Odysseus in America (42 page)

The leading Trojans were dead set against having anything to with the Horse, fearing that it was a trick or a siege engine. They wanted to build a bonfire under it or throw it into the sea, and one of them, Laocoön, was so angered by the sight of it that he hurled his spear at its side.

The response of the Trojans was not, as our schools usually teach it, “Look at the beautiful gift the Greeks left us!”

The Trojans would probably have kept it on the beach where it was built, if the gods had not lent horrifying credence to Sinon's claim that Athena would punish desecration of her offering—thus lending credence to the whole deception. Laocoön drew the lot as priest for that day's sacrifice to Poseidon, and just as he was about to slaughter the bull by the water's edge, two giant snakes crawled out of the sea and ate Laocoön's sons and then tangled him in their coils. Almost everyone in Troy saw this as his punishment for violating Athena's offering with his spear, and the cry went up to bring the Horse inside. It was irresistible. They even had to tear down part of the wall and dismantle the gate to get the Horse through. The false idea had taken root. Cassandra's warnings could not dissuade them. Even the testimony of the senses could not get through: four times the Horse lurched with such force that the soldiers inside were thrown against one another, making a great clatter of their arms.

Students at all levels of education will profit if the Trojan Horse is rescued from the children's book treatment that it now receives, and is taught as something from which we can learn valuable lessons about the dynamic of
self-
deception.

A study by James J. Wirtz,
The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War,
⁸
provides examples of how successful military deception is mostly self-deception by the target. The most prominent and appealing untruth that the Americans fell for was the Repeat-the-Glorious-Victory-of-Dien-Bien-Phu narrative. The Vietnamese had broken the French will to continue fighting in 1954 by successfully attacking and forcing the surrender of a high-profile sixteen-thousand-man French force at Dien Bien Phu. Historian Wirtz describes the grip that this appealing, but false, analysis had on the American leadership:

Dien Bien Phu exerted a powerful influence on [American] intelligence analysts and commanders more than a year before the onset of the Tet attacks. Intelligence analysts believed that, given General Giap's earlier victory and the devastating impact it had on French public opinion, the North Vietnamese would attempt to inflict another “Dien Bien Phu” on the United States [at Khe Sanh]. U.S. Commanders … [welcomed] the
prospect of engaging the communists in a set piece battle…. U.S. commanders hoped that the communists would attempt to repeat their earlier victory, thereby allowing U.S. firepower to be fully utilized. As the siege of Khe Sanh materialized on the eve of the Tet offensive, it appeared that these hopes would finally be realized.
⁹

The North Vietnamese created the impression that their main effort in what is now remembered as the Tet Offensive was the Marine Combat Base at Khe Sanh. The siege of Khe Sanh successfully riveted and deceived American attention—the main effort was elsewhere. The senior American leadership had congratulated itself that the Khe Sanh Marine Combat Base worked a tether-the-goat-to-lure-the-tiger-out-of-the-mountains strategy, drawing the North Vietnamese into a position where they would be destroyed by American firepower.

Americans endured persistent, multilayered mental assaults by their skillful and tenacious Vietnamese enemy. Booby traps, camouflage, ambush, and unexpected appearances and disappearances play with the mind. As common as the mind games of
mētis
are in the
Odyssey,
they are rare in the
Iliad.
¹⁰
However, the reader should not imagine that somehow the war crafts of
mētis—
deception, concealment, cunning, ambush, and surprise—were in general abhorrent to the warrior ethos of the noble gentlemen fighting at Troy.
¹¹
However, the
Iliad
is dominated by the figure of Achilles, whose
personal
understanding of a noble character rejected everything deceitful and devious. In his famous reply, looking straight at Odysseus, after the latter has conveyed Agamemnon's buyout offer to him, he says, (
Iliad
9:377ff, Fitzgerald)

Odysseus, master soldier and mariner,
I owe you a straight answer….

I hate
as I hate Hell's own gate that man who hides
one thought within him while he speaks another.

