Top 100 Mark Bowden Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “More bombs had been dropped in North and South Vietnam by the beginning of 1968 than had been dropped over Europe in all of World War II, three times more than were dropped in the Pacific theater, and twice as many as in Korea.”

— Mark Bowden

52. “The perfect wound was one that was not mortal, debilitating, or disfiguring, but that was bad enough to get you out.”

— Mark Bowden

53. “Never had a general so effectively willed away the facts.”

— Mark Bowden

54. “The upbeat DHS report was some kind of high-water mark for government gall – a tough record to beat. After sitting back and watching the Cabal do all the work, and nearly succeed, Uncle Sam finally found a role for himself: proclaim victory and then stick a flag in it!”

— Mark Bowden

55. “Mark reiterated how assiduously the FBI and his own department were now gathering evidence against him.”

— Mark Bowden

56. “Today there is big money for those who can stealthily invade computer networks, or construct a secure botnet, and no modern military arsenal is complete without state-of-the-art malware.”

— Mark Bowden

57. “Increasingly the United States found itself isolated. Having for two decades enjoyed its status as champion of the free world, it was increasingly the target of bitter criticism abroad and at home, where a growing number of prominent intellectuals and church leaders denounced the bombing campaign as barbaric. The military might disdain the fickle nature of public sympathy, but a democracy cannot sustain a war effort without it, and moral revulsion was growing.”

— Mark Bowden

58. “A secret Rand Corporation study for the Pentagon had concluded in 1966 that while the bombing had caused widespread hardship and even food shortages in the North, “there is, however, no evidence of critical or progressive deterioration or disruption of economic activity.”

— Mark Bowden

59. “Marines do not hesitate in combat. If the Corps has a defining philosophy, that’s it. In war, when the enemy is foolish enough to show himself, marines go right at him and kill him, risks be damned.”

— Mark Bowden

60. “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?”

— Mark Bowden

61. “And Johnson was a convert. Body counts were the first thing he asked for in regular war briefings. He bragged that his general in Vietnam killed thousands of enemy personnel for every one man he lost:.”

— Mark Bowden

62. “Anything was better than waiting in that hole trying to figure out what to think about in his last moments on earth, waiting to be plumed or slaughtered. He’d rather die trying to live.”

— Mark Bowden

63. “One of its analysts was Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time was back in the States compiling the report that – after he leaked it to the press in 1971 – would become known as The Pentagon Papers. The study showed that American leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years and had consistently enlarged it despite doubts that the effort could succeed.”

— Mark Bowden

64. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

65. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

66. “They were called Ontos, after the Greek word for “thing,” in part because they were ugly.”

— Mark Bowden

67. “Mileski had once been caught in a home burglary and had been shot in the leg by police. Afterward, he limped.”

— Mark Bowden

68. “He had spent his first day in Hue as scared as he had ever been. The fear had started when they were shot at on the chopper coming in, and had then just stayed at full throttle. He realized he had adapted to it. It surprised him. Fear, because it was everywhere and everyone felt it, receded in importance. It was still there, but when you realized there was nothing you could do about it, it ceased to matter. It just became your new reality.”

— Mark Bowden

69. “Four specific missions were assigned: to spy on the nguy and American forces in the city; to recruit civilians to join the uprising and provide support; to train them with weapons and tactics; and to build a committed core who, when the battle began, would carry the wounded to medical stations in the rear and help feed the army. Weapons, ammo, food, and medical provisions all would be smuggled, stockpiled, and made ready.”

— Mark Bowden

70. “Westmoreland’s body counts were bogus. He believed them – he was not the first general to welcome statistics he wanted to hear. But, in practice, there was every incentive for field commanders to inflate or even invent body counts. It was how their performance was assessed, and it became one of the greatest self-reporting scams in history. The absurd body counts and kill ratios were proof of his leadership. Westmoreland sold them to LBJ, who in turn presented them as fact to the American people.”

— Mark Bowden

71. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

72. “Opposition to the war was becoming fashionable. Popular figures – intellectuals, athletes, musicians – stepped up to announce their opposition.”

— Mark Bowden

73. “Mohr quoted Westmoreland, after the general had toured the bullet-riddled embassy grounds in Saigon, saying the enemy’s efforts had failed, and that they had sought “to cause maximum consternation in South Vietnam.” “It was clear that consternation had been achieved,” Mohr wrote.19.”

— Mark Bowden

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

— Mark Bowden

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

— Mark Bowden

76. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

77. “When he got back to Phu Bai, one of the walking wounded, he was ordered to look through nearly a hundred body bags and identify those he recognized. It took him two days to complete the job, unzipping the bags and looking at the pale, lifeless faces.”

— Mark Bowden

78. “Profit is the universal trigger of innovation.”

— Mark Bowden

79. “How do you bomb a nation into the Stone Age when, in modern industrial terms, they are not that far removed from it?”

— Mark Bowden

80. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

81. “He knew there was no road map for this session. That was not how interrogation worked. Conversations were improvisational.”

— Mark Bowden

82. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

83. “Many of the things overheard were redolent of deeper knowledge.”

— Mark Bowden

84. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

85. “Just take your flak jackets and some gear because we’ll be back for dinner.”

— Mark Bowden

86. “When Gonzalez and Canley were close enough to the machine gun they called for suppressing fire and then stood and hurled grenades. At the blast, they charged, firing their rifles on automatic, silencing the gun.”

— Mark Bowden

87. “If there was one ideological rationale that had broad appeal, it was nationalism, which for many boiled down to a fervent desire to be left alone.”

— Mark Bowden

88. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

89. “Today police have new tools for old crimes. DNA testing offers seemingly magic solutions to decades-old mysteries as long as physical evidence has been preserved.”

— Mark Bowden

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

— Mark Bowden

91. “Katie assured him that she was professionally nonjudgmental – which was not true; she was the opposite and was revolted by his crimes.”

— Mark Bowden

92. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

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

— Mark Bowden

94. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

95. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

96. “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.”

— Mark Bowden

97. “Gunny, get down!” Ker told him. “You’re going to get hit!” “By the time I get down, I’ll already be hit,” he said. “So I may as well stand up here and see what the hell is going on.”

— Mark Bowden

98. “We do not doubt the outcome,” he said. “The duty of peace is burdensome. It is a duty many generations of Americans have chosen as their own. It is a duty many other young men have borne as you bear it now. In the discharge of that duty, none have honored themselves – none have honored their nation – so nobly, or so bravely, as the United States Marines.”

— Mark Bowden

99. “Hanoi’s leaders were virtuoso songbirds of propaganda. They lived in a bubble. There were no voices of dissent in their society to check or challenge wishful thinking.”

— Mark Bowden

100. “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.”

— Mark Bowden