Edward Samuel Behr > Quotes

“The biggest change in the Army's behavior from 1967 to 197 1 centered on drugs. From the start of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Gls had been enthusiastic consumers of hashish, and Vietnamese had soon found that the sale of local marijuana was a rewarding occupation. By 1967 a pall of fragrant marijuana fumes hung like an invisible cloud over practically every American firebase and bunker in South Vietnam, with nearly all officers and NCOs turning a blind eye.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Some of the OAS and counter-OAS terrorism was in fact a straight-forward settling of accounts between rival Corsican personalities. One murder of a Corsican major (and head of an anti-OAS squad in Algiers itself) had little to do with ideology but was the culmination of a longstanding rivalry between different groups of Corsican pimps, all intent on controlling high-class prostitution in Algiers.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“If the United States had its My Lai in Vietnam which, more than anything else perhaps, brought home the unacceptable, dehumanizing nature of the Vietnam War, France had dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of My Lais in Algeria. The difference was that few French soldiers came forward to denounce their comrades, and the press, under few restraints in Vietnam, was almost completely hamstrung in its efforts to report the war from the field ·during the Algerian War.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“[...], in the darkest days of the Sukarno maladministration, Indonesian museum curators had, some of them, sold off part of their surplus stock of treasures to private collectors, not necessarily for personal gain but to pay their staffs and repair rotting museum buildings-and I never came across an enthusiastic Western collector of Chinese porcelain who refused such deals.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“No one will ever know how many people died as a result of this ill-planned and grotesquely ill-executed division of the Indian subcontinent. But surely one of the least wholesome of its aspects has been Mountbatten's post facto insistence that he was right, that all deaths that ensued were inevitable, and that no other course of action was possible.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Now correspondents were coming into Saigon from the outside, traveling on R and R planes. Among them was Oriana Fallaci. She later wrote a book of reminiscences about her Tet experiences which I found somewhat baffling. According to Oriana, she had had to talk panic-stricken U.S. sergeants into providing her with transport to get to the city. The craven U.S. troops at Tan Son Nhut airport had apparently had to be galvanized into action by this frail but intrepid reporter. "Are you a man or a mouse?" she asked them.

[...]

Maybe Oriana Fallaci's readers were conditioned to see every manifestation of their heroic girl reporter in cliche, comic-strip terms. Correspondents have a technical term for this kind of reporting. It comes under the generic term hyping. Oriana Fallaci, and a few others, were masters of this peculiar art form, which invariably requires an element of factual truth to which the hype is convincingly added. Thus, Oriana Fallaci undoubtedly arrived in Saigon in the middle of Tet, and yes, she did get to Hue in the middle of the fighting with a number of other reporters. But no sooner did she reach the outskirts of Hue than she had to be put back on the first truck convoy, with a bad case of nerves, by Philip Jones-Griffiths, the Magnum photographer. This proved no bar to her subsequent personal account of the fighting, which—as in the case of the Dak To assault—drew liberally on other reporters' stories.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“on a TV assignment in Calcutta in 1966, I had to resort to a camera concealed inside a golf bag to film Howrah Bridge. Because the bridge was a potential "military objective,'' government notices at both ends of the bridge—built at the turn of the century—warned that photography was strictly forbidden. It was, however, presumably all right for putative spies to buy picture postcards of the same Howrah Bridge, on display all over Calcutta.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Opium, the only drug consumed on a large scale by the Vietnamese themselves, was never a favorite with the Gls, because it required a relatively complicated apparatus: pipes, a lamp, and time to coax the opium into a hot, bubbling, gluey pellet. But many reporters, especially the French contingent, smoked opium regularly, in a variety of opium dens whose addresses were passed on from one visiting batch of reporters to the next.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“One member of a U.S. helicopter crew, a Hawaiian, marooned on a besieged AR VN fire base in Laos for several days after his own helicopter had crashed, won a Silver Star for helping the AR VN organize their own defense. The true story of his bravery was a little more complicated. One of the reasons he remained so long on the besieged firebase was that he looked too much like a Vietnamese. A particularly daring helicopter pilot ran the gauntlet of enemy fire to land on the firebase and remove the survivors of the first crashed U.S. helicopter. But when our Hawaiian hero tried to scramble aboard, a crew member from the rescuing helicopter hit him right between the eyes, toppling him to the ground, and shouted, "No, not you, you fucking gook.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“With incredible self-restraint, the advance unit of the Chinese ambushing party stopped short some twenty miles of Tezpur itself. Then they about-turned and walked back to Tibet.

