Free Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay Page A

so he says. And the narrator says. And the gods say. The families back at Ithaca reasonably will hold him responsible for all
six hundred
young men who shipped out with him, but here we are looking at Odysseus’ conduct only with regard to the six men who get eaten by the monster.
    The squadron has lost its bearings. Reconnaissance is called for, and any responsible commander would see it competently done. Odysseus and hiscrew cross the small stretch of water. Now closer, looking up from the shore, Odysseus can see that the cave is a giant’s lair. This prompts him to take the skin of extra-potent wine, much as a modern commander might take extra, nonstandard weapons he thinks the mission requires. 3 Odysseus leaves most of his crew with the ship, and with twelve picked men climbs up to the giant-scale den. They enter it wide-eyed. The owner is not at home. Odysseus’ men plead with him—This is bad shit, Cap’n! Let’s grab what we can carry and get out of here! But Odysseus turns stubborn and says,
    But I would not give way—…
not till I saw him, saw what [guest-]gifts he’d give [me].
    (9:256ff, Fagles)
    This “curiosity” to see what
xeinia,
hospitality gifts, the giant would give him costs six men their lives. This is no ominous hunch. He knows that a giant inhabits this cave, but nevertheless he keeps his men there in danger!
    One of the veterans I have worked with for many years once punched his sister’s husband in the side of his head as he passed him in the back hall of their house. What happened in the ensuing fight matters less than why he did it: “I just wanted to see what happened.” Another veteran says that a couple of years after returning from Vietnam he dove off a roof. Was he trying to commit suicide? No. “I wanted to see what would happen—sometimes you do that.”
    Commentators on Odysseus’ behavior are divided between those who emphasize his “curiosity”—praising him as a sort of ancient proto-scientist—and those who emphasize his greed—that he hoped for a guest-gift of some immensely valuable item. 4 I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans’ attraction to danger, an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives
after returning home,
and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their survival. To quote from a veteran’s poem you will read later, in Chapter 18:
    I drive Chu Yen [the veteran’s motorcycle] to the Wall in a Demon rage, we make the trip in eight minutes; if she’d been flesh and blood I would have ridden her to death.
    Vietnam veteran bikers did not invent dangerously fast motorcycle riding, as we saw in this chapter’s epigraph by the famous World War I combat veteran Lawrence of Arabia, who died from it.
    Veterans’ behavior has been variously called irresponsible, impulsive, judgment-impaired, thrill-seeking, and danger-seeking, but these adjectives don’t quite get at the sense that the dice
must
be rolled. In addition to hungering to acquire the guest-gifts, Odysseus just wanted to “see what would happen” in the Cyclops’ cave. Prolonged combat leaves some veterans with the need to “live on the edge” to pose the same question to the cosmos over and over again: yes or no? The veteran who dove off the roof was not “curious” about what broken bones feel like. Odysseus’ irresponsible impulse to see “What
are
they—violent, savage, lawless?/or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?” (9:195f, Fagles) and what guest-gift he would receive from the giant makes perfect sense, as something that veterans of much fighting simply
do.
It is as if, having lived in a world where the dice were constantly rolling, the calm, plan-filled responsibility of civilian life (or for that matter, of peacetime military service) is intolerable. They speak of it as a