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  • The Empty Sleeve
  • Clay Lewis (bio)
Randall Fuller , From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2011. x + 224 pages. Illustrated. $29.95;
James Marten , Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America. University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xii + 286 pages. Illustrated. $39.95;
David Silkenat , Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina. University of North Carolina Press, 2011. x + 224 pages. $45.

Grant Wood's engraving The Empty Sleeve (1865) presents a stiff-upper-lip Civil War veteran, his arm amputated. Despite his male upbringing, he must submit to being a passenger in a carriage driven by an elegantly dressed young woman. This wood engraving is an emblem of the wounded veteran adjusting to his changed physical condition and to postwar civilian life that has also been profoundly changed.

I think of my own Uncle Oliver, who, when he visited us, frequently stepped out on the porch to hawk and spit from mustard gas he inhaled in World War I. And of an army captain, my mother's genial and much-admired prewar boss, who returned from North Africa with his legs mangled by strafing and his good spirits consumed by rage. And of a high-school math teacher, a marine veteran promoted from private to captain in three Pacific landings. In our 1947 classroom he was profoundly depressed to the point of being unable to correct rowdy students. After class he once asked me: "Everybody got killed, why didn't I?"

The story of war goes beyond the cessation of hostilities. Homer's Iliad ends, but the Odyssey tells of Odysseus's arduous return to Ithaca. There, cleverly disguised, he plans with his son Telemachus to clear his house of the suitors of his wife, Penelope, by killing them all. They succeed. Athena then must intercede to stop the killing that will certainly follow, ad infinitum, as [End Page 305] the suitors' families pursue their revenge. Bloodshed is now widespread in Ithaca, not Troy. Students of the Odyssey speculate that Odysseus brings home from the war quick, cold, systematic killing. Ten years of war have changed him—as killing in Iraq and Afghanistan mark returning U.S. veterans, and as World War I and II marked the men I knew as a boy. Athena understands. Her magical powers restrain another cycle of revenge killings, but the violent slaughter of the suitors is not forgotten by Telemachus and the inhabitants of Ithaca. The long-term effects of Troy would persist in Ithaca even into subsequent generations. The empty sleeve of Wood's soldier speaks to the horror of combat but also to adjustments, present and future, the soldier must make for his lost limb. It dramatizes the adjustments he must make to accommodate a world changed by the war.

Written a decade ago, Jonathan Shay's Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002) informs our perspective. A psychoanalyst, he compares Odysseus's trials to those faced by combat veterans of Vietnam: "Time and again Odysseus shows himself as a man who does not trust anyone, a man whose capacity for social trust has been destroyed." This view of the effects of war on combat veterans applies to veterans of other wars. Thomas Childers's Soldier from the War Returning (2009)—reviewed in SR—traces three men from childhood to enlistment, to combat in World War II, and into their postwar and elderly years. One struggles with the loss of his legs; the other two suffer psychological wounds that never heal. Their wartime experiences profoundly shape their postwar lives. And of course physical and psychological wounds to veterans affect veterans' families. In My Father's War (2003)—also reviewed in SR—Julia Collins recounts how her father, a happy-go-lucky fellow at Yale, was psychologically damaged by marine combat on Okinawa. He could not adjust himself to civilian life, and his family was fractured by alcohol, job changes, his wife's being sent to a mental hospital, and divorce. Then it was called shell shock; now post-traumatic stress disorder.

Eric T. Dean, Jr., in Shook Over...

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