I first read “The Iliad” in high school. The translation my teacher handed out had a single photograph on the cover: American G.I.s on D-Day storming out of a landing craft onto Omaha Beach.The subtext of this pairing wasn’t obvious to me, as a teenager. The rage of Achilles, the death of Hector and all those Greeks in their “black-hulled ships” seemed to have little to do with the Second World War.Many years later, after having fought in two wars of my own, that image has come to resonate in a new way. If “The Iliad” served as an ur-text for the shape the ancient Greeks assumed their wars to take (Alexander the Great, for example, is said to have slept with a copy beneath his pillow when on campaign), then World War II has served a similar function in our society, framing our expectations of war, becoming our American Iliad. We still expect to be the good guys; we expect there to be a beginning, a middle and an end; and we expect that the war is over when the troops come home.But that final expectation — that a war is only over when all the troops come home — has never really held true, not in World War II, and not today.Among the myriad challenges inherited by the incoming Biden administration will be not only ending our nation’s longest ever war, in Afghanistan, but also clearly defining what ending a war actually means. The new president will be handed a less than durable peace negotiated by the Trump administration with the Taliban, as well as recent significant troop reductions.And one of the greatest trials Joe Biden will face is a public not only expecting our soldiers back, but also conditioned to believe that wars are over only when the troops all return. If the goal is reducing all troop levels in Afghanistan to zero, we’re ensuring that the war will drag on for years to come, enshrining its status not only as America’s longest war but truly as America’s forever war.Which returns us to “The Iliad,” to the importance of the narratives we apply to our wars, and to our long-held misconceptions about homecomings.There are nearly 40,000 troops garrisoned in Western Europe; their presence has secured a generations-old peace in the countries where World War II was fought. We also station nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea in a decades-long effort to ensure stability in the region. Despite episodic violence and metaphorical saber rattling, no one would argue that these wars are ongoing, and most would concede that our presence has proved a much-valued source of regional stability that has made both the world and America safer and more prosperous.Obviously, the situation in Afghanistan today is more volatile than Western Europe or East Asia. But U.S. troops stationed in-country have remained relatively safe in recent years. Four men died in Afghanistan this year. But in 2020, many more service members died in training accidents at Camp Pendleton alone. Indeed, since 2015, Defense Department training accidents have exceeded combat deaths worldwide.
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