. Patroklos dies, and it should have been Achilles. Patroklos is even wearing the armor of Achilles. "It should have been me," is a a common refrain. I even feel it a bit for my friends George Fell, Bubbles Napierata, and Billy Cyr. Only because I was able to control my life enough to avoid what they had to go through. And they all died. Why did I deserve to live? There is no logical reason for it.

Chapter 5 deals with the state of going berserk as Achilles does after the death of Patroklos. The berserk state can lead to desecration of bodies and killing of civilians. It can mean shooting someone with a full clip long after they are clearly going to die. I wonder if that is the type of thing I see in police shootings where they empty their weapon.

Chapter 6 deals with dishonoring the enemy to make killing easier. We see that throughout the world today based on religion, race, nationality, and so on.

Chapter 7 deals with what Homer left out:

1. Deprivation. There are no examples of thirst, hunger, lack of sleep, heat and cold, filth and squalor, dysentery, insects, animals, and so on. Vietnam soldiers weighed in the middle to low 100 pounds. Carrying ammo was more important than food. No soldiers in the Iliad die of depravation. That would not be glorious for the families of the fallen. And on both sides there is an astounding absence of villains because many nobles traced ancestry to both sides of the Trojan War.

2. Friendly Fire. Many weapons in Homer miss their intended target. It is certainly possible a friendly soldier was killed but it is mentioned only once. An estimated 15 to 20 percent of American deaths in Vietnam were due to friendly fire.

3. Fragging. The word is derived from fragmentation grenade. There is an interrupted fragging episode at the beginning of the Iliad when Achilles draws his sword to kill Agamemnon for denying him the slave girl Briseis. But Athena intervenes. One estimate has 20 percent of American officers who died in Vietnam were killed by their own men. Usually for perceived incompetence.

4. Suffering of the Wounded. Homer does not hide the frightful wounds inflicted but he does not show the suffering. In Homer, about eight men are killed for every man wounded. In Vietnam, about one man was killed for every six wounded. Wounded soldiers die in physical and mental agony. Their screams and groans must have lacerated the spirit of their comrades.

5. Civilian Suffering by All Civilians. Homer displays the full agony of bereaved civilian men and women. Other than that we don't get a full picture of what they went through.

6. Civilian Suffering by Women. For more on that look up Adrienne Rich's essay "Caryatid: Two Columns." The men were killed and the women were raped. My girlfriend in Vietnam was raped by a soldier. She was sold and locked in a room with a man.

Chapter 8 deals with Luck and God's Will. Fortunately, the author has enough sense to focus on luck and not on the acts of some invisible being. Some of the moments in the Iliad where a god intervenes could be examples of just plain luck. I wrote a poem called "Luck" about a man who survived a firefight simply there just happened to be a fallen tree beside him when his platoon was ambushed. He fell behind it and survived. Luck can be astoundingly good or it can be crushingly bad.

Look at this downward tapering funnel of numbers for the Vietnam era:
1. The whole Vietnam Generation: 53, 100,000.
2. Men: 26, 800,000.
3. Served in military during Vietnam era: 8,615,000.
4. Served in Vietnam: 3,145,000.
5. Served in combat: 776,000.
6. Casualties: 321,000.
7. Dead: 58,000.

Check out the last three or four numbers in particular. So much unfairness of things. Were these men just sent out to get killed or wounded? Good luck if you don't?

One story told has a fascinating mix of humor and horror. A platoon lands in an old French minefield. The radio operator sends out the message: BE ADVISED! YOU'RE IN AN OLD FRENCH MINEFIELD! What do the soldiers do? They start running. Soon they are all running. And they all make it out. That's luck.

Sometimes the luck can make a soldier feel invulnerable. Of course, there are plenty of soldiers who die later because their luck runs out. And luck can also lead to the "It should have been me who died" guilt feelings.

Sometimes blame was attributed to soldiers who died.

For many veterans God was lost in Vietnam. What kind of God lets this happen? And where is virtue now?

Chapter 9 deals with reclaiming the Iliad's gods as a metaphor of social power. Many readers find the Iliad's gods hard to take seriously. High school students often asked me did the ancient Greeks really believe in this stuff? I wondered, Do you really believe in your stuff? So this cultural chasm exists. But we should not be smug about it. Those are real gods and must be faced as such. Just like we do the gods of today's world.

