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Best-seller revives Hibbs' memory 'Ghost Soldiers' profiles late Medford doctor's days as POW By PAUL FATTIG The late Dr. Ralph Hibbs, who practiced medicine in Medford for nearly 35 years, is featured prominently in the national best-selling book "Ghost Soldiers." Written by Hampton Sides, the nonfiction book focuses on a rescue mission by 121 rangers from the U.S. Army's Sixth Ranger Battalion to rescue some 500 American and British POWs held in an infamous prison by Japanese military forces in the Philippines at the end of World War II. Hibbs, who died at 87 last fall, had been a POW for three long years at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp No. 1. Published last month by Doubleday, the hardback book is available at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Medford for $24.95. The book is expected to jump from No. 7 on The New York Times nonfiction best seller list to No. 2 on Sunday. "As soon as I met Ralph I knew I wanted to focus on him," Sides said in a telephone interview from his home in Santa Fe, N.M. "Even though he had had a stroke, he was very sharp with a great sense of humor. "This story was so much a medical story," he added. "It was disease that killed most of these guys. It was important to have a doctor as a main character. ... I was more drawn to survival and endurance than any aspects of military history." Some 6,000 POWs died during the first six months at the camp, Hibbs told the Mail Tribune in a 1997 interview. "You take a young kid, I don't care how healthy he is, and give him malaria and dysentery, he'll die in 24 hours," Hibbs said. "They died faster than we could bury them." Hibbs, who retired in 1984, was the author of "Tell MacArthur to Wait," a book first published in 1988 about his ordeal in the Philippines. Working with a list of people liberated from the camp as well as a contemporary roster of Bataan Death March survivors, Sides tracked down Hibbs in 1999. Hibbs had escaped from the death march only to be recaptured later. In addition to interviewing Hibbs numerous times, Sides also relied on Hibbs' book for material. Sides alternates the focus on the rescuers in one chapter of "Ghost Soldiers" to the POWs in the next. He weaves the experience of Hibbs and three other main characters into a riveting story line. "Dr. Ralph Emerson Hibbs lay delirious in a ditch at the tattered edge of the jungle, his teeth clicking with chills," the book begins. "The malarial attack came over him suddenly as they always did, his strength dropping from his legs like an untethered weight." Virginia Caldwell Hibbs, 82, the doctor's widow, read the galley proofs to the book. "It's a very nice way to frame the story," she said. "You look forward to meeting that person again as you read, and you hope that person is going to survive. "Hampton's writing is very impressive, and I'm very critical when it comes to writing," she added. She was widowed before she married Hibbs, a widower himself, in the early 1990s. Her previous husband, to whom she had been married for 30 years, was Erskine Caldwell, author of "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre." Sides, who cited Virginia Hibbs for her help with the book, uses a narrative nonfiction technique throughout much of the book. "Some historians don't like that genre," Sides said. "But this isn't a history story with a capital 'H.' " Rather, the focus is on people enduring extremely difficult circumstances, he reiterated. "A lot of books have been written about the defense of the Philippines - I wanted to come up with a new structure," he said. "And I wanted people to read it. I've been accused of popularizing history. Well, that was my goal. "I tried to see if I could write this book without mentioning (Gen.) Douglas MacArthur," Sides said, noting he fell just shy of that goal. "People like Ralph Hibbs are much more interesting." A native of Memphis, Tenn., Sides, 39, is a graduate of Yale, majoring in American history. A former reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Washington Post, he is a contributing editor to Outside magazine. Sides is expected to have a book signing at the Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Medford later this month. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.