While all this was taking place, a far more momentous drama was being played out elsewhere: The 1962 Cuban missile crisis was in full swing. This enabled me to confirm the golden rule of journalism, never officially admitted but everywhere tacitly observed: A conflict or calamity in the "developed" world has precedence over a similar event in the "developing" world. Its corollary is equally pertinent; as with Gresham's law, so with conflicts: New wars drive out old wars.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“I eavesdropped. It seemed that a patrol was needed to spy out the land to find out whether a neighboring hill was occupied by some rebels or not. If not, it was an ideal vantage point from which to rain down mortar shells on the enemy. I heard the colonel say, "I can't afford to lose an experienced officer. I'll have to send that young fucker Behr.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“As in all colonial circumstances, language reflected the contempt of the colonizers for the colonized. "Fellagha," "fellouze," "fell" were not strictly speaking derogatory terms. But there were others—"bic," "bicot," "bougnoule," "melon," "crouille"—and the French use of this series of derogatory terms to refer to the Algerian Moslems was part of the overall schizophrenia affecting the entire French population of Algeria.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“I remember the disgust felt by William Porter, then U.S. consul general in Algiers, at a cold-bloo4ed killing of Algerian civilians inside the U.S. consulate compound. Three Algerians had fled inside the consulate to avoid an OAS killer commando. But the OAS car simply swung into the consulate courtyard, mowed down the unfortunate Algerians on the consulate lawn, and made a getaway. The French Anny conscripts on the guard outside the consulate building failed to fire a single shot or do anything to stop the killers.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Several reporters were already in the area, and from the large numbers of dead and wounded landed on the base it was clear that we were witnessing, at second hand, a major disaster. I shared a tent with Oriana Fallaci, the well-known Italian columnist and interviewer, and her photographer, a handsome Italian, who kept saying, "I am not going· on the hill." Neither, to my knowledge, did Oriana Fallaci get there until the battle was over, though I later came across her description of the Hill 875 fighting which—to say the least—failed to make this clear.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“This demonstration was soon followed by another huge rally of pro-Pakistan Pathans, called to coincide with the visit in April 1947 to Peshawar of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the new viceroy. In their book Freedom at Midnight, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre imply that Mountbatten took considerable risks in attending the rally and was saved from the tribesmen's ire only because of his presence of mind in wearing his olive green military uniform, green being the symbol of Islam and Pakistan.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The demonstration, as the local governor of the North-West Frontier Province, Sir Olaf Caroe, and all his Political Agents well knew, was carefully orchestrated by the British to demonstrate that the majority of Pakistanis—unlike the Frontier Gandhi's supporters—favored Pakistan. By the tens of thousands the "tribals" had been trucked in by their maliks and performed with considerable enthusiasm.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“The editor, a huge cigar in his clenched fist, looked down on a table. Researchers aligned their own picture selections from among the hundreds of pictures Burrows had taken, reciting the while, like a litany, the summary of their contents. The editor scattered ash, fingered picture after picture, rejected those he didn't like, dropping them on the floor, where they were trampled by the small crowd that invariably, like students watching a master surgeon operate, congregated to watch.

Eventually, and not always happily, pictures were matched, text was decided on, space allocated. Huge folders of unwanted photographs were consigned to oblivion, and a fresh team of researchers, like African women bearing their native produce for white traders to haggle over, offering derisory sums, trooped in to replace those offering the Behr-Burrows story.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“[...] many Pathans were bisexual (most outposts of the Frontier Corps, the locally raised militia led by specially selected British career officers, included a small, floating population of Pathan boys with rouged cheeks and kohl-blacked eyes to minister to the needs of the militiamen), [...]”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Many such Frenchmen died during the Algerian War, some at the hands of the extremist OAS, which had pledged itself to keep Algeria French at all costs, some at the hands of the Algerian rebels, the FLN (National Liberation Front), once the war had entered its decisive stage, for in order to strike terror in the French ranks and emphasize that no racial collaboration was possible, the FLN struck at liberals as well as diehard conservatives.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“It was almost impossible to get her to talk about her revolutionary experiences, except in the most elliptic utterances. "I used to keep my spoon in my boot; otherwise, someone would steal it," she told me once. Or, "Trotsky was a very intelligent man and charming to talk to. But when he got up to make a speech, he always made a fool of himself." Her familiarity with Trotsky led me, at one stage, to believe they might have been lovers. She denied this, but somewhat coyly.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Needless to say, insurance failed to compensate me for any loss, for the partition, all insurance companies claimed, had been tantamount to "an act of war"-and I suppose that in a sense they were right.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“[...] Jinnah, a shrewd and wily man, was careful never to allow himself to be inveigled into putting anything about Pukhtunistan into writing, though his verbal promises, if vague, were reassuring. Because he continued to campaign for an autonomous Pukhtunistan, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was to spend eighteen years in jail after independence.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“[...] it was only much later that I discovered that Twining was not only a general but also a brand of Indian tea and that this probably explained the general's almost maniacal vested interest in the continuation of British rule in India.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“But when I think of the horrors and hazards of TV crews, I most vividly remember a story, admittedly told me at second hand, but true, of the British crew in Nigeria filming there shortly after the collapse of the Biafra secessionists. A wave of robberies was being repressed by the government in the most brutal way possible-by capital punishment-and the crew was filming an execution. The unfortunate victim, convicted of some particularly modest robbery, had been tied to a tree and blindfold ed. A priest had administered last rites. An army squad, its rifles loaded, took aim. At this point the proceedings were interrupted by the sound engineer. "Stop everything, please," he said. uThere's something wrong with the set."

