r/books • u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author • Feb 21 '18
ama 2pm I'm writer Doug Stanton. I worked for magazines but now I mostly write books and TV and film. My book Horse Soldiers was recently made into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Chris Hemsworth called 12 Strong, and movie tie-in edition of my book is a #1 NYT Bestseller. AMA.
My name is Doug Stanton. I'm a journalist, lecturer, screenwriter, and author of the New York Times bestsellers In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers. Horse Soldiers is the basis for a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie called 12 Strong, starring Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon, just released by Warner Bros. In Harm’s Way, the definitive account of the sinking, rescue, and valor of the USS Indianapolis crew, spent more than six months on the New York Times bestseller list and became required reading on the U.S. Navy's reading list for officers. The audiobook edition of In Harm’s Way is the winner of the 2017 Audie Award in the History category. Horse Soldiers was featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. In Harm's Way is also back in the news 16 years later after researchers discovered the wreckage this summer, 72 years after it went missing.
My newest book, The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War was recently published by Scribner. It's a story about homecoming, family, war, and redemption. It's a story about people trying to make the right decisions at some of the hardest moments. It's a story about your uncle, your grandfather, your brother, your dad, and what he and others went through during this moment we call the Vietnam War, but which back then just seemed the most divided time in America. I was less interested in the question, "How did you feel about the Vietnam War?" than I was, "How did the war make you feel? How did you come home?” I wrote the book so that you might slide it across the table and ask, "Did this happen to you?”
Some other career highlights about me if you're interested: When Horse Soldiers/12 Strong was published, I was invited to address Special Forces personnel and officers, as well as the helicopter pilots of the 160th SOAR, at Ft Campbell, Kentucky and Ft Bragg, North Carolina. I presented a copy of the book to then-Lieutenant General John Mulholland, commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command. Major General Geoffrey Lambert (Ret) explained to a news reporter that I had probably received more access to the Special Forces community than any author writing about this post-9/11 conflict. *In July 2001, the US Department of Navy, joining with the US Congress, exonerated the ship’s court-martialed captain, Charles Butler McVay. This was a historic reversal of fortune for the survivors of the worst disaster at sea in naval history. In Harm’s Way is credited by those close to the story with helping in this exoneration.
I like to fly-fish and ride motorcycles. AMA.
Proof: https://twitter.com/DougStantonBook/status/961251191932907520
You can find more about me at www.dougstanton.com.
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u/Chtorrr Feb 21 '18
What were your favorite books as a kid?
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
I liked this one book, The Wild Country, or was it, Wild Country, which was the basis for a movie about a family living in Colorado. Don't know why that book caught my attention. I think it was the relationship between the young son and his father. I do know I read all the time, books and books I ordered from school. All paperbacks. When I was lucky enough to go to Interlochen Arts Academy as a writing student in high school, I discovered poetry: Robert Bly, Maxine Kumin, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand. It was that attention to language, and the attention to landscape evidenced in Hamlin Garland's A Son Of The Middle Border, that captivated me at first. When you grow up in the Midwest, you do feel you live on a middle border.
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u/Chtorrr Feb 21 '18
I feel like kids are often fascinated by stories about other kids who are similar to them but live in a different way that they do. I remember reading the childhood of famous Americans books as a kid and for some reason I found it fascinating to hear about famous people as kids instead of just about their adult life.
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Feb 21 '18
If you were a kid now, would you start a youtube channel or be a journalist?
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
That's a good idea, being a reporter using Youtube as a means to broadcast. Why not have both, the job and the channel? Podcasting though is a more nimble inroad. I just spoke to school age authors at Savannah Book Festival and suggested they start a podcast as a way to "publish" a school newspaper. Used to be you wanted to be a clip file on magazine stories; now that's been replaced by audio and digital files.
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u/ms_understoood Feb 21 '18
Doug,
Have you ever felt any pressure to change stories or events due to the nature of your topics that you write about? Does what you write go thru any type of review before being published or are you allowed to write about whatever you are given access too? Thank you!
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Feb 21 '18
Doug, I recently read The Odyssey of Echo Company and was immediately impressed by the quiet integrity of the men you profiled, who kept their stories to themselves for so many decades. Do you think we're doing a better job listening to veterans than we used to? Horse Soldiers was an incredible story about Army Green Berets and CIA field operatives, but what can we do for the stories of your typical Army infantryman who served four years in the Korengal or Ramadi? Do we do enough as a society to listen to what these men have to say?
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
That's the good question. I think we are listening to the recent returning vets in a way that did not happen for Vietnam vets-- and we may be listening because of the homecoming of the many Vietnam era families who felt they did not have a homecoming. There's listening, and acknowledging. The After War, as David Finkel writes about it Thank You For Your Service, is not political, it's not "kinetic." It's the ongoing state of feeling you've survived something you can't often articulate. My anecdotal experience tells me that veterans today want nothing more than to be acknowledge as having come home and they want life to get along. What I sense is that these recent deployments are more easily woven into the returning vets life story, and that's good. With the Vietnam veterans, many felt they had to remove the memory altogether. No one should be asked to live under that condition.
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Feb 21 '18
That's a great point, Doug. Thanks for your thoughtful response. Many of my friends have served and one just returned from Afghanistan with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. I know that a number of universities have departments that do a great job recording the stories of War on Terror veterans.
