Quotes from Mitchell Zuckoff

When we saw them, we thought they were coming down on a vine from the sky," said Lisaniak Mabel, who witnessed the paratroopers' arrival as a boy.

JoAnne told Lyz: "Make him . . . make him brave." She repeated the phrase, almost like a benediction: "Make him brave.

If you've got to go into combat, don't go by glider. Walk, crawl, parachute, swim, float—anything. But don't go by glider!

A variation of Get Rich Quick schemes was robbing Peter to pay Paul, or benefiting one person at the expense of others. The origin of the phrase is open to dispute, but one account traces it to the 1500s in England, when the lands of Saint Peter's Church at Westminster were sold to fund repairs at Saint Paul's Cathedral in London.

He wondered what drove Dave Tarantino into that brick oven to crawl through jagged rubble, flip onto his back, and leg-press a load of burning debris, knowing that it might crash down on top of him. Dave Thomas decided that he'd never seen a more courageous act. But it worried him—he feared that Dave Tarantino

Pritchard buzzed them again, wagging his wings and waving from the cockpit. The dejected PN9E crew thought that was the last they'd see of the plane. But as they watched, Pritchard circled lower and lower over an area several miles away. On Pritchard's orders, Bottoms radioed: "Coming in anyway.

You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.

Adding to the danger, Pritchard disregarded Balchen's advice about the best way to touch down. He hand-cranked the Duck's landing gear into place, intending to treat the ice cap the same as he would a paved tarmac. It was a calculated risk. A belly-down landing might damage the Duck's fuselage or curl its propeller, rendering it yet another squished bug on the ice cap. On the other hand, a wheels-down landing could lead to the same result.

Lieutenant Commander David Tarantino, MD, hurt, sore, pungent as an ashcan, limped several blocks to a Metro rail station. He paid the fare and boarded a train toward home. As he reflected on all that he'd seen and done, Dave noticed a woman staring at him from a few seats away. She studied his scrapes and bruises, the burns on his hands. Her gaze worked its way down his torn, stained uniform to his ruined shoes.

Greenland's coast is more than twenty-seven thousand miles long, a distance greater than the circumference of the earth at the equator.