However much he longed to go home after ten years of warfare in Asia, Ulysses the warrior-hero never much wanted to be home. More than the regular warfighter, kings, when home, must submit to certain niceties of social convention. But how dull it is to pause, to make an end. Home is, by nature, too fixed, too ordinary; staid. As tho’ to breathe were life! Not for the wily wanderer is the slow civilizational process, of “thro’ soft degrees” subduing a “rugged people” that “hoard, and sleep, and feed,” to “the useful and the good.” Warriors who’ve “drunk delight of battle” with their peers on exotic foreign fields, striving against gods, only uneasily submit to “this labour”—the frequently thankless work of fulfilling “common duties,” and so taming into peace a savage people.

Such, at least, is Tennyson’s poetic distillation of Ulysses’ complaint. Ulysses’ complaint is the classic complaint of a thymotic human being having to submit or resubmit to the apparent constraints of civilian expectation. This is no more than living within civilization; yet, Ulysses denigrates his people as savages. Unlike himself, they have not seen and have not known a multitude of “cities of men / And manners, climates, councils, governments.” They’ve not had his lust for travel—or for warfare on the epic scale. For Ulysses and his ilk, it seems (to use the later words of Benjamin Constant) that the “unarmed class” will forever appear “vulgar and ignoble.” For them, “laws are superfluous subtleties, [and] the forms of social life just so many insupportable delays.”

Nevertheless, the “unarmed class” might view Ulysses himself as the savage in the equation. This possibility Ulysses seems not to have contemplated. Ulysses, not civilians, forces the distancing here: He neither communicates to his people the knowledge he’s gained, nor shows any interest in learning from them their needs, hopes, or fears. He is isolated, but this isolation is entirely self-imposed.

Ulysses is not unique in this regard. Two decades ago, clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay brought Ulysses “home” to twenty-first-century America, finding in the Homeric hero allegorical patterns for especially Vietnam Era combatants returned from war. Shay fastens on Ulysses-like traits of dissembling, disguising, bitterness, boastfulness, boredom, compulsiveness, cautiousness, recklessness, suspiciousness, wariness, self-isolation—and sometimes, an extreme sensitivity—as typical behavioral characteristics among returned combat veterans. But for Shay, these are all bound up with some heretofore “destruction of the capacity for social trust.” While there is tragedy in contemporary society’s assumption that “injuries or illnesses can only be treated one on one in a professional’s office,” there’s equally tragedy in the combat veteran’s intransigence to accept the civilian community, both as community, and as something to which he necessarily belongs.

What Shay recognizes—and insists on—is that recovery can only happen in community, that intersecting plane of families, friends, neighbors, professional peers, and associational and civic bodies. 

So long as Ulysses refuses to communicate with his Ithacans, he can have no community in Ithaca. Homer suggests a solution, which Shay, millennia later, would emphasize: When King Alcinous’s bard, Demodokos, sings of the Trojan wars before the Phaeacian Court, Ulysses first breaks down in tears. Then, finally, Odysseus breaks his silence. The bard bore true witness to the triumphs and sufferings of war in his art, thus earning Ulysses’ trust.

A Modern Ulysses 

Why does the modern American combat veteran not trust his home once he’s returned? Why doesn’t he trust his spouse, his family, his professional peers, his community? This question is implicit in River City One, US Marine Corps veteran John J. Waters’ debut novel, underneath the fictional account of a heartland homecoming from the post-9/11 wars. Waters is contending with some ancient mysteries of the heart, mind, and will. In the novel, these questions come clothed in the contemporary costuming of a passion with no discernable tethering object, and hence his protagonist, John Walker, shows an all-too-familiar cynicism, purposelessness, angst, despondency, and despair. 

John Walker manifests many of the Ulysses-like traits Shay attaches to modern combat veterans. Not surprisingly, he comes off as an antihero. But upon reflection, the reason seems to be bound up in a certain disconnect between the author’s burning question—whether the warrior-soldier can ever truly return from war—and his evident reluctance to have Walker be the personified, definitive answer to that question.

Waters may not be deliberately navigating the mental waters of Homer, Tennyson, and Shay in relation to today’s Iraq and Afghanistan campaign veterans. The echoes are strong, however. For me at least, they illuminate some of the author’s mental tusslings that just happen to be of a piece with the mental tusslings of the disparate thinkers, researchers, and policymakers (and even of returned combat veterans turned writers themselves), who have been concerned with questions of soldiers and society, war and peace, veterans, democratic citizenship, and the civil-military divide. Nor is it lost on me that an artistic intervention, both for Waters’ protagonist and for me, awakens a denouement. 