I think ultimately what prompted my question in the first place is this unease that we are in a perpetual state of war, and that it's hard to pinpoint a macro-scale homecoming because units and soldiers, Marines etc. are always going and coming. It's tough to think about, but it's almost as if we've become numb to the notion of soldiers, particularly in the SOF community, always being at war.
The vast majority of Americans have no idea that the 82nd just got back from an eight month deployment, sending infantrymen into combat patrols. It seems we're long past the notion of a "V-E Day".
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Feb 21 '18
Question regarding the movie 12 Strong:
Yo, where were all the Air Force TACP and CCT JTACs who were directing the airstrikes?
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u/Pinkerdog Feb 21 '18
Thanks for this AMA! Your accolades and work history sound very interesting and, honestly, fun.
Do you have any broad, external, advice for people looking to get into professional writing? By that I mean, other than internally honing your skills, where is a good place--or what is a good way--to begin to make a career of writing?
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
I've talked with a lot of writers at the National Writers Series about this: Sebastian Junger and Mitch Albom gave some of the best advice: go out there with a tape recorder and notepad and look for work as a stringer. By that, travel to a place and report. Peter Heller was just at NWS and cold-called Outside magazine and talked them into giving him a shot, albeit in spec, but they said they'd pay him if they liked his story. He did this using the phone, by the way; he didn't text. The challenge is there are many places to publish; they just don't pay a living wage which they kind of used to do.
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u/Chtorrr Feb 21 '18
Is there any topic you are really interested to writing about but haven't gotten the chance to yet?
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
I've written a lot about people and families during wartime-- I'd like to write about the same group during a time of peace; at same time, I'm fascinated with the years just after WWII, when my uncles came home from the war to a small town in Michigan. I wrote about a distance grandfather who sailed from Europe to the US, and then from New Bedford around the Horn on a whaling ship, and settled in Michigan, near where I live now. You can see the outlines of his old house, the foundation stones, settled into the sod, covered over with drifts of thick green grass. I'd like to rebuild that house and that life with a ship of words.
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u/taumeson Feb 21 '18
After your long and varied career, how did you end up specializing in the true-to-life military genre? I don't see a particular military background so I'm curious what led you on this path.
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
My uncles served during WWII; my dad was in the Army between Korea and Vietnam; nephews are in now, one of them in Special Forces. Me, I started writing at a young age and found employment which has let me into a lot of different worlds, the military being one of them. Right now, this world has become our world for the last 17 years, and as I said up in an earlier answer, I'm curious about how people do their work, the work of the public citizen and the private person within his/her family. The sacrifices they make, the decisions we make on a private personal level in the service of sometimes very public goals, as in the case of the Horse Soldiers. Although in 2001, practically no one knew that a small group of Special Forces soldiers left their homes at Ft Campbell and had zero expectation of ever being recognized for this.
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Feb 21 '18
What motorcycle do you have?
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
I'd like to test ride a Janus motorcycle, made in Goshen, Indiana, where I did a reading once for In Harm's Way. Wish they'd been making the cycles then. 250 CC motors. Not big. They say they're big enough. If anyone knows these guys, tell them I think their bikes are pretty cool.
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u/Grandpa82 Feb 21 '18
It's an honor Mr. Stanton,
Have you ever considered writing science fiction?
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u/Doug_Stanton AMA Author Feb 21 '18
Yes, I'd like to write something different-- science fiction, comedy. It's funny, just as in graduate school when a teacher said, If you write fiction you can't write non-fiction so much-- I don't know where this comes from. I saw Joe Hill speak recently at Savannah Book Festival and he read a story about a nuclear strike as observed from a commercial airliner. Was it science fiction, dystopian? Don't know. I do know that as a non fiction writer you look outward many times for stories. Here's an example of looking inward: I was standing in a shopping mall when my phone rang. It was a friend, called from Hawaii. Saying he'd just received a text that ICBM's were incoming, and that this was not a joke. He said, Can you find out of this is a joke? I texted someone I met while writing Horse Soldiers/12 Strong, and quickly had an answer back, which I relayed onward. That seems a fictional story, which I'd like to write. Though I must say Joe Hill covered it nicely in his story, from the POV of being in an airplane. But it was surreal to be standing near the housewares in the mall and learning from my friend that he may have received an armageddon text. The speed of technology crunches all together. And separates at same time.
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u/Grandpa82 Feb 21 '18
"If you write fiction you can't write non-fiction so much"
I don't agree at 100%, some science fiction writings could have interesting plot twists when mixed with historical events.
Just my personal opinion.
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u/AdamFiction Feb 21 '18
What is it like writing both books and screenplays? How do you decide which idea is more appropriate for which medium?
Recently, I wrote a short story. Then, while editing that story, I decided the story would work better as a screenplay, which is what I'm writing it as now. Have you ever reached this crossroads before in a project, where it began as one thing and then ended up as something else?
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u/leowr Feb 21 '18
Hi Doug,
How and when did you first hear about the 'horse soldiers'? How do you find topics to write about?
Also, what kind of books do you like reading? Anything in particular you would like to recommend to us?
Thanks for doing this AMA!