The Long Journey Home

“The story of war doesn’t end when the guns go silent. It ends at the moment of reconciliation.”

— Pete Peterson, former POW and first U.S. ambassador to postwar Vietnam

While audiences in record numbers watch Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, Elon Musk has announced a rival. He posted that before the year is out, Grok Imagine will produce a full-length Odyssey that is “historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

It is a curious moment. Nearly three thousand years after Homer composed The Odyssey, we are still arguing over who best understands him.

But the argument has the poem backwards.

The most consequential adaptation of Homer’s work is not unfolding in Hollywood—or inside an AI model.

It is unfolding in Washington.

The Departure

In February, President Donald Trump met with Benjamin Netanyahu and his national security team in the White House Situation Room. Netanyahu came to make the case for a joint war against Iran, including the argument for killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The discussion centered on targets, bomb damage, missile defenses, retaliation, escalation, and success.

Homer would have recognized another presence in the room.

Hubris.

Not arrogance in the modern sense. The Greeks meant something deeper: the conviction that power can master events whose consequences stretch far beyond anyone’s control.

It is the flaw the Greeks gave Agamemnon.

To launch the Greek fleet against Troy, Agamemnon assembled more than a thousand ships in the harbor at Aulis. But the winds refused to blow. According to the myth, the gods demanded a terrible price before the expedition could begin: he must sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia.

He paid it.

The fleet sailed.

That part of the story is not found in The Iliad. It comes from the lost Cypria and from the later tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. Christopher Nolan restores it—which may prove to be the most Homeric decision in his film.

At a moment when misogyny is again on the rise—when powerful men too often treat women and girls as expendable—it is chilling that the Trojan War begins with a father trading his daughter for a favorable wind.

Agamemnon believed he could pay that price, destroy Troy, and return home honored.

His tragedy was not simply pride.

It was the conviction that history would obey his plans—and that the vulnerable could be spent without consequence.

In The Iliad, Homer shows us the cost of Agamemnon’s pride on the battlefield.

In The Odyssey, he shows us the cost that comes afterward.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched the war. Khamenei was killed in the opening strike, along with much of Iran’s senior military command.

The operation was codenamed Operation Epic Fury.

Trump later recounted how he personally selected the name for the operation.

“They gave me, like, 20 names. And I’m, like, falling asleep. I didn’t like any of them. Then I see Epic Fury. I said, ‘I like that name.’”

Trump was drawn to the promise of an epic victory.

Homer devoted an entire second epic to the unmanageable aftermath unleashed by fury.

After the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu reflected on the decision by saying it “allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years.”

Homer would have recognized that sentence.

It is the language of a leader who believes history has finally yielded the opportunity he has long awaited.

The Journey

The day after the Iran war began, this Substack returned to the words of Pete Peterson.

On the evening of September 10, 2001, Peterson—former POW and America’s first ambassador to Hanoi—stood in a Boston ballroom to honor John McCain and John Kerry for an act of extraordinary political courage: helping reconcile the United States and Vietnam.

To describe their work, Peterson invoked the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, where Union and Confederate veterans met not with bayonets, but with embraces.

“The story of war doesn’t end when the guns go silent. It ends at the moment of reconciliation.”

The next morning, the world changed.

In the twenty-five years since, we have repeatedly made the same mistake: preparing meticulously for war while giving far less thought to reconciliation. We mobilize overwhelming force while leaving the morning after undefined.

Perhaps that is why Homer wrote two epics instead of one. He knew victory was never the end of the story.

It was only the end of the first book.

The Odyssey begins after Troy has fallen.

The city burns.

The heroes celebrate.

The war is over.

For most storytellers, this would be the ending.

Only then does Homer begin asking his deepest questions.

What becomes of those who survive?

What did victory accomplish?

How does anyone find their way home?

Midway through his journey, Odysseus reaches the limits of courage. No amount of military brilliance can show him the rest of the way. So he sails to the edge of the world and descends into Hades to seek the blind prophet Tiresias.

It is one of the most remarkable scenes in Western literature.

The greatest warrior of his generation discovers that strength is no longer enough.

He needs wisdom.

Tiresias does not hand him another battle plan.

Instead, he warns him about consequences still to come, temptations he must resist, and the discipline required if he hopes to see Ithaca again.

Homer is making a claim we still struggle to absorb:

Winning a war and surviving its consequences are different skills.

Odysseus also meets Agamemnon.

The conqueror of Troy did not die on the battlefield.

He returned home only for his wife, Clytemnestra, to murder him in vengeance for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia. The victor never truly made it home.

Even Odysseus, who eventually reaches Ithaca, arrives alone.

Every sailor entrusted to his command dies before the voyage is over.

Troy is reduced to ashes, but neither side truly wins. The city falls, while the Greek conquerors return to murder, exile, and loss. Homer refuses to confuse the survival of a leader with the success of an expedition

The legacy of the war is defined less by glory than by ruin. It is a lesson that should be as unsettling in the Oval Office this week as it was for the victors departing Troy three thousand years ago.

The Story’s Real Ending

This week, Benjamin Netanyahu returns to the White House.

Five months after that February meeting in the Situation Room, the question is whether the conversation has changed. Will it once again celebrate military success? Or will it confront what Homer understood: that the destruction of an enemy is only the first chapter, and that the harder story begins when the victors must live with what follows?

Yet this is what the debate over Nolan’s interpretation of Homer keeps missing.

The people demanding a version “true to Homer” are still arguing about the wrong poem.

The Iliad begins with hubris.

The Odyssey begins with consequences.

One is the story of how a city falls.

The other is the story of how human beings—and sometimes nations—find their way home again.

Countries are remarkably good at writing the first chapter of war.

We live in an age when few nations have found the long journey home to peace.

Pete Peterson understood what Homer understood.

“The story of war doesn’t end when the guns go silent. It ends at the moment of reconciliation.”

Not because reconciliation erases what happened.

Not because it excuses aggression.

But because it is the only thing bombs can never accomplish.

Hubris starts wars.

Diplomacy charts the way home.

Reconciliation is where the story finally ends.

If you found this essay worthwhile, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription ($6 a month or $60 a year). I use AI tools for research and editing, but every essay begins with my life experiences and curiosities, reflects my judgment, and is written by me. This one took three days and roughly ten hours to complete.

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