Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay

but even that’s only sometimes. You know, those times when I’m absolutely clear that she needs me to be there for her, then I’m okay.
    Nobody else has had the guts to be that way with me for twenty-five years. I respect her for that.
    Dedication, sometimes going over the line into fanaticism, is normal for combat veterans in the workplace. It accounts for the success in the world that many do achieve. They typically work
much
more than forty hours a week. The truism “Money isn’t everything” has an unusual application here. I have never known a group of people so little interested in money as the combat veterans I have worked with. If they have worked like madmen, like they are on a “mission,” it is not for the money, but for the sake of having a mission that shuts everything else from their minds.
    One veteran formerly in our treatment program—a giant of a man who left school in grade school—worked so much overtime as a stevedore on the docks that he was able to purchase a large house in an upscale suburb of Boston for his wife (now ex-wife) and children. They never saw him.
    When I write these words, I have been working with Vietnam combat veterans for fourteen years. The veterans are now more than a decade older than when I started. While I have not attempted to go back to clinic records and do a count, my impression is that the typical civilian employment history of the veterans newly coming into the program a decade ago was fifty or more jobs since Vietnam, none longer than a year. Now the typical Vietnam veteran newly admitted to the program worked the same job for ten to thirty years making good money, and then “broke down,” incapacitated by combat-related symptoms and emotions. The life courses of the veterans with fifty-plus jobs in twenty years and those who held a single job in that time are very different, with very different consequences forthe veteran, his family, and society. But what impresses me most, having gotten to know veterans in both groups quite well, is not how different they are, but how
similar.
    The event triggering a “breakdown” from a long successful job history has usually been some external event that prevented the veteran from keeping the workaholic schedule he had followed. One veteran currently in the program worked his way to top site supervisor in a nationally prominent demolition firm. Arrest and incarceration for assault—probably facilitated by the amphetamines that he used to support his workaholism—led to his collapse. Another “broke down” when cardiac bypass surgery interrupted his fourteen-hour-a-day work habits.
    Farmer (pseudonym), a Navy veteran of the vicious “brown water” war in the canals of the Mekong Delta, had worked well and happily (and for killingly long hours) for ten years in a high-tech company producing equipment for the pharmaceutical industry. His perfectionism was a highly valued trait in the custom manufacture of this equipment for ultra-pure chemical processes. He felt respected and valued, and the interpersonal conflicts in the workplace so prominent in the “Vietnam Vet Stereotype” were blessedly absent. Then the parent company, a huge international pharmaceutical firm, sold the business to its main competitor “for market share,” and all ninety employees, including the president, lost their jobs. Destruction of his livelihood and work community by distant powers acting on highly abstract and—to him—unreal motives set off numerous traumatic triggers for this Navy veteran. But most of all, he lost the setting in which he could perform his “mission.” He became depressed, suicidal, and flooded with intrusive symptoms related to the ambush of his assault support patrol boat in the Mekong Delta the night before Thanksgiving 1968.
    Every one of the workaholic veterans with a “stable work history” would have responded with