Homer views his gods as powerful. But here's the thing: They behave like REMFs. An REMF is a Rear Echelon Mother Fucker. I was an REMF. I know the guilt feelings. While I was getting laid in Saigon, my good friend George Fell was getting killed in the Cambodia invasion. I have no idea how.

Now here is the big question. Were Homer's gods nothing but REMFs? Why use the acronym. Were they nothing but Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers? And why make it plural. Is our God nothing but a Rear Echelon Mother Fucker? What's He been doing during all of this?

Soldiers on both sides want the war to end. Zeus may have been the original REMF. Men died while Zeus dallied. Homer shows Zeus many times as compassionate and caring. Homer was a master of irony.

Chapter 10 deals with the Breaking Points of Moral Existence--What Breaks?

In a brilliant opening of the chapter, the author quotes Lady Percy's monologue from Henry IV, Part I and points out a list of examples of the symptoms of PTSD. Here is the monologue without the author's list of symptoms. See if you can spot them:

LADY PERCY: O my good lord, why are you thus alone?
For what offense have I this fortnight been
A banished woman from my Harry's bed?
Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit'st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry 'Courage! to the field!' And thou hast talked
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirred thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbèd stream,
And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these?
Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not.

The whole chapter is an excellent rundown of PTSD symptoms. Worth reading for that alone. There is a loss of authority over mental function. Here are a few main items:

1. Untrustworthiness of Perception. The Grunt's experience is whitewashed by his superiors. And the hypervigilance required to go humping the boonies means nothing is what it seems. It is difficult to remove that. Researchers are finding abnormalities in brain chemistry, function, and even gross structure.

2. Memory. Memories come back in dreams or flashbacks.

3. Persistent Mobilization for Danger. The vigilance never leaves. Although I was not in combat, I learned to chose where I sit, and I still do that. When I first arrived in California, I fell to my knees when a plane broke the sound barrier. I was told that was common among those just arriving from the war zone. It took a few months to break the habit.

4. Persistence of Survival Skills.

5. Persistence of Betrayal.

6. Persistence of Isolation.

7. Persistence of Suicidality.

8. Destruction of the Capacity for Democratic Participation.

Chapter 11 deals with Healing and Tragedy. Homer ends the Iliad with mourning, not reassurance. The same goes for severely injured combat veterans. There is no "triumph of the human spirit."

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. . . . you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.” ― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” ― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Is recovery possible? The author gives three answers: no, don't know, and yes. 1. NO: No one can go back to what they were before. 2. DON'T KNOW: No one knows for certain if recovery is possible. 3. YES: Some soldiers find a way to contribute in a positive way to society.

The author believes in telling stories. That has been what I have been trying to do with my veterans group. The listener must listen with emotion, feeling the emotions of the speaker. "WITHOUT EMOTION IN THE LISTENER THERE IS NO COMMUNALIZATION OF THE TRAUMA." The listener must respect the narrator. Veterans constantly say, "Listen! Just listen!" Or they could say, "You weren't there so shut the fuck up!" I'd be more likely to say the latter.

And respect means refraining from judgment. I NEVER judge a veteran if I can help it.

No person's suffering can be measured against any other person's suffering.

Forgetting combat trauma is not a legitimate goal of treatment.

The final chapter is Conclusion.

1. Thoughtful military people assert the need for better training and leadership. Training for Vietnam was often negligent. I know my training was. My job training for Vietnam was superb. The problem was my training for violence. It was ludicrous. I was heading for Saigon, and they taught me how to fight in a field.

Sun-Tzu said, "Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and discipline. Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive discipline and sternness in command result in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, then one can be a leader."

2. Protect unit cohesion by unit rotation rather than by individual rotation. Unit rotation is the single most important measure for secondary prevention of combat PTSD.

3. Value griefwork. It should not be stigmatized. Soldiers should be able to weep and feel sorrow without being weak. Focusing on chaplains misses the point. Soldiers need commanders who can be sensitive.

Bodies were not always handled respectfully by Graves Registration in Vietnam.

Meals in honor of the dead would have been more valuable than those stupid Christmas and Thanksgiving meals. I hated those. They were a joke, an insult.

Soldiers should not be medicated because they feel the need to weep.

4. Do not encourage berserking. A good soldier should always maintain self-restraint.

5. Eliminate intentional injustice as a motivational technique. Humiliation and degradation need to be removed from the military.

