It's an extraordinary time to be Traverse City author Doug Stanton
Talent was never an issue for Doug Stanton.
Without it, the Traverse City author wouldn’t be at what even he admits is a white-hot moment in his career.
For starters, Stanton’s third book, “Odyssey of Echo Company,” about a small platoon of American soldiers fighting for survival in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive in 1968, goes on sale on Tuesday.
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It comes on the heels of his first two books, both best-sellers and both in the works as major motion pictures — “In Harm’s Way,” about the survivors of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II, and “Horse Soldiers,” about a band of Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan who rode horseback in the war against the Taliban after 9/11.
“Horse Soldiers” the movie, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon, hits theaters in January. Stanton, an executive producer on the film, has also been considered for screenwriter for “In Harm’s Way.” Meanwhile, his new book has already generated quiet buzz about its cinematic potential.
For all this, Stanton is thankful. But he’d be the first to admit he owes much of his success to a family that raised him right, having the moxie to score his first major assignment, and of course a bit of luck.
For Stanton, that luck was a writer named Jim Harrison.
Stanton’s father, Derald, knew legendary Michigan writer Harrison when they were kids growing up in Reed City, where he lived until moving his family to Traverse City when Stanton was a baby. The legend of Harrison loomed large in Stanton’s consciousness, at least from his midteens when, as a student at Interlochen Arts Academy, he decided to be a writer. The decision gave him much needed direction, he says, crediting his parents for “completely, always encouraging me to say yes.”
Stanton pestered Harrison for years before finally writing to him at his home in Lake Leelanau when he was in high school. “I asked if he could kindly send me a signed book and I would pay him when I was able. Which is now the kind of letter I get at my home. He quickly wrote back: ‘Dear Doug, I am not an f-ing bookstore, but here’s your book.’ I thought, 'Wow, that’s really cool. The writer really exists in the world.' ”
He headed to Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where his senior thesis was on Emily Dickinson, Heraclitus and salmon fishing in northern Michigan — “an amalgam of my interest in poetry, philosophy and the natural world.” From there, he worked a variety of jobs, including caretaker for the Robert Frost house in Vermont, until he got so bored one day he applied to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at University of Iowa, where he eventually studied poetry and fiction.
Upon graduation, he accepted his only job offer out of 60 applications at a state school in Louisiana, then called Northeast Louisiana University, which had a robust creative writing program. “It was a wonderful place to be,” says Stanton, who loved teaching and thought it might be his path.
That is, until one semester break on New Year’s Eve when Stanton spotted Harrison at the Bluebird Tavern in Leland and decided to approach him: “I want to start writing for a living. How do I do that?” Harrison promptly replied: “That’s not a problem at all. Just send me something and we’ll see if we can’t get you a job.”
Stanton, who’d never really written prose, returned to Louisiana and wrote a “completely unpublishable essay.” He sent it to Harrison who sent it to his editor, Terry McDonell, then at Smart magazine. “Terry’s a legend,” says Stanton. “He’s edited everybody and was at the epicenter of the best of the magazine world when it was really, really healthy. He sent it back and he said this is unpublishable but keep trying.”
And so he did. By now Stanton had met his wife, Anne, a reporter at the Traverse City Record-Eagle, and written an essay about how he proposed to her. It was his first clip and it ran in Smart magazine in 1990, the year they married.
“It paid $1,700, and I didn’t think I’d ever have to work again,” says Stanton. “I thought, 'This is really easy.' ” So he went to New York to meet McDonell, who was by now editor of Esquire.
Stanton asked if he could do more writing. McDonell asked if he had any interest in John Mellencamp. Stanton knew nothing about the singer but blurted out: “Man, I love John Mellencamp; he’s my favorite singer in the whole wide world.”
Stanton got the gig with McDonell telling him to pay attention to a piece called “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese “since you can’t write a profile,” recalls Stanton, who had no idea what he was doing.
He asked Anne how to do an interview and meticulously studied every line of Talese’s story, basically teaching himself the craft of narrative nonfiction. “And that’s where I started,” he says.
“The piece was called ‘Jack and Dianne are Dead.’ Terry said it made the magazine look smart because it really wasn’t about rock music. It’s about the challenges of fame.”
Stanton spent the rest of the 1990s writing for McDonell at Esquire, Outside and Men’s Journal, among other publications, reporting on adventures around the world and doing deep dives into celebrity features, from George Clooney to Sting, while enjoying hefty expense accounts and writing stories that ran more than 10,000 words.
To this day, McDonell says he never knew Stanton had bluffed his way into the Mellencamp piece, a tactic Stanton admits can backfire. But he had faith because of how he was raised, he says. He’d finish what he set out to do. “I’m very dogged and patient. Once I get going I don’t stop.”
McDonell says it wouldn’t have mattered to him anyway as he’d already determined Stanton “was an extremely talented writer and reporter. Although he probably didn’t know he was yet.” Plus, Jim Harrison “had never, ever before and never afterwards asked me to look at someone’s work. He would never do that unless it was extraordinary in some way."
