Top 100 Mark Bowden Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It’s what you do right now that makes a difference.”

— Mark Bowden

2. “No one gets left behind, you know that.”

— Mark Bowden

3. “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Mark Bowden

4. “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

5. “Excited. In a good way. I’ve been training my whole life for this.”

— Mark Bowden

6. “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

7. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

8. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

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

— Mark Bowden

10. “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

11. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

14. “In the world’s most dangerous country, the job of going after Pablo was the most dangerous position of all.”

— Mark Bowden

15. “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?”

— Mark Bowden

16. “The pace and urgency of war have always accelerated the development of technology and encouraged novel uses of devices that already exist.”

— Mark Bowden

17. “Beware of men with theories that explain everything.”

— Mark Bowden

18. “The Viet Cong were not the idealistic warriors of American antiwar propaganda; they were vicious. They relied on terror.”

— Mark Bowden

19. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

20. “Instead of being assembled by genes, the worm was assembled by “memes,” a word coined by British scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are original ideas. Dawkins argued that they play the same role in cultural evolution as genes play in biology, getting passed along from person to person, surviving and adapting as they move.”

— Mark Bowden

21. “His only cause, ultimately, was himself.”

— Mark Bowden

22. “Steele gave the unapologetic impression that he could break you with his bare hands if it weren’t for his strict devotion to Jesus and army discipline.”

— Mark Bowden

23. “The plan called for attacks leading up to Tet against American bases throughout the South – Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Con Tien, Pleiku, and others. It anticipated that Westy would move his troops to defend his own bases, which would leave Saigon, Hue, Can Tho, Nha Trang, and dozens of other South Vietnamese cities to be defended by much weaker ARVN forces.”

— Mark Bowden

24. “The director Stanley Kubrick, no doubt attracted by the unusual visuals of urban combat, set Full Metal Jacket in Hue, although in his film the battle is just a backdrop.”

— Mark Bowden

25. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

26. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

27. “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

28. “To me the way they were used, particularly the way their idealism and loyalty were exploited by leaders who themselves had lost faith in the effort, is a stunning betrayal. It is a lasting American tragedy and disgrace.”

— Mark Bowden

29. “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

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

— Mark Bowden

31. “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Vietnam became the case in point. In a letter to Diem in 1961, Kennedy wrote, “We are.”

— Mark Bowden

32. “The absurd body counts and kill ratios were proof of his leadership. He sold them to LBJ, who in turn presented them as fact to the American people.”

— Mark Bowden

33. “So they turned around and retraced their trip as morning dawned, eventually reentering the southern gate at Phu Bai. At about 8:30, more than four hours since they had been awakened to board the trucks and go south, they came barreling straight through the base and exited the north gate – confirming suspicion inside the trucks that no one in charge had a clue.”

— Mark Bowden

34. “It is harder to defend a computer than to attack it.”

— Mark Bowden

35. “But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

— Mark Bowden

36. “Criminals saw the man, not the badge, and they liked him, sometimes enough to tell him surprising and damaging things.”

— Mark Bowden

37. “At the very least, Vietnam should stand as a permanent caution against going to war for any but the most immediate, direct, and vital national interest, or to prevent genocide or wider conflict, and then only in concert with other countries.”

— Mark Bowden

38. “Both had white hair but still looked hale.”

— Mark Bowden

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

— Mark Bowden

40. “The Americans landed in Vietnam, were killed in Vietnam, and others have continued to come here without having good reasons.”

— Mark Bowden

41. “When asked what he did for a living, Dave would answer, “I work for local government,” because if he said he was a cop, the mood instantly stiffened.”

— Mark Bowden

42. “How could a nation built upon ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ ‘all men are created equal,’ and ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ have ended up waging a shameful, disgraceful war against a people who had done us no harm nor ever would or could?” he wrote.”

— Mark Bowden

43. “Do you truly hate them? Or is it more the feeling you get when you’re around them that you hate?”

— Mark Bowden

44. “60 Minutes, the most watched and most respected news program on the tube.”

— Mark Bowden

45. “Westin celebrated the New Year by shooting off some hand flares. Orders were “no fireworks,” but you couldn’t expect several hundred thousand men in a war zone, armed to the teeth with explosive devices, to follow an order like that.”

— Mark Bowden

46. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

47. “Hue had become a city of the dead.”

— Mark Bowden

48. “I pride myself on not making people’s experience shittier.”

— Mark Bowden

49. “The Battle of Hue would be the bloodiest of the Vietnam War, and a turning point not just in that conflict, but in American history. When it was over, debate concerning the war in the United States was never again about winning, only about how to leave. And never again would Americans fully trust their leaders.”

— Mark Bowden

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

— Mark Bowden