6. Respect the enemy as human. A common idea in Vietnam was that the enemy did not value human life as much.

7. Acknowledge psychiatric casualties.

Achilles in Vietnam is a psychological analysis of the trauma of war as compared to the soldiers in Homer's The Illiad. It is a must read for those wanting some answers for the causes and impact of Post Trauma effects. Scholarly, yet readable, Achilles in Vietnam is a masterful look at the devastating impact on soldiers at war.

This book is incredibly painful to read, but incredibly fascinating. It will change the way you think but it will also put you in a bad mood... At least you're not in combat.

Really really really well done. Would he 5 stars but there were just a few tiny things the classicist in me didn’t love. That being said I think this is a must read for anyone who consumes any classical media or interacts with the military in any way, shape, or form

CONTENT WARNING: graphic depictions of guerilla-style war, f-bombs galore, combat trauma

Shay's juxtaposition of Achilles, as depicted in Homer's Iliad, and soldiers who survived the Vietnam War is curious and compelling.

In this book, Shay uses veterans' actual words (with identifying nouns removed) to describe both the horror they went through in Vietnam and the hell they continue to know at home. Here there be f-bombs.

I've wondered why the proportion of Vietnam vets with PTSD seems so much larger than WW2 vets with PTSD; Shay gives many reasons. In Vietnam, soldiers went through individual rotations; In WW2, soldiers trained, deployed, fought and returned home in a unit. That cohesiveness gave soldiers comrades who could mourn the loss of fellow-soldiers together.

Also, in Vietnam the soldiers were constantly exposed to attack. Night was more dangerous than day. There was no safe time to mourn. When grief is shoved inward it will eventually come to the surface and it won't be pretty.

I didn't agree with Shay's belief that God is against the soldier.

The task is to remember — rather than to relive and reenact — and to grieve.

Listened to the audiobook (thank you رغد). A unique study on chronic PTSD which draws parallels between American soldiers in the Vietnam War and Achaean soldiers of Homer’s Iliad. The core of the book is about the necessity of the communalization of grief, other interesting notes on berserk states, shrinking of social/moral horizons, philia / friendship amongst soldiers of both wars, respect for the enemy amongst the Greeks but an encouraged/indoctrinated disrespect and dehumanization of the enemy mainly via biblically based religions. And a whole lot of first hand accounts from US vets. Really well narrated. This was such a comprehensive and informative read. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I recently accepted a fellowship in the treatment of PTSD among combat veterans and decided to read Dr. Shay's book in preparation for this position. But first, I read The Illiad, upon which Shay bases his book (I recommend this before you read Achilles in Vietnam so that you can compare your take on the classic to Shay's). Basically, Shay is considering the traumas endured by Vietnam (and other combat) veterans within the context of Homer's classic. He effectively compares and contrasts the current zeitgeist of war with the beliefs of Homer's age. Shay's view of the Illiad is unconventional and thought-provoking. His ability to look beyond the written text of The Illiad to consider the humanity of the classic characters is astounding, and the depth of his compassion for the suffering of the Vietnam vets with who he has worked for 20 years is incredibly moving. This book makes the argument that the most profound impact of war is its capacity to transform typical, innocent young men into monsters who do not care for anyone. In fact, many of the vets interviewed for the book state that they would have preferred to have died, rather than continue as part of "the living dead."

This book is emotionally very difficult, but as the author points out, we owe it to these combat veterans, especially those from Vietnam, to listen, and to do better by them in every single possible way. War is traumatic for everyone involved, and as a society we have failed our soldiers in nearly every conceivable way.

Shay accurately points out that the Iliad is a tragedy- it’s a war story, and a story about the tragedy of Achilles and the undoing of his moral character. We typically see Achilles as a great hero but the Iliad is a story about a great warrior’s fall from respectable war practice.

The integration of the experiences of combat vets from the Trojan war and the experiences of combat vets from the Vietnam war clearly show the traumas of war and it’s effects on the mental states of our soldiers, but more importantly, it shows how over time we’ve begun to fail our soldiers and cause them more mental harm.

Sometimes the writing style felt a little stiff, and I felt some of the takes were slightly outdated/things I disagreed with, but overall I love this take on achilles & the illiad. It’s also a very eye opening piece of scholarship regarding veterans of the Vietnam war

Recommend for anyone who has experienced trauma or lives with someone who has experienced trauma.

This was a great book in conjunction with The Iliad. He compares PTSD symptoms in Viet Vets he counsels to descritions in The Iliad. Very intense depictions of modern PTSD copied verbatim from transcripts with the vets. One man describes leaving his house at night carrying a steak knife, walking down dark alleys hoping someone will threaten him. This is real.