Early in the novel, the fictional Walker recalls wondering to himself “whether isolation was a place one could choose to enter and just as easily choose to leave.” That question is echoed by the book’s setting and title, borrowed from the convenient military jargonese for a ship that’s been similarly situated, meaning purposefully cut off from all external communication: “River City One.” But there’s already a conceit tied up in the “River City” situation. Ostensibly no communication is possible once the order has gone through—complete radio silence is maintained. But among the sailors onboard the ship, communication is of course still possible. The possibility of communication is always present whenever two human beings are together. It’s the willingness to do so that isn’t.

That willingness or unwillingness turns out to be the most complex proposition to parse. Despite his shared history of military service, Walker is no longer willing to communicate with his former Marine buddy, Dan, about a profound shift that has happened in his post-service life. “However much we still had in common, there were problems I could no longer tell him,” Walker muses. Dan doesn’t appear again in the action. The scene shifts from a gun range plinking session and veteran paraphernalia-bedecked bar to the home Walker shares with his STEM teacher/college instructor wife, Grace, and toddler son, Charlie. But he wants to escape this home and its conversations, too, which he does via late-night neighborhood walks with his dog, Rex; by dilly-dallying around in his much-loathed office at the Taylor & Tines law firm; and occasionally, by attending civic functions pushed by his professional peers that enable him to conveniently disappear.

Walker is the newest attorney at his landlocked, midwestern city’s oldest law firm, where ostensibly he’s traded the violent justice of battlefield bullets for the polished prestigiousness of trial law. What happens when you take an American Marine out of the terrorist-dotted battlefield and put him in the courtroom harboring landmines of a verbal variety? Crickets, mostly, it turns out. Walker fumbles his argument before the judge in his first client case. It’s not simply that Walker has “lost his will to fight,” though he has, in a way that reflects his existential boredom and the Dunder-Mifflin-like character of his work, colleagues, and firm. But it’s the articulation of thought and the vocalizing of it, speech itself, that stumps Walker. “Violence had not made me afraid. Now, in this courtroom, I found myself paralyzed by the pressure of speaking in public.” But this paralysis also seems self-cultivated. Later, when his willingness to speak is suddenly unlocked by interacting with Ruth, an Irish-born, New York City-based opera singer, Walker then reveals the deeper dynamic: “I had waited years for a time when I would be interested enough to answer honestly.”

There’s a nice story to be written about a US Marine translating his righteous pursuit of America’s international enemies into a righteous pursuit of domestic enemies via the American justice system. Perhaps such a storyline is too straightforward for our day and our molded desire to ferret out context and subtext and corrupt ulterior motives in every human and institutional interaction. River City One is not that story, nor does it try to be. But the mirroring of the combat soldier and the trial lawyer, the murky IED battlefield, and the murky legalese behind which lawyers, firms, and defendants often hide themselves and their true motives, is an inspired literary device that should be full of thought-riches. 

Waters, however, makes his readers do most of that thought-work themselves. And thus I cannot tell whether it is only the overtrained literature student in me that is imagining the parallel identities of Walker as soldier and attorney intersecting in the recognition that both roles are proxy executors of principals who have hired them to navigate the consequences of their prior decisions. Walker dialogues about getting hired for “a lifetime preoccupied by unintended consequences.” But he never notices how delegated responsibility for others’ lives is no less costly, complex, or worthy of taking seriously because it happened at the rate of private billable hours in the American Midwest instead of government pay scales in the Middle East. Though Walker does not make the obvious connections between his former and his current professions, he reflects on attorney life:

Clients gave you a task simple enough: preoccupy yourself with everything that might go wrong; invent the problems before they materialize; answer one question by asking another. Doing this right meant walking a tightrope, which was why the client hired you. They hired you to walk the tightrope ahead of them, stepping carefully along a narrow string while looking straight down into the pit of their own personal, financial, or marital ruin. You did it so you could report back on how to avoid falling in.

But Walker, like a certain strain of stereotyped veteran, seems to resent the rhythms of this responsibility only when it comes in the civilian, and not the military, setting. And this reinforces the question: From whence comes the Ulysses-like bias against the tugs and pulls of civilian life? It is not as though military life lacks bureaucratic inanities—nearly every experienced veteran has an arsenal of cynical descriptors for precisely such features of military service. Nor are all those who serve particularly noble characters, as Walker himself shows, or as US Army veteran-turned-also-novelist Matt Gallagher explained in a spicy interview this spring: “The reality is soldiers are oftentimes very gruff people with ugly worldviews.” Soldiers can conveniently wrap themselves in the patriotic pathos of the Flag; lawyers can wrap themselves in the righteous aura of Justice. But underneath such trappings, both tend to look recognizably human, flawed, and quite mundane. Both ooze distrust for the motivations of their fellows.

