I Spent Years Working with War Veterans. The Odyssey Hit Me Hard | The Walrus

Erin O'Toole, writing in The Walrus, describes watching Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey and connecting Homer's account of Odysseus's difficult homecoming to his own work with Canadian war veterans. He notes the film arrives near the fifth anniversary of Afghanistan's fall to the Taliban and the 25th anniversary of 9/11, both weighing on veterans of Canada's longest non-peacekeeping deployment.

O'Toole, who served in peacetime and later as veterans affairs minister, writes that the poem's structure, in which the journey home is harder than the war itself, mirrors what he heard directly from veterans he worked with in office.

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