The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War
By: Doug Stanton / Narrated By: CJ Wilson
Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
How to say this? I am GUTTED...
So this is who I am: When I was born, the Vietnam War was already in full-swing. By the time I could walk, talk, watch TV? It was still going on. Early in the wee hours of the morning, I’d watch an exercise program (The host had a dog!), a children’s show, and the news of the Vietnam War.
Those guys? They were my friends. What I saw them endure, what I saw them do to save a buddy, when I saw them, after going through a horror show, sling an arm across the back of a friend and mug for the cameras? How could those guys be anything LESS than heroes in the eyes of a little girl? I full-well expected the war to still be going on when I was older and of marrying age, expected to marry one of them, or a POW.
It was and still is a very basic part of who I am. There’s the guy wearing the Vietnam Veterans cap I see at the post office; and there are ALWAYS the audiobooks that cram my Library. And? There’s the National Vietnam War Veterans Day, which will be every day in my heart.
This year I chose The Odyssey of Echo Company by noted war author Doug Stanton. If you’re expecting Echo Company, a gaggle of young men and their experiences? Welllll, kinda sorta don’t cuz it’s mostly about Stan Parker and his life. This frustrated many a reviewer when last I checked, but I’m here to tell you that this is still a truly worthwhile book if you want to get a closer What It Was Like. As in: No holds barred.
Yeh yeh yeh, there’s a LOT about Stan’s life pre-war, about being bullied (Not only by kids but by adults who should’ve had his back) and learning to fight, fight for himself, fight for the underdog. But surrounding Stan’s stories are pretty much a sense of the horror going on around him. When mere boys, in shock after a full-on firefight, start batting around a squishy thing like it’s a toy, only to realize it’s a hand with fingers blown off? And they pretty much don’t bat an eye?
So very young; too young.
And Stan wasn’t drafted but chose to enlist straight out of high school. He joined his fellow grunts, some who were escaping harsh homelives, feeling a sense of excitement. When he discovers his father had him flagged not to go to Vietnam (An older brother already in the thick of it), he’s soooo disappointed as he bides his time in Germany. Letters from his brother, from friends, tell him to stay put, that it’s bad in Vietnam, that he does NOT want to be “here” are dismissed as Stan is desperate to join his buds, desperate to join all the men in his family who served their country.
He vaguely knows it’s all something about keeping the world safe from Communism, but he soon learns, when he’s there, after his first engagement, it ain’t about all that. It’s about survival and survival only. It’s about taking one for the man next to you; it’s about trying to stay sane in an insane environment.
He will be forever haunted by what he sees. A little girl, mute from shock and terror, dressed in rags? His heart goes out to her, and he hands her a can of peaches. Soon, he hears gunshots and finds her dead: She has accepted a gift from the vile Americans and has been punished. Stan’s gift sealed her fate. As barely a youngster himself, how does he cope? What skills does he have? He shoots at the rats that come to eat her body, staying there, shooting rat after rat as his friends silently hand him more ammo until he can bear it no longer and screams his sorrow, guilt, and agony.
An old man. Stan and the grunts have gone through the village and found stores of rice. The orders? Burn it all. And so Stan watches as an old man comes to weep as his stores are destroyed; he watches as the man saves what he can, grain by grain; he joins the old man, even as tears make it hard for him to see.
CJ Wilson, heretofore unknown to me, narrates this admirably tho’ I did feel I had to speed up the narration past my usual x1.3 (Seriously, there is gore and hell and suffering and madness galore in this: I did NOT need slow reading to cue me that Things Are Awful). But he captures the banter of each boy, of their leaders, of the situations. And when it came to the end when Stan goes back to Vietnam and coincidentally comes across an NVA veteran, I was in tears. Wilson delivered the strained beginnings of a conversation between the two, then the increasing excitement as the two’s memories coalesce into the larger narrative of a brutal day. And though friends were killed on both sides, the two find a sense of kinship, of brotherhood: They were there; they KNOW.
NATURALLY I Googled Stan Parker, and the YouTube videos of his journey back to Vietnam had me crying and crying ugly. There he was, one of my heroes and now an older gentleman (I’m kinda sorta up there in years m’self!), reliving, re-seeing battles and lost friends. And then laughing and holding onto a former enemy as though he’d found a long-lost brother, a missing piece of himself.
As though his memories found a safe place to be. As though he’d finally come home.
Welcome back, y’all. Forever with me...
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