Hampton Sides > Quotes

“These men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes, and no one in this country should be allowed to forget it.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“He belonged to the men who have cared for great things, not to bring themselves honor, but because doing great things could alone satisfy their natures.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“We do not want to go to the right or left, but straight back to our own country!”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

“I thought we’d been forgotten,” the prisoner said. “No, you’re not forgotten,” Robbins said. “We’ve come for you.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“We are not pleasant people here, for the story of war is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights.
The hate destroys you … Agnes Newton Keith
Three Came Home”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“In August 1944, the War Ministry in Tokyo had issued a directive to the commandants of various POW camps, outlining a policy for what it called the ‘final disposition’ of prisoners. A copy of this document, which came to be known as the ‘August 1 Kill-All Order,’ would surface in the war crimes investigations in Tokyo. Bearing a chilling resemblance to actual events that occurred at Palawan, the directive stated:
‘When the battle situation becomes urgent the POWs will be concentrated and confined to their location and kept under heavy guard until preparations for the final disposition will be made. Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual dispositions may be made in [certain] circumstances. Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, and whether it is accomplished by means of mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, or decapitation, dispose of them as the situation dictates. It is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.’ (pp. 23-24)”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“For poverty is miserable. It is ugly, disorganized, rowdy, sick, uneducated, violent, afflicted with crime. Poverty demeans human dignity. The demanding tone, the inarticulateness, the implied violence deeply offended us. We didn’t want to see it on our sacred monumental grounds. We wanted it out of sight and out of mind.”
― Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

“He became more and more intrigued by the Arctic, by its lonely grandeur, by its mirages and strange tricks of light, its mock moons and blood-red halos, its thick, misty atmospheres, which altered and magnified sounds, leaving the impression that one was living under a dome.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“The degree to which a society is civilized can be judged by entering its prisons.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“Filipinos were famous for their garrulousness. They were the Irish of Asia, it was sometimes said—warm, openhearted, story-loving, with unslakable appetites for the latest rumor or fact.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“Ralph Hibbs said his heart stopped, for he realized that it was the first Stars and Stripes he'd seen since the surrender. All the men in all the trucks stood at attention and saluted. Then came the tears. "We wept openly," said Abie Abraham, "and we wept without shame.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“Then she spoke with Yolanda, her eldest child, with whom she'd been shopping all afternoon for an Easter dress. "Mommy, I'm not going to cry," Yoki said resolutely. "I'll see him again in heaven."
But something was bothering her, something clearly nagged at her young conscience. "Should I hate the man who killed my father?" she asked.
Coretta shook her head. "No, darling, your daddy wouldn't want you to do that.”
― Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

“Let me tell you what we think. You begin when you are little to work hard. After you get to be men, you build big houses, big towns, and everything else in proportion. Then, after you have got them all, you die and leave them behind. Now, we call that slavery. You are slaves from the time you begin to talk until you die; but we are free as air. The Mexicans and others work for us. Our wants are few and easily supplied. The river, the wood and plain yield all that we require. We will not be slaves; nor will we send our children to your schools, where they only learn to become like yourselves.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“Kit Carson, more than any figure on the Western stage, filled the role. Honest, unassuming, wry around a campfire, tongue-tied around the ladies, clear in his intentions, swift in action, a bit of a loner: He was the prototype of the Western hero. Before there were Stetson hats and barbed-wire fences, before there were Wild West shows or Colt six-shooters to be slung at the OK Corral, there was Nature’s Gentleman, the original purple cliché of the purple sage. Carson hated it all. Without his consent, and without receiving a single dollar, he was becoming a caricature. In”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. "Go ahead, you're free now," the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn't think to give him money for the bus fare into town.”
― Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

“This same strain of transcendent “love-your-enemies” thinking guided Young, Abernathy, and the others as they began to contemplate their leader’s death. As Young put it, “We aren’t so much concerned with who killed Martin, as with what killed him.” It”
― Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