The execution squad commander courteously obeyed; the troops grounded arms until the tinkering with the recording machine was completed. "Now let's have a test," the sound engineer said, completely oblivious of his surroundings. "Okay, you can go ahead now.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Had Kipling's India ever existed, except in my imagination? Had I dreamed it all? But the Frontier Gandhi, still hale and hearty at eighty-nine, bless him, grasped me with both long simian arms, held me close, and said, to my surprise and silent, incredulous joy, "Welcome back. I remember you well.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“But perhaps the most lasting autobiographical fake ever to be published in Constellation was "I Was Stalin's Nanny." The putative author, a certain Boudou Zvanidze, was not to be found among our somewhat limited range of corrupt acquaintances who would impersonate the author in return for a small percentage of the fee. Indeed, the fluent Russian-speaking Madame Lecoutre would have seen through such an impersonation, even if the venerable nanny had survived that long ( she would have had to be nearly a hundred years old at the time). Prodigies of eloquence were needed to persuade the Constellation editors that a Russian emigre of our acquaintance, remotely related to the Zvanidze family, had come across certain "family papers"-including a diary kept by Stalin's nanny during his earliest years. Needless to say, Boudou Zvanidze depicted her charge as a monster-smashing his toys, torturing animals, pulling the wings off flies, and providing other early evidence of inhuman behavior. After Stalin's death and the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, at which Stalin's crimes were posthumously revealed, the article on Boudou Zvanidze assumed considerable importance. One rumor was that Khrushchev himself had ref erred to it in his famous speech attacking Stalin, as an example of Stalin's cruelty, and it has since been included in the endless biographical data concerning Stalin, not only in the West but, I am told, also in the Soviet Union itself.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“We went up to the front, very near a dried-up riverbed. The Paks wouldn't let us visit the very front line, so we asked the Pak artillery to fire away at anything they saw on the other side, so that the trip wasn't entirely a waste of time." In effect, through this insistence on filming the Pakistani guns and mortars, one CBS team had almost annihilated another CBS team.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“FLN terrorists, masquerading as municipal workers, filled the bases of seven streetlamps in a central Algiers street with explosives, timed to explode at peak traffic hour. They went off as planned, and the carnage was spectacular. The French reaction was predictable. The day the French victims were buried, Frenchmen fanned out into the streets, killing and beating senseless any Moslems who happened to be in the vicinity of the funeral procession. The sight of Moslems being beaten to death with meat hooks taken from nearby butchers' shops apparently gave the mob some satisfaction, and there was precious little interference from either French troops or police, though individual French officers did attempt, quite ineffectively, to get them to stop.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“I came across a GI openly smoking heroin through a rifle barrel. I decided on an on-the-spot inquiry.
"How do you feel?" I began somewhat cautiously.
"Terrible, I can't eat, I can't sleep, and I haven't had a shit for a week."
"Then why do you do it?" I asked.
The soldier looked around us, at the expanse of red laterite dust covering everything, at the helicopters taking off and landing, and said, "I do it to feel normal.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Algerian and French gamblers, side by side, seemed completely unaware of the carnage which was a daily feature of their lives beyond the hotel walls. Some, I'm convinced, came to gamble small sums simply to find a relatively secure haven, for never once was the Aletti Hotel the target of OAS violence, after the generals' putsch, and there was no doubt in my mind that the casino operated with the tacit consent of OAS leaders, perhaps as a convenient means of raising revenue.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“On at least one occasion the literalness of French teachers' instructions led to a ludicrous incident. On one visit to a southern Algerian town by De Gaulle, shortly after his Fifth Republic had begun, I heard a French teacher say to his small infants' class, drawn up to greet De Gaulle, each tiny schoolchild clasping a French flag, "You must shout 'Long live De Gaulle' from the bottom of your lungs." De Gaulle appeared, and the children chanted, "Long live De Gaulle from the bottom of our lungs. Long live De Gaulle from the bottom of our lungs. VIVE DI GOL A PLEIN POUMON!”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?