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Tigers that a firefight almost ensued.
    Bear received his Army Commendation Medal for Valor for an action where he called in artillery on his own position (which necessarily was observation distance from the platoon he was working with), to permit the platoon he was serving as forward observer to escape encirclement. He received a second such award, but has complete amnesia for the action for which it was given.
    Bear is a proud man. He is proud of supporting his family, but is profoundly apprehensive that he is “losing it,” now more than thirty years after the war.
    His wife has taken to sleeping on the sofa. Bear always sleeps with a knife under his pillow, despite her pleas not to. He lives a long way from Boston in a rural community where few people lock their houses, no one locks the car, and many leave the key in the ignition. Bear is fanatical about both—forcing his family to lower the blinds at sundown, and he “walks the perimeter” every night before bed looking for snipers and ambushes. He rarely gets more than two hours of sleep a night because of nightmares. Four hours sleep is a good night.
    After Vietnam he took a job in the Department of Corrections as an officer in a maximum-security prison. Clearly his background as a combat sergeant in the Airborne made him appealing to the prison authorities. He says he was motivated by a desire to help the many incarcerated veterans. But he also loved the sense of being alive that came from being the only guard on a prison tier, where only his cunning, his will, his comprehensionof the psychology of the moment stood between him and a shank (homemade knife blade) between the ribs. He reveled in his ability to “mind-fuck” the prison administration when they mistreated Vietnam vet inmates.
    He recalls with relish various strategic deceptions that he pulled off against prisoners and administrators alike. In one episode, he feigned a regular, predictable pattern of sleeping while on duty in one of the prison towers, drawing a contraband operation to the apparently safe spot in plain view beneath his tower. He loved this job and only left it because he rebroke the ankle he had broken in a post-Vietnam parachute jump at Fort Bragg.
    Now at work in the post office he feels he no longer is able to pick his targets, but rather engages in physical violence before he even knows he is doing it. This hurts his pride because he has always counted on his self-control and self-discipline. Along with his understanding of combat veterans, these were his major assets when he worked as a prison guard.
    On one occasion Bear confused a Vietnamese co-worker at the post office with the Vietnamese enemy. He grabbed the man and told him he was going to cut his throat just like his comrades. Bear finds these episodes hateful, because he despises racism and recognizes that the man he terrorized is “a nice guy, by the way.”
    Co-workers say that sometimes he just stands and stares. No one dares to interrupt him at these moments, or to come up behind him unannounced.
    Thirty years after military discharge he has in one year used up four weeks of vacation time, 150 hours of sick time, and 80 hours without pay, mainly having to leave work in order to prevent himself from killing somebody, but also to receive treatment at the VA.
    Many, like Bear, who joined uniformed services quit or were fired after relatively short careers. Unlike Bear, some found civilian policing too boring, too dictated by rules that made them feel unsafe, too full of “chickenshit” authority relationships and apparently meaningless administrative tasks.
    A career that war exactly prepares veterans for upon return to civilian life is a
criminal
career, symbolized here by Odysseus’ pirate raid on Ismarus. Even though piracy had a certain cachet, even respectability, much as privateers, from Sir Francis Drake to the American brig
Yankee
in the War of 1812, have had in more recent