With impeccable scholarship and remarkable insight, Lawrence Tritle has unearthed and exposed the history of the ordinarily unremarked trauma of war. While deaths are faithfully recorded and wounds usually obvious, the lasting effect of war on the remaining warriors and those close to them has only recently been examined. Shay's "Achilles in Vietnam" was the first to look back at the Illiad and draw a parallel between the "post traumatic stress disorder" found in Vietnam vets and the descriptions of the effect of the Trojan war on Achilles.
Lawrence Tritle has used the juxtaposition of a remote massacre in the Peloponnesian War and the massacre at My Lai some 2500 years later to connect the experience of Greek warriors such as the Spartan general Clearchus with Vietnam veterans to demonstrate that the emotional damage of war, while sometimes recognized, but usually quickly forgotten between wars, is universal.
This book is a great service to Vietnam veterans who can take some comfort that the battles they have fought within themselves have been fought by a long line of others before them, almost always in darkness and silence. For the historian this is a fresh view of war,well researched and analyzed An impressive achievement.