Introduction

"Must you have battle in your heart forever? The bloody toil of combat? Old contender ..." - Odyssey 12:132f, Fitzgerald "I wish I had been untrained afterward ... reintegrated and included. My regret is wasting the whole of my productive adult life as a lone wolf." - Jim Shelby, Vietnam veteran "Doc, you're f - - ing crazy." - One of my patients, a former Army Airborne sergeant, veteran of four Vietnam combat tours, upon hearing that I was going to lecture on prevention of psychological injury at the United States Military Academy at West Point

Homer's Odyssey is the epic homecoming of a Greek fighter from the Trojan War. Odysseus' trick of the hollow horse got the Greeks inside the walls of Troy, a feat that ten-to-one superiority in troop strength had never achieved. He was the very last fighter to make it home from Troy and endured the most grueling travel, costing him a full decade on the way. Odysseus' return ended in a bloody, triumphant shoot-'em-up. It is now more than thirty years since the majority of American veterans of the Vietnam War have returned home - physically. Psychologically and socially, however, "many of us aren't home yet," in the words of one combat medic.

My portrait of the psychologically injured combat veteran is colored by respect and love. However, I shall conceal none of the ugly and hateful ways that war veterans have sometimes acted toward others and themselves during their attempts to come home and be at home. To the ancient Greeks, Odysseus' name meant "man of hate" or "he who sows trouble." Indeed, some

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