The side of the angels

The side of the angels is Sykes’s defense of Project NOAH, offered to Bradford J. Wolgast as he asks the agent to recruit death-row prisoners for research. The expression turns an argument about secrecy, human risk, and military investment into a declaration of moral purpose. Its force is deliberately double: Sykes presents the project as humane and consequential, while the story shows how little Wolgast has been told and how uncertain the wider crisis remains.

The phrase as a recruitment argument

Sykes acknowledges that Wolgast will be asking the prisoners to surrender their whole lives and says he must give them some explanation. He offers a partial account of the project’s origins: about ten years earlier, four terminally ill Americans returned from a jungle ecotour with symptoms resembling hantavirus. Their apparent recovery and the circumstances of their trip became part of the background to the research. Sykes presents the account as only what he is permitted to disclose, setting the phrase’s moral confidence against the project’s restricted information from the outset.

When Wolgast asks whether the procedure is safe, Sykes does not promise safety. He concedes that there are risks and says the project will try to minimize them. He then frames the prisoners’ participation as an opportunity: they have few options, he argues, and the research might let them contribute to medical science. Calling everyone involved “on the side of the angels” converts that uncertain bargain into a reassuring moral claim, even as Sykes admits that the outcome cannot be guaranteed.

Military purpose and promised benefit

Sykes explains the military’s interest through the problem of wounded soldiers leaving service. He imagines a soldier injured by shrapnel who, under ordinary conditions, might require extensive treatment and be unable to return to combat. If the same injury could heal within half a day, Sykes argues, the soldier could rejoin his unit. The example makes the project’s military logic explicit: healing is valuable not only as care for an individual, but also as a means of keeping soldiers in the field.

He also acknowledges that the military is paying for research that has already consumed enormous resources. Rather than treat that funding as evidence against the project, he presents it as an investment in medical advances and longevity. His personal hope of living long enough to meet distant descendants extends the promised benefit beyond the battlefield. The phrase therefore gathers together several motives—scientific contribution, military usefulness, and longer life—under one assertion of moral legitimacy.

What the reassurance conceals

Wolgast senses that Sykes is giving him only a small, persuasive portion of the story. After their meeting, he looks up the biblical account of Noah and recognizes that the reason he was selected lies in his own history: he had watched his daughter, Eva, die. That realization changes the recruitment conversation. The project has not chosen him solely for his professional role; it has also chosen a bereaved father whose loss makes him useful to its appeal.

The broader events deepen the distance between Sykes’s confident phrase and what can be known. During the Colorado fever crisis, public accounts conflict over the source and severity of the outbreak: the president presents it as terrorism, officials report rapid spread and violence, and the Centers for Disease Control acknowledges that communications with the quarantine zone have broken down. Outside the crisis, people trade unverified claims about infected attackers and how to fight them, while Wolgast recognizes that his direct experience with the research subjects gives him knowledge unavailable to the public. These contrasts make the phrase more than a statement of belief: it marks the effort to impose a moral interpretation on a project conducted amid secrecy, danger, and incomplete information.

Recurring moral contrast

The expression’s later resonance lies in the difference between declared purpose and actual consequence. Sykes speaks for a project that promises healing and scientific progress, but the story repeatedly places characters in situations where a decision made under uncertainty carries irreversible costs. An apparently correct shot can become the killing of a brother once his identity is recognized; a gunman’s death can abruptly end a threat; and an act of separation can be experienced not as rejection but as a clear, grateful relinquishment. These episodes do not repeat Sykes’s argument; they sharpen the ethical problem embedded in it. Good intentions and claims of necessity cannot, by themselves, settle what an action means or who bears its cost.