“The Vikings spoke of a place at the world’s northern rim, sometimes called Ultima Thule, where the oceans emptied into a vast hole that recharged all the springs and rivers on the earth. The Greeks believed in a realm called Hyperborea that lay far to the north. A place of eternal spring where the sun never set, Hyperborea was said to be bordered by the mighty River Okeanos and the Riphean Mountains, where lived the griffins—formidable beasts that were half lion and half eagle. The notion that Saint Nicholas—a.k.a. Kris Kringle or Santa Claus—lives at the North Pole seems to have a much more recent vintage. The earliest known reference to Saint Nick’s polar residence comes from a Thomas Nast cartoon in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly—the artist captioned a collection of his Yuletide engravings “Santa Claussville, N.P.”Still, the larger idea behind Nast’s conceit—of a warm, jolly, beneficent place at the apex of the world where people might live—had ancient roots, and it spoke to America’s consuming fascination with the North Pole throughout the 1800s.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!” A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home. June 18 was set as the departure date. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp—they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves. The next morning the trek began. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins. When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.” They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. And as they marched, they chanted—”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“Muir now could see that this icy wilderness was as vulnerable as it was vast—marked by fragile rhythms of migration, interdependencies of population, and patterns of habit many thousands of years in the making.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“stitched it up, but the German went about his work without a whimper, refusing to go on the sick list even for a day. “Nindemann is hardworking as a horse,” said De Long, and “seems to know no such thing as fatigue.” Nindemann was also oblivious to cold. His circulation appeared to be different from other men’s. On freezing winter hunts, he wore hardly any clothes. He kept his cabin colder than everyone else’s. His feet were inured to frost. He was a polar creature, through and”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“The Navajos were another matter. Theirs was a sprawling nation, wealthy in stock, obdurate in its ways, open to change but only on its terms.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“I want you to swear an oath before God,” he told them. “Swear that you’ll die fighting rather than let any harm come to those prisoners.”
― Hampton Sides, Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission

“In all cases of locating reservations,” he once said, “it would be best to show some deference to the expressed wishes of the tribe.” Euro-Americans, particularly in the boom-and-bust West, were relentlessly mobile. They blew about in the wind—deracinated, it seemed, always in search of better fortune. Miners, traders, trappers, merchants, missionaries, they thought nothing of moving great distances and starting all over when new opportunity struck. The hunger to push on, particularly in a westward direction, was an attribute of the (white) American. But Carson knew enough about Indian culture to recognize that even among nomadic tribes, the familiar landmarks of one’s homeland were profoundly significant—in fact, they were sacred—and one strayed from them with great trepidation. Homeland was crucial in practical terms, but also in terms of ceremony and ritual, central to a tribe’s collective identity and its conception of the universe.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“War is the unfolding of miscalculations. —BARBARA TUCHMAN”
― Hampton Sides, On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War's Greatest Battle

“Kill most of the livestock and prepare the meat. It is getting cold now, so we have to start. We must be on the top before it snows. The men have been working on the trails. The ladders have been put up. Be strong and prepare to defend yourselves.” One day in December, as it started to snow, some three hundred men, women, and children, perhaps tipped off by a sentry that the bilagaana army was on its way, ascended to the top and pulled up their ladders and bridges. Hoping the evil might pass beneath them, they planned to dwell in silence for months—and, if necessary, make a last-ditch defense, like the doomed Jewish rebels who defied the Romans from the stone ramparts of Masada.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“More than 150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, were murdered in cold blood that day, in a massacre that is now widely regarded as the worst atrocity committed in all the Indian wars.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“As the Jeannette drew nearer to the equator, the waters became oily calm and teemed with eels, tortoises, and dolphins.”
― Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette

“A new notion took hold: The tribes of California must be physically separated from white society as an alternative to their own extinction. They must be relocated on some clearly delineated parcel of arable land sufficiently watered by a river. There, they must be taught the rudiments of farming and animal husbandry. The government must not skimp—it must provide the Indians with modern tools, sound stock, and good seeds so that they might finally stop roving and settle down to earn an honest living as self-sufficient farmers, dwelling collectively on what amounted to a kibbutz. This communal farm must be closely guarded by an army fort, not only to prevent the Indians from straying into the white communities but also to keep ill-meaning white folks from venturing onto Indian land, bringing the scourge of alcohol and other vices with them.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

“He practiced the code of swift reprisal that was almost universally practiced by the Indians themselves: Failure to strike back, he understood, would only be interpreted as weakness and inevitably lead to an even bolder assault.”
― Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West