“Lawyers drank to forget,” Walker theorizes. He himself is drunk off of his own memories, which he prefers to keep hazy—until he encounters Ruth, that is. And thus most of River City One stands as witness to Walker’s performativeness at being a combat veteran in the eyes of his family, his attorney peers, his city, and even himself, rather than his simply being one. Convinced that all civilians want from him is a sensational story of witnessing death, Walker makes up stories with Kafkaesque details for the Grief Ministry group he halfheartedly participates in. Similarly, his ostentatiously patriotic office wall displays a glamor photo of a fellow Marine who died on patrol with him, that looks nothing like how that Marine was in person. A reflexive performer, Walker judges every action and interaction of others around him as also conscious performance, and implicit fakery.

The exception is Ruth, the actual professional performer. Ruth arrives in this midwestern city already disdainful of it, America, and Americans—of her audience, which forms the jury of her profession to which she must “play,” as does a trial lawyer to his more formal one. For her, a glamorized Instagram life and old New York Times reviews of her vocal talent are the uniform and flag that cloaks the disappointments of her fading career, marriage, and life. But she shines brightly when she puts herself on display, perhaps no more so than when before a man who has participated in the violent pain that she only reflects in her roles. Ruth, too, glamorizes pain and alienation. But with Ruth, Walker immediately buries the truth of her performativeness. Allured as though by a Siren, he chooses to respond to her performance, specifically her singing of “O Danny Boy.” Like Ulysses before Demodokos, he chooses to trust the truth of her performance; a willing suspension of disbelief in action. 

Only afterward does Walker begin to be honest about the truth of that Marine’s death, and how he had coaxed him into that fatal deployment because he had wanted his expertise. Only in articulating these admissions does Walker begin to be honest with himself about himself, such that his father can also, finally, have an honest interaction with him. Only in this ripped-bare state where Walker no longer throws up any decoys of pretense, can he even begin to be welcomed home. In what seems to be a felt, rather than a conscious way, Walker appears at last to grasp this truth: even when it appears to be playing out in a staged way, not all visible human behavior is unauthentic or cheap.

Planting an Oar

Art can conceal as much as it reveals. This is an old truism, as is the reminder that art can both soothe and unsettle. The former is one of Homer’s warnings about the artful tales Odysseus tells about himself to his enraptured Phaeacian hosts. The duality is partly what lends performative art its transformative power for troubled souls, as Shay argued, and as demonstrated among GWOT veterans with the successful Theater of War phenomenon that brings Greek tragedies to life. But a soul can also get lost in the captivating cadences of poetry, and find himself rooting for the questionable Ulysses who shuns all responsibility in favor of endless adventuring with his war buddies. 

On more mature reflection, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is seductive with all that striving, seeking, finding, and not yielding of “we few, we happy few.” While seeming to celebrate excellence and hence purposefulness, it in fact is a guilt-free absolving of Ulysses’ ties to his community, and of any necessity of turning himself back from a man of war to a man of peace. It discounts life in a true community as a washed-up happenstance, rather than as the choice that proves the true human metal of one’s soul. And on further reflection, this illuminates something about both the contemporary John Walker and the ancient Ulysses.

Ulysses, too, is willingly seduced by the artful tales he lives within. He never escapes the art of Homer’s poem—we never see him complete his most puzzling but important task, as imparted to him in Hades via the blind prophet, Tiresias. Tiresias instructs Odysseus to take an oar and journey as far inland as there is no knowledge of the sea, where his oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan. He must then plant that oar in the soil, and sacrifice it to Poseidon, the god of the sea but also the one who “holds the earth” (gaiêochos). 

Ulysses must finally choose to anchor himself in the fixedness of the earth, which means the fixedness of the civilizational strictures of participating in the human community. But this requires a certain humility: to do so, Ulysses must first choose to explain to that community the meaning of his oar and why he carries it, and hear from them why they identify it with harvesting the fruits of the soil. He must communicate with non-seafaring humans. Only in so doing will he finally join together what is fixed and unfixed, sea and land, war and peace. Only then will he be home. And only then will he regain his full humanity.