Town Hall Seattle: Civics Series
Town Hall’s Civics series highlights everything from local policies to world politics. These events offer perspectives on a range of topics as diverse as Seattle itself—a bustling forum for activism, discovery, and thought-provoking discussion.
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Oct 27, 2017
To help us gain historical perspective about the dangers and realities soldiers face, Doug Stanton—author of The New York Times bestselling books In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers—presents us with The Odyssey of Echo Company, a powerful work of literary military history highlighting the experiences of soldiers coming home and reintegrating after their harrowing ordeals. Stanton distills hundreds of hours of interviews, dozens of personal letters and Pentagon after-action reports into this redemptive, fraught, and utterly unforgettable narrative of an American army reconnaissance platoon’s fight for survival during the Vietnam War.
Perhaps more telling, Stanton follows their return to a country in the midst of a social revolution spurred by collective protest of the war they had survived. The Odyssey of Echo Company tells the stories of soldiers who had fallen silent, certain their countrymen would not wish to understand their suffering. Stanton brings their voices forward with his chronicle of the searing experiences of Echo Company, impressing upon us the importance of human empathy for soldiers returning from combat.
Doug Stanton is the author of the New York Times bestseller 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, to be released by Warner Bros. in 2018.
Recorded live at Seattle University by Town Hall Seattle Wednesday, October 18, 2017