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Somewhere near Chasiv Yar, along the « fortress belt » in the Donetsk region, Serhii Krynitskyi, a Ukrainian soldier, crawls out of the dugout that he has been holding for the last 356 days. He leaves behind the body of his friend, killed by a Russian drone a few days before. For him, and for the countless survivors of global battlefields, it is the start of an odyssey.
What does war do to a man? After the brutal circumstances have been met with more or less honor, and the olive branch extended, society expects every father, son and husband to come back home, but how? If anything, The Odyssey recounts the long and tortuous journey of a veteran who returns from the surreal experience of war. The parenthesis that separated life from death has finally closed leaving him with only ellipses and question marks for directions.
The transition to civilian life is a hellish trial that veterans and their families have to psychologically, physically and socially navigate alone and together. Odysseus experiences PTSD, identity loss and moral injury from actions taken or witnessed. The sacred bonds that once united him with his men will break progressively, painfully, in part because of the heavy price they will have to pay collectively for every one of his decisions. Guided by his intemperate hubris like when he reveals his real name to the Cyclops Polyphemus, or his sense of sacrifice like when he hides from his men the cost of choosing Scylla over Charybdis, Odysseus’s actions are his own to answer for when the time comes.
At home, waiting for an eternity, Penelope only wants one thing: Odysseus. Every night, she undoes her work – the weaving of Laertes’s burial shroud, to defend a household on the brink. The absence of her husband is a void that « suitors » seek to fill, a vacancy that society cannot tolerate. In their own fight against the odds, she and Telemachus throw everything in to win time for Odysseus to make it home, old and unrecognizable. What about Serhii and his comrades? What about their wives and children? Will they find each other back in this universal darkness?
According to a report that’s part of the Costs of War project from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, more than 30.000 veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars took their own lives after returning home. To put this number into perspective, it is four times the number of soldiers killed in the theater of operations. There was probably no military honoring ceremony, no folded flag, no epic poem written about their struggles.
So yes, come home safe Odysseus. Come home safe, all of you. Maybe not immediately but eventually.
Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now
in the waves and wars. Add this to the total – bring the trial on!
The Odyssey, book 5.
