Survivor’s guilt felt by young soldiers echoes Odysseus’s haunted memories

He was the king of Ithaca and a combat veteran of repute who was the anti-hero of Homer’s Odyssey and a con artist “insatiate of deceit” whose trials of the heart in coming home would mirror those of many veterans 3,000 years later.

For Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, the 10 years of wanderings on a perilous sea as Odysseus took…