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    The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War
    The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War
    The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War

    Written by Doug Stanton

    Narrated by CJ Wilson

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    SELECTED BY MILITARY TIMES AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * SELECTED BY THE SOCIETY OF MIDLAND AUTHORS’ AS THE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR

    The New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers shares the powerful account of an American army platoon fighting for survival during the Vietnam War in “an important book….not just a battle story—it’s also about the home front” (The Today show).

    On January 31, 1968, as many as 100,000 guerilla fighters and soldiers in the North Vietnamese Army attacked thirty-six cities throughout South Vietnam, hoping to dislodge American forces during one of the vital turning points of the Vietnam War. Alongside other young American soldiers in an Army reconnaissance platoon (Echo Company, 1/501) of the 101st Airborne Division, Stanley Parker, the nineteen-year-old son of a Texan ironworker, was suddenly thrust into savage combat, having been in-country only a few weeks. As Stan and his platoon-mates, many of whom had enlisted in the Army, eager to become paratroopers, moved from hot zone to hot zone, the extreme physical and mental stresses of Echo Company’s day-to-day existence, involving ambushes and attacks, grueling machine-gun battles, and impossibly dangerous rescues of wounded comrades, pushed them all to their limits and forged them into a lifelong brotherhood. The war became their fight for survival.

    When they came home, some encountered a bitterly divided country that didn’t understand what they had survived. Returning to the small farms, beach towns, and big cities where they grew up, many of the men in the platoon fell silent, knowing that few of their countrymen wanted to hear the stories they lived to tell—until now. Based on interviews, personal letters, and Army after-action reports, The Odyssey of Echo Company recounts the searing tale of wartime service and homecoming of ordinary young American men in an extraordinary time and confirms Doug Stanton’s prominence as an unparalleled storyteller of our age.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 19, 2017
    ISBN9781508227588
    Author

    Doug Stanton

    Doug Stanton is the author of the New York Times bestsellers In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors and Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, which is the basis for a Jerry Bruckheimer–produced movie by the same name, starring Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon, to be released by Warner Bros. in 2018. He attended Hampshire College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, Men’s Journal, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Esquire, and Outside, where he has been a contributing editor. Stanton is a founder of the National Writers Series, a year-round book festival, and lives in his hometown of Traverse City, Michigan, with his wife, Anne Stanton, and their three children, John, Katherine, and Will.

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    Reviews for The Odyssey of Echo Company

