109 Quotes by Mark Bowden

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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