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Stanton's 'The Odyssey of Echo Company' full of aftershocks

Staff reports
The Petoskey News-Review

A colleague, a military veteran whose opinion I value, tells me that Doug Stanton’s new book is the best first-hand account of battle he’s read about any war in any era.

And while I shy from superlatives, my friend’s view is likely to gain momentum with more and more readers of “The Odyssey of Echo Company,” Stanton’s new book on the American war in Vietnam and particularly the 1968 Tet offensive.

The trauma and mendacity of war come through in the story of Stan Parker, son of an itinerant ironworker and his teenage bride, when Stan enlists in 1966, wondering existentially, “Will he be a good man? Is he brave?”

Stanton believes the story is properly an odyssey, as Parker and his buddies discovered not only the destruction of war, but also the yearning to return home, though home was perhaps lost as soon as they made boot camp.

As with “In Harm’s Way” and “Horse Soldiers,” Stanton’s expert reporting is on full display here, as he takes readers along with Parker and his boyhood friend Tom Gervias, as well as his platoon mates Tom Soals, Freddie Westerman, and Charles Fowler — all wounded in action at least once — as well as others as they navigate the dangers and boredom of war.

Stanton first met Parker in 2005 in Afghanistan, where the career soldier left a deep impression. When the two reconnected several years later, Parker told the writer he was ready to tell his Vietnam story. Stanton realized, with more than 2.7 million Americans deployed in Vietnam, there were in fact “a lot of untold stories.” He agreed to tell Parker’s story and the result is engrossing.

Graduating high school in Gary, Indiana, home as much as any of the two dozen cities where he’d lived, Parker, known to his friends as “Boots,” decided to follow his older brother Dub to Southeast Asia.

What he couldn’t fully see, however, was how his decision would not only put him in harm’s way, in places such as Quang Tri, Cu Chi, Trung Hoa, and other places in the ancient country, but alter the course of his life and those of his mates.

Graduated from jump school in 1967, Parker deployed to Germany after his father worked the phones to keep at least one of his sons from combat.

Parker manages to connive his way to Vietnam, however, but gets far more than he hoped for, as Stanton’s reporting, sometimes moment-by-moment, sometimes via a longer lens, explores both the horrors and the mundane Parker met in country.

The horror is found in Parker’s brief encounter with the “girl with the peaches,” a “little girl standing in the middle of the road” who Parker longs to help. But when he gives her a can of C-ration peaches, partisans almost immediately kill her. Realizing his generosity has doomed her, Parker “would love more than anything to reach back through time and take (the peaches) back,” to save the girl.

There is no reclaiming time, of course, so Parker marches forward, enduring other terrifying, as well as sometimes also stultifying moments, illustrating the experience of so many others too along the way.

There’s no doubting, superlatives or not how “The Odyssey of Echo Company” is a story full of aftershocks.

Good Reading.

Glen Young teaches English at Petoskey High School. His column, Literate Matters, appears the second and fourth Thursday of each month. Young can be reached at P.O. Box 174, Petoskey, MI 49770. Follow @glenyfish on Twitter.

Glen Young
Stanton's 'The Odyssey of Echo Company' full of aftershocks