    4.5/5

    97 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Haunting. I was four years old when this happened. Amazing to consider how different my life could have turned out if I had been born 14 years earlier.
    • 3/5
      At some point I started to question the truth of much of what is said in this book. It could be true, but the bit that appears to be lifted directly forest gump made me start to question some of the other things that felt more like fiction than reality. Possibly Stan Parker lied about getting Robert McNamara to intervene in his leave situation, among other things.
    • 5/5
      This book has helped me understand and settle my experiences
    • 5/5
      Wow. Just, wow. This is an emotionally intense book. A must read for vietnam war historians.
    • 5/5
      Powerful. I've listened to many ww2, vietnam and war on terror first hand accounts. None made me choke up and FEEL the grief of war like this one. A must read for war history enthusiasts.
    • 3/5
      I listened to the audio book and it's pretty good.. This is the story primarily of a guy who volunteered to join the Army to fight in Vietnam. it is well written.Stanton does a wonderful job of communicating the near-madness -- mental and physical exhaustion, deafening noise, and continuous adrenaline response.
    • 3/5
      This is a compelling telling of a young man among many men who served in the Vietnam War. More of a memoir than a war story. A good read about how war can affect one so intimately. *My thanks to Jeff Umbro for hosting this GOODREADS giveaway I won!*
    • 5/5
      Doug Stanton's latest offering, THE ODYSSEY OF ECHO COMPANY; THE 1968 TET OFFENSIVE AND THE EPIC BATTLE TO SURVIVE THE VIETNAM WAR, is a book that will keep you up reading way past your normal bedtime. I finally finished reading the book sometime after midnight. But even after turning out the light, I didn't go to sleep for a long time. I was still thinking about the book, which is mostly the story of Stan Parker, a career Special Forces soldier Stanton had first met nearly a dozen years ago in Afghanistan, while researching his previous book, HORSE SOLDIERS. Parker's Army career spanned over thirty-five years, but this book focuses on his first enlistment, and his tour in Vietnam.I spent eight years in the US Army. I did not go to Vietnam and I never saw combat. But I have read dozens, perhaps scores, of books about the Vietnam war in the past forty-plus years, both fiction and non-fiction. Stanton's book is, unquestionably, an important addition to the canon of Vietnam literature, but I suspect it may be somewhat controversial. Because, although I enjoyed the book tremendously, I found the portrayal of Parker to be almost hagiographical at times, making him a kind of uber-soldier protected by spirits and possessing supernatural powers. Parker's charging of an enemy bunker through a hail of machine-gun fire, for example, seemed almost too much, smacking of John Wayne movie heroics. "The air is filled with bullets." He runs, zigzagging and somersaulting, "with the LAW clenched in his left hand, firing his M-16 with this right hand ..." Ultimately he takes out the bunker with a single rocket from the LAW. After being felled by grenade shrapnel, he finds himself looking directly into the muzzle of an NVA soldier's rifle, but is somehow miraculously spared. Then he survives the crash of a medevac chopper, and shoots even more attackers as he fights his way aboard another helicopter to safety. And then there is a beautiful nurse in the military hospital who washes and repairs his bullet-riddled, blood-soaked sweater and returns it to him "made whole." Compelling, gripping, dramatic stuff, I know, but passages like this can simply strain credibility, and may even require that "willing suspension of disbelief" usually only needed for reading fiction. With his first two books, Doug Stanton gained a reputation for his ability to make history read like a novel. With this book, he may have slightly overreached in using this skill, at least here and there. That said, I was most impressed with the thoroughness of Stanton's research on the Vietnam war, and particularly the Tet Offensive and the role that Echo Company's Recon Platoon played in that bloody chapter of military history. His twelve-page bibliography includes not only published books and articles about Vietnam and Tet, but also government documents, After Action Reports (AARs), and numerous unpublished memoirs, letters and papers from the principals involved. Stanton also spent hundreds of hours traveling and interviewing unit survivors and even journeyed to Vietnam with Stan Parker and another platoon member to revisit the scenes of battles and firefights, a trip which resulted in perhaps the most effective and affecting scenes of the whole book.There were associations and connections galore here for me. The section "The Girl with the Peaches" - centering around Parker's grim and grisly memories of a small Vietnamese girl he briefly befriended on a patrol - brought back a little-known memoir of Vietnam I read more than a dozen years ago, Don Julin's dark THE WAY I REMEMBER IT (1980), in which he recounts an incident where a woman and two children - "VC prisoners" - are casually shoved into a bunker and obliterated by a grenade. Another section, in which Parker described the hauling away of loads of enemy bodies and body parts after a fierce battle, was reminiscent of a similar scene of bodies being bulldozed off to the side of a mountain top in Karl Marlantes' novel of Vietnam, MATTERHORN (2010). Similarly, the medevac and chopper scenes in Stanton's book evoked memories of CHICKENHAWK, Robert Mason's moving 1983 memoir of his tours in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. And Echo Company's brief journey to Black Virgin Mountain naturally reminded me of Larry Heinemann's fine 2005 memoir, BLACK VIRGIN MOUNTAIN: A RETURN TO VIETNAM.The heart of Stanton's book, however, is Stan Parker's personal story. The second of four sons born to a Texas ironworker who moved from job to job all over the country, Stan contracted polio and rheumatic fever as a kid, but recovered from both, learned to fight, and had attended nearly two dozen different schools by the time he finished high school in Gary, Indiana, and joined the Army. Stan enjoyed a particularly close bond with his mother, who, sadly, died of cancer while he was still in training. Wounded three times during his tour in Vietnam, Parker returned home a confused and angry young man who struggled to find his place in a society that was unwelcoming and hostile to returning veterans. After some brushes with the law, he married and became an ironworker like his father. Eight years after his discharge, he reenlisted in Army Reserve Special Forces and spent another thirty-plus years, achieving the rank of Command Sergeant Major (CSM). But Vietnam is what Stan Parker remembers most, cannot forget, in fact. Horrific memories haunt him still, causing recurrent nightmares. He remembers too vividly scenes of "dead enemy soldiers, their severed heads, legs and arms scattered around them." He remembers too a village leveled by US artillery, and the wailing of women survivors - "The intention had not been to kill civilians, but Stan can hear them wailing. He feels increasingly that his mind's not right, that he's having trouble thinking ... That night, hunkered in a shallow hole in the yard of an abandoned school, Stan sits and listens to the wailing, wishing with all his might that it would stop."Like so many other young men in Vietnam, Stan got a "Dear John" letter from his high school girl friend. Upset and angry, he wanted to destroy her photos, but his buddies dissuade him -"Her photographs, they tell him ... are the reasons they've been spared. There's a feeling among some of them that to go into the next firefight without them in Stan's shirt pocket might get them killed. He doesn't destroy the pictures."Small, personal touches like this give ODYSSEY a universal feel. A girl's photo as a totem, something to keep you safe. There must have been thousands of young men in combat who carried such pictures and felt that way. Or who remember - can never forget - a buddy who didn't come home. Parker and his friends remember Charlie Pyle, who was killed walking point in a rice paddy. And there was Darryl Lintner, "age twenty-one, from Perryville, Missouri" -"He will never die. He is falling backward toward the ground, which he will never reach. A man will live forever among the men who love him, watch over him."This is, in the end, a very moving book, a story of young men pushed to their limits, who did the best they could. Some of them never made it home. And many of them, like Odysseus, took years to make it back. It was a long hard way. Doug Stanton has done a damn good job in telling their story. Very highly recommended. (four and a half stars)- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA