THE ODYSSEY OF ECHO COMPANY

Nonfiction
Punishment is to go on living

THE ODYSSEY OF ECHO COMPANY:
The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War

By Doug Stanton

313 pp. Scribner

Reviewed by Tom Glenn

Doug Stanton knows combat. His bio makes no reference to military service, but he brings alive on the page the grisliness of the battlefield so graphically that he must have experienced it.

And Stanton writes better than any other author on Vietnam that I have read. He uses the techniques of fiction to tell of the carnage, but the events he catalogues really happened. His prose is clipped, precise, and pointed; his paragraphs lean and sharp; his vocabulary incisive. Nor does he shy away from describing the unspeakable—the wounds and deaths of soldiers on both sides of the conflict, the dragging of bodies away from the battlefield, the scattered body parts. His naked realism combined with his flair for words makes for riveting reading.

The prose of Odyssey locked me in from the first page with the words, “It’s 4:00 a.m. when they attack.” The reader follows Echo Company’s Reconnaissance Platoon, of the 1^st Battalion (Airborne), 501^st Infantry Regiment, 2^nd Brigade, U.S. Army, from the final days of 1967 to the end of 1968. The platoon fights in the southern part of South Vietnam, then shifts north to Quang Tri Province, whose top border, the demilitarized zone (DMZ), separates North Vietnam from South Vietnam. 

The focus is on Stan Parker, who joined the army straight out of high school and wanted to fight in Vietnam. We follow him through training—so rigorous that many drop out—to battlefields in both the southern part of South Vietnam and just south of the DMZ. We learn of his hardscrabble childhood and adolescence, his life after combat, and his eventual rejoining the military to become a “lifer,” a career soldier. And at the end, we see him, now retired, return to Vietnam in 2014 to the scene of a brutal battle where he meets Mr. Sinh, who had fought for the North Vietnamese in that battle.

About a third of the way through the story, after the unit’s move to the north, Stan comes across a small girl in a ville. No adults are close by. “Her hair is tangled and her face is dirty and streaked with tears.” Stan wraps her in a shower curtain he’s been using to ward off the drizzle and gives her a small can of peaches he’d been hoarding from his C-rations. He leaves her but hears gunfire. He races back and finds that the North Vietnamese, hidden nearby, have executed her. Her hand still holds the peaches. “She’s dead because she accepted the American’s peaches.” He howls over her body.

Still on patrol that night, Stan discovers rats on the girl’s body. He shoots the rats too late. They have already eaten her nose and ears. Stan screams.

The girls with peaches continues to haunt Stan through his year in ’Nam. He carries her image with him through sorting bodies after a firefight, through the death of fellow soldiers he loved, through his discovery that he’s addicted to combat. He and the others around him distance themselves from each other so they won’t suffer so much when one of them is killed. He risks his life repeatedly and kills more North Vietnamese than he can remember. He thinks to himself that he’s ready to die. His punishment is to go on living.

When Stan returns to the world (the U.S.), crowds curse him and spit on him. He muses that the older men in his family never talked about their experience in combat until they were in their sixties. But if you’re a Vietnam vet, you don’t talk about it ever, out of shame. Welcome home.

Doug Stanton tells Stan Parker’s story using techniques that in other hands might not work. Although he follows a generally chronological scheme starting with Stan’s childhood and ending with his return to Vietnam in 2014, he sometimes jumps back and forth in time to juxtapose elements of Stan’s experiences. He often shifts into the present tense to notch up the tension. In battle scenes, the prose is simple, bare and brief. I never wanted to put the book down except in those moments when it brought back my own memories of combat with such force that I had to break off and deal with my own emotions.

In sum, a brilliant book. I’m happy to see that some writers nowadays are willing to portray combat as it is, in all its brutality. We Americans need that knowledge as we decide whether to go to war. That said, Odyssey may be too raw for some.

Tom Glenn spent the better part of thirteen years in Vietnam during the war providing covert intelligence support to army and Marine combat units and escaped under fire when Saigon fell. He now has seventeen short stories and four novels in print. His most recent novel, Last of the Annamese, called by a reviewer “fiction in name only,” tells of the fall of Saigon.