Duplicity was not unheroic per se in the Homeric world, but was personally hateful to Achilles, Homer's antithesis to Odysseus. Centuries later Achilles' enormous prestige in classical Athens made “openness [the opposite of guile]” into “the largest part of noble character “for that culture.
¹²
Athenian contempt for secrecy and deceit was a theme in Pericles' famous funeral oration in Thucydides:
(Thucydides 2.39.1)

And then we are different … [from the Spartans] with regard to military preparations. Our city is open to the world, and we have no periodic deportations of foreigners in order to prevent people seeing or learning our secrets which might be of military advantage to the enemy. This is because we rely, not on … deceits but on our own real courage…. The Spartans, from boyhood are submitted to the most laborious training in courage, whereas we pass our lives without such restrictions but we are no less ready to face the same dangers as they are.
¹³

Pericles connects deception with fear, a lack of manly courage. A character in one of Euripides' plays says, “No brave man would choose to kill an enemy by stealth rather than confront him face on.”
¹⁴
Our own culture has adopted many of the Athenian ideals. I believe that when President George W. Bush called the men who flew to their own deaths by crashing airplanes into the New York World Trade Center “cowards,” he voiced this aspect of the American classical inheritance, connecting military deception with fear and thus “cowardice.”

In Part One I laid out the evidence that warranted at the very least a court of inquiry if not a court-martial:

Overall:

• The loss of twelve ships and crews, in excess of six hundred of the youth of Ithaca and environs, who accompanied Odysseus to Troy.

Specifically:

• Unable to control his troops in a relatively simple situation, seventy-two lost unnecessarily at Ismarus.
¹⁵

• Takes troops into needless danger on a selfish or irresponsible impulse, six lost in the Cyclops' cave.

• Protects himself when he could have protected everyone, approximately 480 lost in the Laestrygonian fjord.

• Fails to muster his crew in an orderly way for first departure from Circe's island, one lost.

• Unable to control his crew with regard to the Sun god's beef, all the remaining, approximately forty, lost.

The following would generally not give rise to charges, but reflect badly on his qualities as a leader:

• Rarely disagrees with his boss, Agamemnon, even when the latter is disastrously wrong.

• Doesn't tell his men the truth: lies of both commission and omission.

• Doesn't trust them to do even the simplest things right, staying awake nine days and nights manning the tiller from Aeolia to Ithaca. Had this leadership failure not occurred, he would have arrived at Ithaca with approximately 530 of his crew within months of leaving Troy.

• Indulges his own pleasures at the expense of the mission of bringing his troops home, lingering with Circe.

And in the name of giving the defense an even break, I repeat items in Odysseus' favor:

• A talented and brave warrior who takes initiative and personal risks on behalf of others in a fight.

• Brilliant in the construction of deception plans.

• Brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing as a solo spy and as a reconnaissance leader.

• Loyal and resourceful in carrying out his boss's wishes.

Odysseus seems to get into trouble when he is responsible for others. Scholars can rightly point out that applying standards for a modern military officer to Odysseus is an anachronism. For one thing, Odysseus was the independent political chief, the king if you like, of the men in his command, with arbitrary and ill-defined powers. His fiduciary duties, if any, to these men arose from a likewise ill-defined mix of personal obligations to each man and his father individually, and the very real sanction of blood revenge when he got home, if he seriously violated the town's moral consensus.

