Quotes from Mark Bowden

It's what you do right now that makes a difference.

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.

Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures—intellectuals, athletes, musicians—stepped up to announce their opposition

He knew the sound of an AK-47. It made a high-pitched, more mechanical crack than the American rifle, the M16, which made a deeper, rounder sort of pop.

Hue had become a city of the dead.

Never had a general so effectively willed away the facts.

Against the certainties of the American command, the truth never stood a chance.

Regular users know nothing about program languages or varying exchange protocols. They just want the thing to run. So Microsoft invented a way to bundle executable programs and data, the DLL, that allows them to be smoothly exchanged by computers on different networks.

Historians say that revolutions come in a country not when things are at their worst but when they begin to improve, when an entire generation has been well fed, sheltered, and educated so that it feels its strength in a way previous generations, ignorant, ill fed, and unhealthy, did not.

Do you truly hate them? Or is it more the feeling you get when you're around them that you hate?

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.

prepare for a great push to be called Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day (General Offensive, General Uprising). It would take place during Tet, which in 1968, according to the Chinese calendar, was to be Mau Than, the Year of the Monkey.

Pretty girls were not perceived as a threat in the city. They moved around freely. They could watch the military and police posts, mapping entrances and exits, defenses, and gun positions, and noting the enemy's numbers and routines.

Like most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming.

While in the United States and Europe revolution was an excuse to sell pop music, stage protests, and hold festivals, it was being played for keeps in Asia. Young people were not just challenging their elders but pushing them aside, expelling, imprisoning, and in many cases executing them, all the while extolling the young as the righteous vanguard, their very youth a badge of purity. They were, by definition, forward-thinking. And in Hue they were armed.

They were all running on adrenaline, which cannot just be turned off. So even when they had silent hours and felt reasonably safe with their backs against a wall, most could not fully sleep. They would nod off with their head between their knees, a rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other. It was more like being temporarily not awake than sleep.

He was afraid a lot, but it had become a discerning fear.

Beware of men with theories that explain everything. Trust those who approach the world with humility and cautious insight. The

remember the two signatures of modern war: (1) You never win, exactly; you claim victory. (2) Perception is paramount.

Never mind that this fellow had been busy that morning shooting scores of people in cold blood,9 the image alone told a simpler, more brutal story, one brandished enthusiastically by the war's opponents.

Sitting cross-legged on the rug, puffing on a pipe, wearing a fat gold Rolex on his wrist, Khamenei asked the colonel, "If we were to release all of you now, without any conditions, how long would it be before you could begin to supply us again with spare parts for our military forces?

And while each death would echo loudly halfway around the world, hurling families and even whole communities into grief, often with shattering consequences for generations, in Hue there wasn't even time to stop and look, much less grieve.

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.

How much sense would it make, after all, for someone involved with a kidnapping to draw attention to himself by claiming to be a witness and telling an elaborate lie?