Extraordinary circumstances
Extraordinary is a word Stanton uses today when discussing stories that move him lately.
“I like to tell stories about people trying to make the right, difficult decision at the least opportune moment. ... People in a crucible of an extraordinary circumstance,” he says. “And then, how that experience changes their life.”
Although all of his books have been about war, Stanton doesn’t see it that way. “Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person’s life,” he says. “I’m not writing about superheroes, I’m writing about ordinary people.”
What drew him to write about Vietnam in general was a desire to understand the war. Then he met Vietnam veteran U.S. Army Sgt. Major Stan Parker in 2005 in Afghanistan where Parker was with Special Forces, and again in 2012 when Parker was living in Colorado Springs, Colo. Stanton says he realized Parker had a story to tell. “Mostly, he had the courage to speak honestly.” That story became “The Odyssey of Echo Company.”
Parker, now 70, who volunteered for the war in 1967 with hopes of becoming a paratrooper, had faith in Stanton after reading his books. But as a self-described “military history nut,” he insisted if he and his platoon mates were to trust Stanton with their stories, Parker had to be able to check the book’s accuracy to the tiniest detail. “I told Doug: I don’t want any mistakes. So he sent me the first manuscript.”
Parker is pleased with how it turned out. “Doug puts his heart into it,” he says. “When I read it I felt like I was back with the guys.” More importantly, Parker feels better. “I won’t say 100%. But before the book I had maybe 10% closure. Now I’d say I’m in that 95% range,” he says. “Just by letting this out."
For Stanton, that speaks to why he wrote the book. “If you have a national experience that’s been completely buried in the country’s consciousness, what does that do? What have we lost as a country and as a community in terms of creativity and productivity and social justice by having that dysfunction in our society?” he says.
“If the book is any kind of lever, it’s to change that dynamic. I don’t think it’s healthy to have 68-year-old men, 70-year-old men thinking regularly about a traumatic experience that happened to them and thinking that they cannot talk about it with anybody, and no one wants to listen.”
Sometimes people need an excuse to have an uncomfortable conversation, he says. “A book can provide that.”
'Just want to write'
As Stanton contemplates another book, he’s riding a wave of opportunities to do scripts for television and film, including an action movie script he’s completing for a Chinese film studio. “I just want to write,” he says. “I’ve been on a lot of movie sets, and I love scriptwriting and movies and great television. I plan to go back and forth from Michigan to Los Angeles.”
It’s a good if hectic time, he says. “It feels like I have more work than I can do, and I’m very happy about that.”
So far, success doesn’t seem to be changing him. According to Colin Harrison, Stanton’s editor on “The Odyssey of Echo Company” as well as editor-in-chief of Scribner, Stanton is still the same guy he recalls in graduate school, where they first met. “[He] didn’t say too much, watched carefully and clearly, and was thoughtful,” he says. “He’s very sensitive and really cares about bedrock American qualities.”
According to Anne, he’s the same humble guy she married. “He doesn’t let it go to his head.” She recalls an interview he did with Don Imus for the first book. “Don said don’t ever change, you’re such a nice guy. And he really hasn’t.”
If anything, Stanton seems even more firmly entrenched in small-town life in Traverse City, near family, where he’s lived all his life, save for about a decade after high school. “One day on Front Street in Traverse City, I can see in 50 feet of sidewalk someone from grade school, high school, college and present life,” he says.
It’s where he met his wife and raised their three children, John, 24, Katherine, 21, and William, 13. It’s home to his parents and only sibling, sister Debbie — who played matchmaker for he and Anne — and her husband, photographer Tony Demin, a partner with Stanton on many assignments.
It’s also where he and Anne do their work, as they did on the last book, with her helping to organize and fact-check. Stanton, she says, is a meticulous researcher with a perfectly organized filing system in his basement office. “If he needs to put his hand on anything, he can do it in about three seconds.” She also jokes about his tendency to tidy up if he’s struggling with a deadline. “I always know his writing has gone poorly when I come home to a very clean house.”
They’ve also joined forces for the National Writers Series, which the couple co-founded in 2009, a year-round book festival that brings top name authors to on-stage events in Traverse City. Even Stanton’s mom does her part, he says: “She puts all the posters up in town by foot, and she gets the flowers every week for the stage.”
It’s a white-hot moment that sounds almost idyllic.
Says Stanton with a joke: “I’m really going to do my best to enjoy it and not just be Midwestern about it and think something bad is about to happen.”
'The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War'
By Doug Stanton
Scribner, 336 pages, $30
In stores Tuesday
Doug Stanton book appearances:
• 7 p.m. Sun., Traverse City Opera House as part of the National Writers Series, Traverse City
• 7 p.m. Oct. 23, Schuler Books & Music, Grand Rapids
• 7 p.m. Oct. 25, Ann Arbor District Library, Ann Arbor