These three Homeric leaders are alike in being courageous and effective fighters in their form of warfare. Achilles was a standout in speed, stamina, and spear-work. Odysseus was a brilliant archer, but also good with a spear. Agamemnon didn't stand out in any particular military skill, but was personally brave and competent enough to win some duels.
¹⁷

But in every
other
dimension of leadership and military practice they contrast sharply with each other:

The
Iliad
portrays Achilles as having broad, other-regarding care for
all
the troops, not just his own. He is famous among them for his skill and interest in treating wounds. When a plague ravages the army, it is Achilles
who steps in to end it, both by obtaining a correct diagnosis and prescribing treatment. He leads by example and is lavish in his generosity to both peers and subordinates. He shows moral courage, standing up to Agamemnon, as well as great physical courage.
¹⁸
As the commander of the Greek maneuver force, he has taken twelve cities by sea and eleven by land, making him the most admired fighter and troop commander in the Greek army. He is habitually blunt and truthful to the point of being tactless. What you see is what you get; he speaks the same to everyone. When angry, his language gets ungrammatical and somewhat coarse.
¹⁹
He is idealistic, passionate, and energetic, letting his emotions show. He is also perfectionistic and given to self-righteousness, which makes other people not want to upset him.

Achilles died in the final year of the war, so we know nothing of how he would have conducted himself during the homeward trip with the Myrmidons, the contingent he brought with him to Troy. We have watched Odysseus and his men on their way home. But earlier, during the war (in the
Iliad
), we hardly saw him with his men at all. Unlike the tongue-tied Ajax and the unadorned Achilles, Odysseus in the
Iliad
was eloquent in his persuasion and artistically scathing in his ridicule. He was mainly on stage as Agamemnon's principal staff officer, or as a fighter on the battlefield where he related almost exclusively to other Greek leaders or to Trojan adversaries, but hardly at all to his own men. Agamemnon gave him the task of returning the captive woman Chryseis to her father in
Iliad
1; Odysseus stopped the stampede to the ships in
Iliad
2, which Agamemnon caused, saving his neck. In
Iliad
2, Odysseus took the initiative as Agamemnon's deputy to humiliate the critic Thersites and to give him a public beating. Odysseus functioned as Agamemnon's representative where “the general's” presence was not required, such as pacing off the dueling ground with Hector in
Iliad
3. In the “Embassy” to buy out Achilles in
Iliad
9, Odysseus was clearly Agamemnon's negotiator, with Ajax and old Phoenix along to soften Achilles up. In
Iliad
14, we find the only occasion where Odysseus did anything but agree with Agamemnon. With his boss in a terminal funk, ready to bolt for his ship, Odysseus said to him, (
Iliad
14:95ff, Fitzgerald)

Hell's misery! …

Would you, then,

quit and abandon forever the fine town
of Troy that we have fought for all these years,
taking our losses? Quiet! or some other
[Greeks] may get wind of this. No man
… could ever
allow that thought to pass his lips—no man
who bore a staff, whom army corps obeyed,
as [Greeks] owe obedience to you.
Contempt, no less, is what I feel for you
after the sneaking thing that you propose.
While the two armies are in desperate combat,
haul our ships into the sea? …
As for ourselves, sheer ruin is what it means.
While our long ships are hauled down, will the soldiers
hold the line? Will they not look seaward
and lose their appetite for battle? There,
commander, is your way to wreck us all.”

Agamemnon was as much a failure as the commander of the static siege force around Troy as Achilles was a success as the commander of the mobile strike force.
²⁰
The whole tragedy of the
Iliad
was kicked off by Agamemnon's breathtaking twin violations of his army's moral order, first by impiously refusing to ransom the captive girl Chryseis to her father, the Priest of Apollo, and then by publicly dishonoring his most esteemed, most effective subordinate commander, Achilles. The next day, Agamemnon was so obtuse that he demanded the following bizarre demonstration of the army's loyalty:

Agamemnon tells his officers he's going to
pretend
to give up the war. It's the day after he has dishonored Achilles in front of the troops by seizing his
geras,
Achilles' Medal of Honor.
²¹
Agamemnon does one of the nuttiest things in the annals of military leadership, real or fictional. He says to his officers— (
Iliad
2:77ff, Lombardo, trans.; emphasis added)

We'd better move if we're going to get the men [ready].
But I'm going to test them first with a little speech,
The usual drill—
order them to beat a retreat in their ships.
It's up to each one of you [officers] to persuade them to stay.