Quotes from Stephan Talty

fingernails were torn out with pliers.

Patton, it was said, loved horses more than he did most human beings.

Patton was dreading what came after. "I love war and responsibility and excitement…" he wrote his wife, Beatrice, on May 3. "Peace is going to be hell on me.

Now they needed a man to go across the line. Col. T.B. Hargis, Jr. called in Capt. Tom Stewart. Stewart, 30, was lanky, bookish and witty, a devout Christian and the son of a semi-famous senator from Tennessee. It's likely he was chosen because he was decisive and smart. He knew a smattering of German — plus he could ride a horse. That was more than enough to qualify him for the job.

We were so tired of death and destruction," Colonel Reed said. "We wanted to do something beautiful.

which no other failed applicant had even thought of trying to do, because most people don't regard seeing as a skill you can get better at. And when it came to

In Iowa, locals kidnapped a judge and threatened to hang him unless he agreed not to force any more families off their land.

In the late sixties, some Army soldiers had bought long-haired wigs to cover up their military haircuts. Not all that much had changed since then.

dexterity and problem solving but also a rigorous psychological examination, which included a Rorschach test. Many aviators would later say that passing the exam was the toughest thing they'd ever faced in the Air Corps.

fifteen thousand airmen—as many men as made up an infantry division—would die in training before they left the continental United States.

L'Ollonais's men were reported to have blown through 260,000 pieces of eight, or $13.5 million in today's dollars, in three short weeks

minister, the physician.

There are three kinds of people," he wrote later, "those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.

extinguish the flames. When the fires went out, Cullinan

Three out of every four recruits never made it through the course, and trainers were

The oil business, as Erickson understood it, was and had always been amoral.

How sweet is success when the conditions leading it seem to bode ill," Stewart thought. "Such, in all modesty, is the reward of virtue." *

The rat, which transported bubonic plague, and the louse, which carried typhus, were despised but accepted presences in almost every human society, although the latter could travel places (such as the Arctic) where even the rat couldn't survive.

Such, in all modesty, is the reward of virtue.

armies could go through a lake of gas in the blink of an eye. Take the medium-sized German Panther tank, used from the middle of 1943 to the end of the war. The Panther carried a Maybach V-12 engine that got about a third of a mile per gallon on good roads, and even less than that

Nowhere else would Napoleonic troops encounter soldiers who fought as fanatically or bravely when defending a position; a famous epigram said that you not only had to kill the Russian soldier, you had to then push him over.

Therefore I cannot but see and feel that time is passing, and I with it, and yet I would not like to go without performing some great action to serve as a monument to my name. What is lost today will not be found tomorrow and I have done nothing so far to cover myself with glory.

The intensity of it simply enters your heart and brain and tears every nerve to pieces.

Hitler, who despised spies (even his own), had directed that secret agents be given a special distinction at the guillotine. They were to be turned face-upwards and forced to watch the blade descend toward their neck.