Quotes from Mark Bowden

He was disappointed on his first Vietnam tour in 1965 when he'd seen little action. Now, with his own company, he was eager to be put to use. His ears stuck out on either side of his high-and-tight and he wore US Marine Corps–issued glasses in thick black plastic frames. In his wallet, he carried a formal portrait of his wife, Missy, and daughter, Marianne, both wearing pink. The politics of the war didn't concern him at all. He was a marine; there was a war on.

The fifty-three-year-old former Eagle Scout from South Carolina didn't drink, smoke, or swear; the most colorful expletive in his vocabulary was "dad gum."7 He was a West Pointer and had been an artillery commander in World War II.

Leadership was partly showmanship, and Westy neglected no means of projecting confidence, strength, and moxie.

but the rank and file had sized up the coming fight inside the Citadel as the shit storm to end all shit storms.

She had joined the Viet Cong herself four years earlier, its Young Pioneer Organization.

in all honestly

Anyone who uses Windows on their home computer is familiar with routine security updates, which Microsoft issues on the second Tuesday of each month. In the Tribe it has become known as "Patch Tuesday.

But what if the death toll—which despite the distortions clearly favored the Americans—was having the opposite effect? What if heightened punishment by US bombs and guns actually fueled Communist resistance, inspiring ten recruits for every dead enemy fighter?

The Internet promised a truly global egalitarian age. That was the idea, anyway. The international and unstructured nature of the thing was vital to these early Internet idealists. If knowledge is power, then power at long last would reside where it belonged, with the people, all people!

Nearly everyone had a father or uncles who had fought in World War II or Korea, or both, and many had grandfathers who had fought in World War I. War was stitched deep in the idea of manhood.

taught to compose a letter on an e-mail account, and then store it as a draft instead of sending it. His colleagues, armed with a password to the same account, could then log in and retrieve the draft e-mail without it ever having been sent, presumably avoiding America's watchful eye.

The invitations to the New Year's Eve party at the American embassy in Saigon would read, "Come see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Information and intelligence is the fire and maneuver of the twenty-first century," says Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

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.

Both had white hair but still looked hale.

One man who had known Lloyd years earlier said flatly that he "hated women.

He was so out of step with the youthful antiwar fervor of the period that he enlisted in the army at the height of the Vietnam War, only to be thrown out for lying about his age, education, and criminal past.

There were none of the card games marines usually played in downtimes. They were too tired to concentrate, and poker was serious business.

The Geneva Accords called for elections in 1956 to reunite the country. But as it became apparent that Ho's Communist government had overwhelming popular support—Eisenhower later estimated that if the elections had been held in 1954, Ho would have captured 80 percent of the vote13—South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem, reneged on the election. The United States, which had not been a party to the Geneva Accords, continued to back Diem

ISO, FIRST TO GO! LAST TO KNOW!

increasingly, they did not really know each other. The constant toll of death and injury, in addition to the policy of rotating marines out promptly when their thirteen months up, meant that squads were always changing. There was no such thing as unit cohesion.

If we are strong, our strength will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help. —John F. Kennedy

It was hard to overestimate the desire of a man living in isolation to talk.

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