Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay Read Free Book Online Page B

makes the nightmares go away. There’s not enough pills or booze to make the nightmares go away, but pain…. In jail I
made
them do me [beat him]—grabbed a guard and beat him so they’d do me…. If I get hurt bad it helps the nightmares go away faster.”
    Wiry is an intelligent, capable man. After discharge from the Navy, between 1970 and 1985 he held himself together by being a workaholic, building up and repeatedly losing businesses, both legal and illegal. Hestarted a successful delicatessen and then destroyed the business when his symptoms flared up. He describes “certain points where I get erratic—all fucked up—and whatever I have going at the time is irrelevant.” He has worked as a caterer, as a tractor-trailer driving instructor, and as a trucker. Several of his businesses were criminal, “in the rackets,” for which he has served prison terms.
    One such criminal business involved stealing locked safes from business establishments and then expertly opening them elsewhere with explosives—a civilian application of his trained military skill. He informs me that an ordinary auto tow truck is quite up to the job of pulling a safe through the wall of a building with its cable and then driving away with it.
    His first VA hospitalization occurred in January 1985 when he was employed as a trucker. His truck broke down in the cold, and he called in to his employer, who promised to send help. Wiry waited in the truck, but help never came, resulting in the development of hypothermia, for which he had to be hospitalized. He now understands that he experienced this as a replay of being abandoned in the Mekong Delta after being blown off his boat. At the time, however, he did not see this: “They left me…. [After release from the hospital] I went off and I shot up the warehouse…. I made the people who owned the company get down on their knees…. I treated them like [Vietnamese] prisoners.”
    Treatment in the VA since the mid-1980s has only partially stabilized Wiry. He remains highly symptomatic, highly mistrustful, and highly explosive. In the periods around Christmas and around the anniversary of Tet in March [that is, of a period of thirty-five consecutive days of fighting during the Tet Offensive], he has gotten himself beaten up almost every year. He does this by going into a bar and attacking the largest man in the place. Wiry weighs no more than 140 and is about five feet seven, and, of course, wiry in build.
    Speaking of his criminal activities he says, “It’s not the money, it’s the
action.”
His skills, his cunning, his craft—a precise word, because it means both highly developed skill
and
cunning—all become valuable again in “action” in a way that they never are in civilian life. To my knowledge, he has never read Tennyson’s poem
Ulysses,
but would readily subscribe to the following:
    How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life …
    He shares the disdain that Tennyson’s Odysseus has for the civilians: they merely “hoard, and sleep, and feed,
and know not me.”
11
    What kind of recognition and acknowledgment would have let Wiry feel he was “known,” understood, and valued? Any kind? Would it have affected his need for “action”? I believe that a unit association of Riverine Force veterans, such as exists now thirty-plus years out, could have made this difference had it existed at the time.
    Some readers will angrily accuse me of perpetuating the “crazed, criminal, out-of-control Vietnam Veteran Stereotype.”
Absolutely nothing
I have to say here is distinctive to the Vietnam War. War itself does this. War itself creates situations that can wreck the mind. If Wiry has lost his reason at times, he had good reasons. I’ll put it as bluntly as I can: combat service per se smoothes the