Doug Stanton

I once knew a survivor of the USS Indianapolis. He was kind enough to come to my US Survey classes and share his experiences as a young man facing war, the dramatic tale of the sinking of his beloved ship, the four terrifying days he spent in the water being attacked by sharks and without food or water, the rescue they thought would never come, recovery, and the Navy's treatment of the story. He MOVED these students.

In some ways Stanton's book mirrors the tale the survivor told my students. show more Only 300 or so of the 1100 sailors survived the torpedo attack and four days in the water. Sharks killed hundreds of sailors who floated in the water for rescue. It was the worst disaster in the history of the US Navy. In the end, the Navy hung the cost of the disaster around the neck of Captain McVay who had suspended zigzagging ( a tactic to evade submarine launched torpedoes) at his discretion due to poor visibility. The Navy even took the unprecedented step of calling in the skipper of the Japanese submarine who sunk the Indy to testify for the prosecution! Even he told the court that zigzagging would have made no difference at all. Blaming McVay (which might have been part of a vendetta that Admiral Ernest King had on McVay's father, also a navy officer) was a coverup on a series of failures all along the chain of command that included missed or ignored signals and SOS messages, lack of destroyer escorts, conflicting orders sent to various commands on the location of the Indy (so no one really noticed that if had failed to show up at its destination), etc. This book will make you mad. show less

A heart-rending account of men battered, killed, and scarred by forces beyond their control--forces of war, forces of nature, and forces of politics. The needless loss of hundreds of sailors' and marines' lives in a tragedy overshadowed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the surrender of Japan, and suppressed by a military beaurocracy using the victim as a scapegoat will leave your blood boiling with outrage.

This book should, as much as anything could, vindicate the survivors show more from the guilt they place on themselves and from the guilt placed on them by the hubris of the politics of war. But vindication will not bring back the heroes of the Indianapolis' survivors whose psychological wounds proved fatal in the intervening years.

This story is a horrible lesson that every military leader should read about the horrible consequences of discarding personal discretion, initiative, and reason in the interest of following the letter of the law. show less

"As the heat of the day tempered into relative cool, the boys, lying in their rafts, hanging from floating nets, and bobbing in life vests, began to feel things bumping from below – nudges and kicks that they mistook for the touch of their comrades treading water." (pg. 188)

It is widely accepted that the most horrifying moment in Steven Spielberg's classic blockbuster film Jaws is not the opening scene, despite its being accompanied by that famous music, nor the first appearance of Bruce show more amongst Brody's scattered chum, nor even the eventual destruction of the famously-undersized boat by the relentless beast. It is the moment on the eve of battle when, in the quiet of the boat's cabin in the middle of the night, Quint relates his experience with the USS Indianapolis to Brody and the rapidly-sobering Hooper. Quint may not be real, but the story, unfortunately, is. A ship goes down, torpedoed, and sinks in minutes. No one knows they are there. Four days in the water, exposed to burning sun and coarse salt, no food or water. Eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred came out, sharks took the rest.

The film quite naturally emphasises the shark angle, and the reality is certainly horrific (on page 285, Stanton estimates that of the approximately 900 who survived the initial sinking, 200 were killed by shark attack – a rate of 50 a day. And that's not counting the already-dead bodies that the sharks feasted on). But what Doug Stanton's detailed factual account In Harm's Way impresses upon you is that the sharks were only part of the horror endured by the forgotten crew as they waited hopelessly for rescue. Alongside the terrifying accounts of shark attack, Stanton also recounts the equally alarming accounts of burns (from the initial explosion and fuel oil slicks), dehydration, drowning, hypothermia, exhaustion and delirium. It's not even a question of endurance; the strongest, most resolute man could choke on fuel oil or see his lifejacket lose buoyancy or have the muscles of his broken arm chewed to the bone by saltwater. Even if he endures all this, there's nothing to stop one of the hundreds of sharks from dragging him away. The horror of the book, aside from your sympathy for these tragic men, is the horror of complete helplessness.

Like Richard Dreyfuss' Hooper, we're completely sobered by the story and locked in to its telling. I thought Stanton's account was, at times, a bit too detailed, particularly in the early stages, but he must have been doing something right because I read the 400 pages of the book in a single day and could easily have read 400 more. It's a simply-written, journalistic account (the book was expanded from an initial feature article in Men's Journal of just 12,000 words) and does justice to the story. I did find myself wanting more insight into certain events (for example, why did Commodore Gillette recall the boats initially sent in response to the Indy's SOS signal?) and in particular I was disappointed the account of the court-martial and post-war inquiry was not of greater depth. Given one of Stanton's stated purposes in writing the book was to exonerate Captain McVay, a more forensic deconstruction of how he was stitched up would have been welcome.

McVay is the only US Navy captain to have faced a court-martial for losing a ship sunk as an act of war (pg. 21) – and convicted, at that, and by a panel including an admiral who was himself perhaps culpable (pg. 294). The government and navy in general wanted to cover up its own culpability in not rescuing the men in the water for four days (and then only after discovering them by chance). As a further insult to a man who had the misfortune to be attacked in a warzone, and had borne the same trials of exposure and shark that the others of the crew had endured, the navy invited the Japanese submarine commander who sunk McVay to testify against him. Only a few months after the war had ended, this must have been a humiliating insult. Even when the Japanese submariner's testimony actually benefits McVay (in that he would have been able to sink the Indy no matter what countermeasures she took (pg. 304)), the inquiry panel finds otherwise. The grubby hands of Admiral King are everywhere (in everything I've read of him over many years as a WW2 history buff, he's always seemed a repellent man) and, as so often in life, the people in charge are choosing where they can safely deflect responsibility. And yet Stanton's account never really delves into King or the Navy scheming, and so does not convey the white-hot anger one should feel at these developments.

Perhaps the best thing Stanton's book does, beyond the justice paid to the survivors and the dead in telling their story respectfully, is contrast the buck-passing and bureaucratic squirming at the top with the understated heroism of those at the sharp end. One of the most affecting anecdotes in In Harm's Way comes on page 266, when the ship's doctor distributes fresh water that has been dropped to them in canisters from a passing plane, to tide them over until the more considered rescue operation can finally begin (four days late). The doctor, assessing the condition of each of the men around him, orders certain men to be given their meagre ration first. A cup of water is passed down the line of men, all of whom have gone four days without a drink and endured much else besides, to each of the targeted men in turn. No one broke under this tantalising test, and each man waited his turn. The doctor still marvels in telling the story to the author decades later. The contrast to the self-serving squirmers and the cruelly bureaucratic might be unintentional, but it is there. The book makes you realise, starkly, just how precious basic humanity can be. In a modern world where sports stars can be heroes for playing well and people who regret a one-night stand twenty years ago can be survivors, we can read true stories like In Harm's Way and think in horror and wonder at what men can endure.

"More than a few of them didn't have life vests. They were half dog-paddling and half drowning, heroically supported by comrades who themselves were close to giving up. The boys supporting these swimmers had enormous sores on their hips from the chafing of their heavy loads. Yet none of them wanted to let go of their charges. They were clinging to them as if saving themselves." (pg. 232) show less

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 show more 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 show less