Quotes from Doug Stanton

As I traveled around the country on a book tour for 'In Harm's Way,' I began learning how certain Indianapolis survivors had heard these voices - not necessarily the voice of God, but often that of someone who had fostered them and imparted an identity as a person who doesn't quit.

I'm very dogged and patient.

While researching 'Horse Soldiers,' I conducted over 100 interviews in the U.S. and in Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan, I walked and studied key sites that appear in the book. I was able to capture not only the Americans' point of view but the Afghans' as well.

Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person's life. I'm not writing about superheroes; I'm writing about ordinary people.

I like to tell stories about people trying to make the right, difficult decision at the least opportune moment... People in a crucible of an extraordinary circumstance. And then, how that experience changes their life.

'Horse Soldiers' is the untold story of how a small band of U.S. Special Forces soldiers secretly entered Afghanistan in 2001, just five weeks after September 11, saddled up on horses, and rode to an improbable victory against a vastly larger Taliban and Al Qaeda army.

Where does a man go when there are no more corners to turn, when he's running out of hope, out of luck, out of time?

They'd been afloat now without food, water, shelter, or sleep for over forty hours. Of the 1,196 crew13 members who'd set sail from Guam three days earlier, probably no more than 600 were still alive. In the previous twenty-four hours alone, at least 200 had likely slipped beneath the waves or been victims of shark attack. Since the sinking, each boy had been floating through the hours asking himself the same hard question: Will I live, or do I quit?

This was Special Forces' rule number one: let men experience failure so they never fail again. And by failing, they will learn how to be successful soldiers.

Later, Dean would see Atta's fighters show up carrying AK-47s, and there with them would be their sons, carrying spare magazines. Behind the sons walked even younger sons, carrying nothing. Dean understood that in this kind of fighting, the sons who carried nothing would pick up either a gun or a magazine if the fathers or brothers were killed. The look on the faces of the kids seemed to indicate to Dean that they expected to die.

The sharks had, in fact, remained a constant presence throughout the men's ordeal, even during the daylight hours. Not long after [navy pilot] Gwinn showed up, a massive shark attack--involving an estimated thirty fish--had, in about fifteen minutes, taken some sixty boys perched on a floater net.

Together, they wanted to return the Middle East to the fourteenth century, into a golden age ruled by Islamic law.

the sun set . . . with guillotine-like speed this close to the equator.

On November 5, to kick off the final, coordinated assault on Baluch, Stu Mansfield, positioned with Atta at the warlord's mountaintop compound, ordered the drop of a bomb called a BLU-82, which Mansfield called "the Motherfucker of All Bombs." A few minutes after dawn, barreling toward earth was the largest non-nuclear explosive device in the United States' arsenal.

Before their hurried flight from the city two weeks earlier, the Taliban had left the weapons and smeared feces on the walls and windows. Every photograph, every painting, every rosebush had been torn up, smashed, stomped, ruined. Nothing beautiful had been left behind.

Ali was horrified and enraged when in March of 2001 the Taliban dynamited the stone Buddhas that had stood watch over the town for centuries. What man had the right to write the future by blowing up the past?)

Other objects found in shark stomachs include a suit of armor, a barrel of nails, a roll of tar paper, coal, raincoats, shoes, plastic bags, goats, sheep, lizards, snakes, chicken, reindeer, and monkeys.

On a training mission, he'd watched as Nightstalker pilots cut their own landing zone using the rotors of the helicopter as giant hedge clippers. They'd been landing in a pine forest and he marveled as the helo dropped into the hole of its own making—pine

a decision can be legally correct and still be unjust.

Accurate data on shark attacks on World War II servicemen may never be known since medical records did not note them. In fact, the navy was sufficiently concerned about loss of morale that it discouraged public mention of the menace.

I'm really interested in how people face existential crises and either overcome them or don't, and in how the human psyche responds.

Winters are so long in northern Michigan - nearly nine months of gray skies and deep snow - that summer comes as a fresh burst.

Where does a man go when there are no more corners to turn, when he's running out of hope, out of luck, out of time?

When I first met the survivors of the Indianapolis in 1999 while writing a book about them, their story - the last major action of World War II - was rarely mentioned in high school textbooks. This is despite the fact that, before its torpedoing, the ship had delivered components of the atomic bomb Little Boy to Tinian Island.