Adjusting To Normal Life a Struggle for Some Veterans
Washed on the shores of his island home, after 10 years'lack of foreign wars and 10 years of hard travel in foreign lands, Ulysses, Literature's most famous veteran, staring around him:"But now the glorious Odysseus awoke from sleep in his own country, and he did not know it, / have been long gone. "In addition, the goddess Athena cast a veil of mist over all the famous landmarks, making"Do anything / other than it was. "" Ah me, "sighs Ulysses,"what are the people whose country I have come to this time? "
This sense of dislocation has been the veterans returned from the field of war since Homer conjured Ulysses'sinister back about 2800 years ago. Its annoying power highlighted on Thursday when a military psychiatrist who had examined the mental scars of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan went on a shooting rampage at an army base in Texas.
Who is a veteran, and how he stands in relation to his country and people? This question is still relevant for them to walk in parades this week on Veterans Day in the U.S. and Armistice Day in Europe, and the ever decreasing number of spectators who applaud them. In theory, celebrates Veterans Day event, which brutally clear that victory - the survival. The practice is November 11, clouded by ambiguous symbolism, and has become our most embarrassing holiday.
The major theme of"The Odyssey" - the return of the veteran to his home - the only survivor, and undoubtedly the greatest epic example of what was apparently a popular theme in ancient times. Another poem, now lost,"Nostoi" or"Return", was an epic uncertain authorship, which was said to have included five books and traced the homecomings of the veterans of the Trojan War by the Greek Commander in Chief, Agamemnon, his brother Menelaus, the aged counselor Nestor, the priest Calchas, the hero Diomedes, and even Achilles'son Neoptolemus.
The Greek word Nostos, which means"home", is the root of our English"Nostalgia" (along with algos - "evil" or"sorrow"). Content and character'Nostoi "are now impossible to measure, all we know about it comes from a late, possibly fifth century quick and stray fragments. Some of the most famous of these traditional veterans \ stories, however, survived in later, non-epic works.
Aeschylus'towering tragedy"Agamemnon", held in 458 BC, focuses on King's return from Troy to his palace in Argos, where he is murdered in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra. Virgil's"Aeneid" relates travails of the famous heroic veteran Trojan Aeneas, which must be after the destruction of their city by the Greek victories, making a new home in some other foreign country.
But it is"The Odyssey" which most directly probes the theme for the veteran's return. Threaded through this tale story, right in the historical touchstone, is remarkable scenes deals with aspects of the war veteran's experience is disconcertingly familiar to our own time. Odysseus returns home to a place he does not recognize, and then find their estates overrun with young men with no experience of war. During his long journey back, he has responded to every stranger with elaborate caginess, concocting stories about who he is and what he has seen and done - the real war, he keeps to himself.