Mark Bowden > Quotes

“It's what you do right now that makes a difference.”
― Mark Bowden

“These problems have been here so long that the only way I’ve been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively.”
― Mark Bowden, Worm: The First Digital World War

“No one gets left behind, you know that.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“Sometimes the fate of an entire nation can hinge on the integrity of one man.”
― Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

“Do me a favor, okay? Tell my parents that I fought well today. And tell them that I... that I... that I fought hard.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have stopped Hitler’s armies. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
― Mark Bowden, The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

“(Somalia) was a watershed," said one State Department official, "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more recent example - don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it." (pg 334-335)”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“Victory was for those willing to fight and die. Intellectuals could theorize until they sucked their thumbs right off their hands, but in the real world, power still flowed from the barrel of a gun.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“The joke Colombians told was that God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating it with the most evil race of men.”
― Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The True Story Behind the Hit Series 'Narcos'

“And yet these Americans, with their helicopters and laser-guided weapons and shock-troop Rangers were going to somehow sort it out in a few weeks? Arrest Aidid and make it all better? They were trying to take down a clan, the most ancient and efficient social organization known to man. Didn’t the Americans realize that for every leader they arrested there were dozens of brothers, cousins, sons, and nephews to take his place? Setbacks just strengthened the clan’s resolve. Even if the Habr Gidr were somehow crippled or destroyed, wouldn’t that just elevate the next most powerful clan? Or did the Americans expect Somalia to suddenly sprout full-fledged Jeffersonian democracy?”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“Soldiering was about fighting. It was about killing people before they killed you. It was about having your way by force and guile in a dangerous world, taking a shit in the woods, living in dirty, difficult conditions, enduring hardships and risks that could—and sometimes did—kill you. It was ugly work. Which is not to say that certain men didn’t enjoy it, didn’t live for it. Garrison was one of those men. He embraced its cruelty. He would say, this man needs to die. Just like that. Some people needed to die.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“Excited. In a good way. I've been training my whole life for this.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“The Americans landed in Vietnam, were killed in Vietnam, and others have continued to come here without having good reasons.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“I pride myself on not making people’s experience shittier.”
― Mark Bowden, The Last Stone

“John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of “antiwar,” which he felt, and I’m paraphrasing him here, was like being “anti-food” or “anti-sex,” since war was such an essential element of human experience.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“The ratio of men killed in battle is becoming more favorable to our side. From a little better than two to one last January, the ratio has climbed to more than six to one in favor of our side.”20 Westy argued that the ratio so heavily favored allied forces that in time the mounting toll would buckle Hanoi’s resolve.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“It was hard to overestimate the desire of a man living in isolation to talk.”
― Mark Bowden, The Last Stone

“The great hope of the Tet Offensive was that its very size and daring would trigger a surge of nationalism that would transcend barriers of ideology, class, and faith.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“Richard Nixon was elected president mendaciously promising not victory, but a “secret plan” to bring the war to an “honorable end.” The secret plan prolonged the conflict seven more years, spreading misery and death throughout Indochina. Nixon began gradually drawing down the number of Americans fighting there in 1969, and— catastrophically, as it turned out— began shifting the
military burden to Saigon.

General Abrams threw greater and greater responsibility for prosecuting the war to the ARVN [South Vietnamese military], shifting his efforts to disrupting and destroying Hanoi’s delivery of troops and matériel. This is what prompted the raids into the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, where North Vietnam had long sheltered troops and supply routes. The bombing of Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia destabilized that neutral country, leading to the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 and the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge, which would be responsible for the deaths of millions of Cambodians in ensuing years.”
― Mark Bowden, Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“He would think about this a lot later, and the best he could explain it was, his own life no longer mattered. All that did matter were his buddies, his brothers, that they not get hurt, that they not get killed. These men around him, some of whom he had only known for months, were more important to him than life itself. It was like when Telscher ran out on the road to pull Joyce back in. Carlson understood that now, and it was heroic, but it also wasn’t heroic. At a certain level he knew Telscher had made no choice, just as he was not choosing to be unafraid. It had just happened to him, like he had passed through some barrier. He had to keep fighting, because the other guys needed him.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“in all honestly”
― Mark Bowden, The Last Stone

“Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures—intellectuals, athletes, musicians—stepped up to announce their opposition”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“General Maza, the survivor of two grotesque assassination attempts, put it bluntly: 'This country won't be put right as long as Escobar is alive.”
― Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

“the entire rationale for fighting in Vietnam was rooted in faith. Faith that his elected leaders and military bosses knew what they were doing and that the calculation that had placed his life at such peril mattered, that it did more than just make sense but demanded his suffering and sacrifice.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“A month after it ended, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection, and Westmoreland would shortly thereafter be removed as its commander. Richard Nixon was elected president eight months later mendaciously promising not victory, but a secret plan to bring the war to an “honorable end.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“the Tet surprise was regarded by Westy as proof of Hanoi’s weakness. Nowhere in his understanding of the war was there room for the size and quality of the force that had taken Hue. So the MACV in Saigon and General LaHue in Phu Bai simply refused to believe it had happened. Reports that contradicted this high-level understanding were dismissed as unreliable, the cries of men facing real combat for the first time, and panicking. Against the certainties of the American command, the truth never stood a chance.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

“he was not the first general to welcome statistics he wanted to hear—but the numbers emerged from an intricate origami of war bureaucracy: South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and American. The truth was bent at every fold for reasons that went beyond propaganda to self-interest, sycophancy, and wishful thinking.”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“hot vit lon, a local favorite, a duck embryo boiled and served inside the shell—”
― Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“I'm not a ranger, I'm a pilot.”
― Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War