Doug Stanton

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

One of the reasons I wrote 'Horse Soldiers' was to understand the world my children would inherit after the events of 2001. ”

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

Instead of large-scale occupations, we should rely on small units of Special Forces who have proved it's infinitely more effective to work with a country's soldiers and citizens at eye level. ”