Quotes from Mark Bowden

It was hard to keep track. If Durant wasn't on a real mission like this one, he was off somewhere in the world practicing for one. Practice defined the lives of the Night Stalkers. They practiced everything, even crashing.

was a heady time to be young in Iran, on the front lines of change. They felt as though they were shaping not only their own futures but the future of their country and the world.

rooted firmly in centuries of tradition, who wanted to return Iran to some dimly remembered utopian past where clerics ruled like philosopher kings.

The name of the game in warfare is to learn faster and act faster than the enemy.

A CIA report completed in 1968 found similarly: "The war and the bombing have eroded the North Vietnamese economy, making the country increasingly dependent on foreign aid. However, because the country is at a comparatively primitive stage of development and because the bombing has been carried out under important restrictions, damage to the economy has been small.

China is traditionally Vietnam's enemy. [Vietnam] had been kicking [invaders] out for millennia. And we were just the latest.

The United States had complete control of the air over all of Vietnam, and could presumably deliver a decisive blow at will. The failure to do so was blamed on the very notion of "limited war." America was fighting with one hand—or so the story went.

The river's name, Huong, evokes the pleasing scent of incense or the pink and white petals that float downstream in autumn from orchards to the north. The Americans called it the Perfume River.

The smallest pleasure, like a mouthful of canned fruit or the chance to bathe in an ice-cold river, was a luxury, something to be savored.

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.

Vivá Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!

his days were reduced to trying to stay alive and not to disgrace himself.

In April 1967, Johnson had dispatched General Creighton Abrams to Vietnam as Westy's deputy. Abrams, a famous tank commander in World War II, had more combat experience than any other officer in the upper ranks of the US military, and some saw his appointment as a hint that LBJ was not entirely satisfied with Westy's progress.

Nobody ever tells you when you go into police work that it will require dishonesty.

she'd had to play along, to pretend—convincingly—sympathy and even amity.

You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns. And in this real world, nobody had more or better guns than America. If the good-hearted ideals of humankind were to prevail, then they needed men who could make it happen.

but the goblin was still speaking in riddles.

Isolated remnants of the county's bucolic past remained in blocks of older wood-frame houses stranded between acres of parking lots, strip malls, and big retail outlets. Its population was mixed in every way.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not a party of preachers and missionaries but rather of divine enforcers," he wrote. "Its mission is to blot out, by force if necessary, oppression, moral anarchy, social disorder, and exploitation so as to finish the so-called divine role of self-styled gods and replace evil with good. 'Fight them,' the Koran says, 'until there is no more oppression, and all submission is made to God alone.

But modern malware is aimed less at exploiting individual computers than exploiting the Internet. A botnet-creating worm doesn't want to harm your computer; it wants to use it.

Profit is the universal trigger of innovation.

What mattered in combat, what really mattered, was not only understanding why you asked men to risk their lives, but making them understand. Men would willingly risk their lives, but they needed to know that it counted. And they needed to know they had a chance.

All had had close calls. They lived in what combat correspondent Dale Dye would later call "the high weirdness of survival when the odds say you should be stone dead.

attacks." George Romney, the governor of Michigan and a Republican candidate for president, told newspaper editors, "If what we have seen in the past week is a Viet Cong failure, then I hope they never have a victory."25 On