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<em>Armand Hopkins</em>, known to his friends as Hoppie, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 20 August 1901, graduated from Hughes High School there, enlisted in the Cavalry, and served with the Armed Forces in Germany. He graduated from West Point in 1925. Lured by the call of faraway places, Hoppie chose the Coast Artillery and was assigned to Fort McKinley, Philippine Islands. For a diversion he coached the Philippine track team and in 1927 accompanied the team to Shanghai as one of the coaches in the Far Eastern Olympics.</p>
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In 1928, when he was ordered to Fort Hancock, New Jersey, Hoppie returned to the United States via Singapore, Suez and France—walking across France from Italy to the Atlantic, enjoying the people and learning French with Italian intonation. The experience paid off; a year later, he was sent to France as a language student in preparation for an assignment to the United States Military Academy. While in France, Hoppie took the opportunity to walk from Dijon to Geneva to Grenoble to Nice—“over the Alps just like Rousseau, Hannibal, and Napoleon, only in reverse direction,” he used to say.</p>
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From 1930-35, Hoppie taught French at the Academy, augmenting his pay in the summer of 1933 by taking leave to teach riding at a French language camp in Vermont. There he met and fell in love with another counselor, Sophia Kuziw, whom he married the following January.</p>
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In 1941 Hoppie was ordered back to the Philippines as fort executive at Fort Hughes, a small island several miles south of Corregidor. He was taken prisoner of war with the collapse of United States defenses in 1942 and spent the next three and a half years in various camps in Cabanatuan, Japan, and Korea. The 49-day trip from Cabanatuan to Japan was brutal. Some 1,865 half-starved and half-naked men were packed into the hold of an unmarked ship which was repeatedly bombed and strafed by United States forces, forcing the prisoners to be moved twice to other ships before a mere 500 finally arrived alive in Japan. Some of those later shipped to Korea were liberated by United States forces in September 1945. Hoppie’s memoirs of his experiences are in the United States Military Academy Library.</p>
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After the war, Hoppie was assigned back to West Point as assistant professor and in 1950 went to Washington to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff for four years. From 1953 until his retirement in 1959, he served with the Joint Support Group with liaison functions in Paris and Washington, D.C.</p>
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In the fall of 1959 Hoppie joined the faculty of Landon School in Bethesda, Maryland, as a teacher of French and head of their modern language department. The 11 years he spent at Landon were to be “one of the most spiritually rewarding periods of my life.”</p>
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In 1970 Hoppie and Sophie moved to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where they had enjoyed so many summers with their daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, as well as the company of some West Point classmates who had taken up residence there. After ten years, in search of warmer winters, they bought a home in Florida; but the beauty of the eastern shore, a garden that produced food and flowers for their table as well as for friends and neighbors, and hikes through the unspoiled wetlands of Cape Henlopen lured them back to Delaware every summer. Only this past August, with Hoppie’s health failing, did they finally leave Rehoboth Beach for good and return to Florida where Hoppie died two months later.</p>
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West Point has lost one of its noblest and most loyal sons. He will be missed by his wife of 55 years, Sophia; his three daughters: Mrs. Frances Gerard of Edina, Minnesota, Mrs. Cynthia Sapia-Bosch of Guatemala City, Guatemala, and Mary Carol Hopkins of Cincinnati, Ohio; his eight grandchildren; his three great-grandchildren and innumerable friends, both young and old, who will remember him with the greatest admiration, respect and affection.</p>
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