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I Spent Years Working with War Veterans. The Odyssey Hit Me Hard

The journey home can be harder than the battle itself

A highlight of my recent vacation in Halifax was watching The Odyssey with my son Jack. We were especially lucky to be among the relatively few viewers able to experience the film in all its IMAX 70 mm majesty; Halifax is home to one of only a handful of theatres in Canada equipped to show it in that format. We loved it.

Even if you have not seen it, you likely know the basics of the story. Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic poem is a touchstone of Western mythology and storytelling. I vividly remember learning about The Odyssey in my English class at the Royal Military College. Knowing the room was full of cadets, our professor seized upon the military hero and his long trek home from war to teach us broader lessons about literature. He wove into those discussions Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey made famous in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The pattern stretches back to antiquity: a hero departs on a quest, faces a series of trials, and returns home transformed. Campbell saw this arc as part of humanity’s common story, with each of us playing the hero in our own lives. The idea has particular resonance for military veterans, who go off to combat as heroes but find, like Odysseus, that coming home is its own difficult odyssey.

The Odyssey is the OG hero’s journey. The Trojan War takes ten years to complete, but the trip back takes another ten because of incredible challenges along the way. In Christopher Nolan’s version, monsters, witches, sirens, giants, whirlpools, storms, and a cyclops stand between the men and the homes they long for. They lose time, direction, and ultimately themselves. Odysseus appears to offend the gods, and his crew fears they are all doomed. While Odysseus survives, his men do not. He returns to Ithaca, but the homecoming is more tragedy than triumph. He arrives a changed man and finds a land that bears no resemblance to the one he left.

The quest at the heart of The Odyssey is one veterans have long faced. The journey home to the life you knew before the war can be the more difficult battle to face because, in some ways, it is impossible. The world they longed to return to no longer exists. People have moved on, circumstances have changed. The veteran has changed too. Many struggle to relate to friends and family because few can fully understand what they endured. Sometimes love is not enough to help the veteran come to terms with injuries both mental and physical. More tragically still, some survive the war but perish on their journey of recovery.

I watched The Odyssey just days before the fifth anniversary of Afghanistan’s fall back into Taliban hands, after two decades of Western military presence and fragile........

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