Bought this book from second hand book store in Garland. Read it in February 2021. Same author as In Harms Way. Would not be the first book I recommend on the Vietnam War. It is almost a collection of rambling thoughts and war stories for a well decorated veteran. It comes together in the end. Recommend reading the last chapter about homecoming to better understand how difficult it was for Vietnam Veterans returning home from the war. It was really cool to read the stories about his trips back to Vietnam over 40 years after the war.

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. ( )

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!* ( )

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. With his first two books, Doug Stanton gained a reputation for his ability to make history read like a novel. This book continues that tradition, with more of the same gripping and compelling prose. Take, for example, a scene with Parker charging an enemy bunker, carrying a Light Anti-tank Weapon (LAW). He runs, zigzagging and somersaulting, "with the LAW clenched in his left hand, firing his M-16 with this right hand ... The air is filled with bullets ..." Ultimately he takes out the bunker with a single rocket from the LAW. In another scene, badly injured by shrapnel, Parker survives the crash of a medevac helicopter, but manages to shoot more attackers as he doggedly fights his way to another helicopter and is finally flown to safety. Yes. A page-turning nail-biter. Like a novel.

I was also very impressed with the thoroughness of Stanton's research on the Vietnam war, 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.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA ( )