The Evil Hours (12 page)

Western literature begins in strife and trauma, in the sweat and spear clashing, the agony and exertion of
The
Iliad
. In his epic poem, written eight and a half centuries before the birth of Christ, Homer depicts Achilles, the hero of
The
Iliad
, as the ideal warrior, a surpassingly talented soldier and stalker of men, a man capable of intense feeling who, not coincidentally, also appeared to suffer from at least two symptoms of what today might be called post-traumatic stress. (One of the biggest differences between the Greek world and our own is that public displays of emotion by men were not only tolerated but also considered highly dignified, an appropriate response to an overwhelming event.) His best friend, aide-de-camp, and comrade (and, some say, lover) Patroclus is killed in battle.
Having tended to his body, honoring Patroclus in accordance with the strict martial rites of the time, Achilles found himself unable to simply put the loss behind him:

 

Achilles went on grieving for his friend, whom he could not banish from his mind, and all-conquering sleep refused to visit him. He tossed to one side and the other, thinking always of his loss, of Patroclus's manliness and spirit . . . of fights with the enemy and adventures on unfriendly seas. As memories crowded in on him, the warm tears poured down his cheeks.

 

Whenever I read lines like this from Homer, I think of friends who lost buddies in Iraq and Afghanistan, men who despite having strived mightily to protect their comrades saw them die anyhow.
I have watched, over the years, as these good and honorable people then proceeded to eviscerate themselves with guilt, convinced that they had somehow violated the holiest and most sacred of warrior bonds. One of the most psychologically wounded trauma survivors I've ever met was a Marine who lost seven of his closest friends in a single IED blast near Fallujah in 2004. The fact that he'd had an argument with one of them right before he was killed only deepened the blow. “Kevin wasn't the same guy who'd shipped out to Iraq seven months before,” his sister told me.

When I first met him at a restaurant, his eyes locked on me the second I stepped through the door. We sized each other up like boxers as I made my way to his table. Sitting down, I could see clearly the anxiety, the guilt that possessed his frame almost like rictus. He sat as stiffly as a man about to get a root canal. The only things that moved were his eyes, which missed nothing, and his right leg, which worked up and down like a sewing machine needle the entire meal. We got to talking, and more of his story emerged. He was in a kind of reverse basic training for the most afflicted sorts of post-traumatic sufferers. “Boot camp with smoking privileges,” he called it. He told me he'd been addicted to crystal meth, a drug he knew to be the worst of them all. “The only time my symptoms go away is when I'm high.”

Post-traumatic stress is a slippery thing, a ghost that haunts history, but it isn't hard to imagine what happened to Kevin. The instant that the IED had gone off, killing his buddies, the moral universe he'd inhabited for the first nineteen years of his life essentially ceased to exist. Virtually everything he assumed to be true and right and just came to an end in that moment. (Recently, a number of researchers, many of them close readers of Homer, have begun calling this sort of thing “moral injury.”) What happened next is harder to understand, but somewhere deep in Kevin's psyche, in a dim place beyond the light of reason, an insistent voice began whispering a secret message to him until it was the only thing he heard. The message was simple and unmistakable:
Bad things don't happen to good people
.

Out of the Corps a year later, it wasn't long before Kevin lost his way. Looking back on it, one could say he tried to make true that secret lie he heard within.
Bad things don't happen to good people
. Alcohol, drugs, rampant paranoia, and the life of a shut-in soon followed. In such moments, when one's social horizon shrinks down to a pinhole, the idea of palliative human warmth can seem untrue, wrong, like a heat on the skin. Self-damage becomes inevitable. This unnerving human impulse to reflect one's inner pain with outer damage runs across cultures. As Homer shows us in
The
Iliad
, there's an immortal species of self-torture that demands physical expression. Learning of Patroclus's death,

 

A black storm cloud of pain shrouded Achilles.

On his bowed head he scattered dust and ash

In handfuls and befouled his beautiful face,

Letting black ash sift on his fragrant khiton.

Then in the dust he stretched his giant length

And tore his hair with both hands.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Homer anticipates other ideas in contemporary psychological research that we are only now coming to terms with.
In
The Odyssey,
for example, we find a depiction of survivor's guilt, written 2,760 years before the term “survivor's syndrome” was coined by Holocaust researcher W. G. Niederland. As Odysseus faces a deadly storm, which threatens to sink his ship on the way home from the Trojan War, he finds himself wishing that he had been killed with his buddies in Troy instead of dying ignominiously at sea:

 

There is nothing for me now but sudden death. Three and four times blessed are those countrymen of mine who fell long ago on the broad plains of Troy in loyal service to the sons of Atreus. If only I too could have met my fate and died the day the Trojan hordes let fly at me with their bronze spears over Achilles' corpse! I should at least have had my burial rites and the Achaeans would have spread my fame abroad. But now it seems I was predestined to an ignoble death.

 

Reading these old poems,
The
Odyssey
in particular, one cannot help but be struck by what appears to be the more than metaphorical inability of these survivors to go home. It is less the enigma of survival at stake in
The
Odyssey
than the enigma of homecoming, the frustrated transit between worlds: the world of savage, warring nature and the world of civilization. Indeed, the entire narrative structure of
The
Odyssey
is built around this basic fact: the Trojan War ends, and in the face of all reason Odysseus hits the road for ten years in what amounts to history's greatest road trip, in the process bedding the beautiful sea goddess Calypso and narrowly escaping a mind-killing drug habit in the Land of the Lotus-Eaters. It is impossible to know what dark, self-destructive impulses were at work in Odysseus's postwar heart, but it isn't hard to imagine that after the brutality and capriciousness of war, Odysseus might not have felt fully prepared to return to a buttoned-down domestic life back in Ithaca. This deep-seated, even existential, feeling of having been cut loose in the world, transformed by the cruelty of fate into a rootless wanderer without a relational home, a theme familiar to readers of Jon Krakauer or Jack Kerouac, has little place in the modern psychiatric canon and is not generally included in discussions of PTSD. Still, one sees this theme echoing throughout the literature of trauma, predating even Homer. (In
The Epic of Gilgamesh
, Gilgamesh, who is generally regarded as the mythic predecessor of Odysseus, looks on his dead comrade Enkidu and cries, “I cannot bear what happened to my friend. Then I was frightened, I was terrified by death, and I set out to roam the wilderness . . .”)

This impulse to wander, to leave the awful past behind and kill time in a strange place, is written across the lives of so many survivors that it could easily stand as a literary genre all its own. It is, in essence, a form of resurrection. Alice Sebold, describing her postrape roamings, said, “Syracuse was over. Good riddance, I thought. I was going to the University of Houston in the fall. I was going to get an MA in poetry. I would spend the summer trying to reinvent myself. I had not seen Houston, never been south of Tennessee, but it was going to be different there. Rape would not follow me.”

Trying to outrun shame, even perceived shame, is perhaps a universal human impulse, and it should come as no surprise that
The
Odyssey
is but an early example of what can be found in every era of human history. After the Civil War, the number of veterans, both Blue and Gray, who hit the road after Appomattox is beyond counting.
In fact, once you start looking into the number of Confederate veterans in Jesse James's gang, that roving band of gunslingers who terrorized the American West throughout the 1870s, an entirely new theory of how the American West was settled opens up. The Wild West was filled with scarred young men whose only skills in life included killing, sleeping on hard ground, stalking, and looting. Closer to home, a dear friend of mine, who was drugged and raped on Long Island as a nineteen-year-old, left America as soon as she could, cut off all of her hair, and wandered around Europe for months, eventually moving to a small island off the coast of Italy.
One Iraq veteran I interviewed for this book has moved almost every year since his unit returned from Baghdad in 2003, an odyssey that has taken him to three different continents.

The urge to reinvent one's moral and physical universe through travel is so common that some students of trauma think it might be biological. Laurence Gonzales, a
National Geographic
writer who has written extensively on the science of survival, wrote that “travel is a time-honored strategy for healing. It forces the unconscious reorganization of a number of areas of the brain, especially those involving the hippocampus, which has the special function of creating spatial maps. Every time you travel to an unfamiliar environment, your brain undergoes an important transformation.”
The neuroscience behind this claim hasn't been firmly established, but the point remains: Homer was on to something.

Homer died some four hundred years before Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was born, and the bodies of knowledge they promulgated were as separate then as they are today.
Hippocrates, as with Plato and his idea that the quality of one's childhood influences the quality of one's adulthood, formulated notions of the self that have, over the centuries, exerted a powerful influence over the field of psychiatry, not to mention our general view of human development. Some students of depression have even gone so far as to argue that Hippocrates is, in effect, the grandfather of Prozac, viewing the body as the originating point of mental ills.

Nothing remotely similar can be said of Homer, whose works have largely remained under a sort of house arrest in ever-shrinking classics departments across the United States (most of the classical scholars I know are forced to scrape by, struggling to find teaching work). Even today, when so many Greek assumptions about life and society are woven into the fabric of our lives (such as their faith in human reason, individuality, and democracy), the Greek views of postwar life and heroic loss remain oddly removed from our modern view of trauma. In Denis Johnson's epic Vietnam novel
Tree of Smoke
, the dominant character, a towering army colonel turned CIA puppetmaster named Sands, observes that “war is ninety-percent myth,” a truism that was never more resonant than with our Greek heritage and trauma.
War, it seems to me,
is
mostly myth, ancient ideas and dreams handed down to us by our fathers, stories we live out unknowingly, often having no idea of the invisible stories and archetypes that guide us from day to day.

Unfortunately, whatever psychological insights Homer has bequeathed to us remain hidden behind the wall of a more recent, very unclassical sort of mythology, obscured by our society's need for heroes who are somehow immune to normal human weakness, which conversely views survivors as damaged goods, aliens, and walking time bombs rather than as people burnished by adversity. In my own life, my experience has always been that the joys of survival, the exuberant embrace of life that seemed to emanate from my deepest cells, was always greatest on my way home, neither here nor there, in the remote airfields and transient barracks that are every war correspondent's postwar odyssey. Home: that was always another matter entirely, and it was almost as if some deeper sense of life's preciousness leaked out in transit, hour by hour, in between the world of the war and the world of the protected.

 

If, as Siddhartha Mukherjee argues, “every era casts illness in its own image,” there can be few clearer examples of the way that a particular age has cast the image of psychological trauma than the Middle Ages, an era dominated by the Catholic Church.
During this period, the post-traumatic condition, such as it was, was treated as a question of theology and, secondarily, as a matter of tending to the moral needs of warriors returning to their communities after war. In a world viewed as God's Kingdom on Earth, where little distinction was made between the natural and the supernatural, the first challenge was how to conceptualize violence in a religion whose messiah's teachings strongly emphasized pacificism over bearing arms. Keeping this in mind, leaders in the early Christian church assumed that warriors returning from battle would be racked by feelings of guilt and shame over their role in breaking the “Truce of God,” and they paid an unusual amount of attention to their plight, providing them with what could generously be described as a sort of religious medicine.
Veterans today are often encouraged to undergo therapy and deal with their conflicted feelings about their wartime experiences, but returning warriors during the Medieval period were encouraged, and in some instances commanded, to undergo various rituals of repentance and reconciliation, cleansing themselves before the Lord. In the eyes of the church, warriors were, in essence, sinners until they got right with God. As Pope Gregory VII put it, “It is impossible to engage in military service without sin.”
In particular, church leaders were concerned with those warriors who had broken or believed they had broken the Sixth Commandment, which declared without qualification that “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”