Words matter. These are the best Doug Stanton Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I was writing my first book, ‘In Harm’s Way,’ I witnessed the sense of sacrifice that those WWII veterans possessed. I was surprised that sometimes their grandchildren hadn’t talked to them about the historic events of that night in July 1945, when the USS Indianapolis went down.
Simple words of encouragement subsequently saved many of the Indianapolis’ sailors during their ordeal in the summer of 1945, and those men took the lesson to heart.
Traverse City sits halfway between the North Pole and the Equator, and our summer days are long. The light seems to take forever to vanish from the sky, and when it does, it goes out like someone folding a white sheet in the dark. A flare on the horizon. Then a rustle: Goodnight.
Winters are so long in northern Michigan – nearly nine months of gray skies and deep snow – that summer comes as a fresh burst.
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’m really interested in how people face existential crises and either overcome them or don’t, and in how the human psyche responds.
The action of ‘Horse Soldiers’ is back-dropped by the story of how America went to war with little time to prepare – but with a lot of moxie.
I wanted to write ‘In Harm’s Way’ from the young men’s point of view of being in a raft, or hanging in a life vest with just their nose poking above the water.
That’s the potential power of a single voice – a neighbor’s, a teacher’s, a parent’s, a friend’s. It can change you, make you feel as if you have a place in the world.
I’m very dogged and patient.
I don’t think it’s healthy to have 68-year-old men, 70-year-old men thinking regularly about a traumatic experience that happened to them and thinking that they cannot talk about it with anybody, and no one wants to listen.
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.
When I look at Lake Michigan each July, I imagine the men of the Indianapolis visible on the horizon; dark heads, struggling arms, a cry and whirl of a world being remade. I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness, accompanied by a desire to yell out that they will be rescued.
Each summer, as Lake Michigan finally begins to warm, I think of the men of the World War II cruiser Indianapolis and the worst disaster at sea in United States naval history. I go down to the lake, and I wonder: How would I have survived what they experienced?
