Achilles in Vietnam

[silent woman]

"What We Haven't Learned About War We Have Repeated: Warriors As Victims"
The goals of this book are largely successfully met, and the book could usefully be read by behavioral scientists, historians, Iliad scholars and the public at large.
http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol2is5/achilles.html

If it was a snake, it woulda bit us: "Homer's Iliad ... is about soldiers in war." (xiii) Classicists are not, of course, ignorant of that fact, but we have tended to gloss over it, foreign as war is to most of us, and thereby to find ourselves puzzled by certain ethical aspects of the poem which are the direct result of warfare. We are accustomed, after all, to think of Homer as "fiction," to assume that social realities in the Iliad are refracted through the lens of oral tradition and bear only a tenuous connection, like the Trojan War itself, to historical events and actual people.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1994/94.03.21.html

[silent woman]

Juxtaposition

The Denial of Death

“Heroism is the first and foremost reflex of the terror of death” (DD, 11). “Our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic”

http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Death-Erne ... 0684832402

"There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition";[30] and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy." George Fox