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868d79d
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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.
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coping
panic
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Mark Bowden |
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7d31dc0
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No one gets left behind, you know that.
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Mark Bowden |
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c26ccb5
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Sometimes the fate of an entire nation can hinge on the integrity of one man.
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Mark Bowden |
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11d2b79
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Do me a favor, okay? Tell my parents that I fought well today. And tell them that I... that I... that I fought hard.
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Mark Bowden |
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799e064
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Somalia) was a watershed," said one State Department official, "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she'll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All th..
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Mark Bowden |
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0da2f34
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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1f7fc6b
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Excited. In a good way. I've been training my whole life for this.
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Mark Bowden |
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2673693
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I'm not a ranger, I'm a pilot.
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Mark Bowden |
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818c20c
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And yet these Americans, with their helicopters and laser-guided weapons and shock-troop Rangers were going to somehow sort it out in a few weeks? Arrest Aidid and make it all better? They were trying to take down a clan, the most ancient and efficient social organization known to man. Didn't the Americans realize that for every leader they arrested there were dozens of brothers, cousins, sons, and nephews to take his place? Setbacks just s..
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Mark Bowden |
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1c91841
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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3f21d64
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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4357ebe
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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7ff74f1
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In the world's most dangerous country, the job of going after Pablo was the most dangerous position of all.
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Mark Bowden |
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1497305
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They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
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Mark Bowden |
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8e72294
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They had traveled the world, to Korea, Thailand, Central America ... they knew each other better than most brothers did.
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Mark Bowden |
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7c167bc
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The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy--'Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate"--to Richard Nixon's opening with China, to Ronald Reagan's famous 'walk in the woods' with MIkhail Gorbachev. Obama's position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush's post-9/11 policy--'You are either for us or against us'-..
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international-policy
obama
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Mark Bowden |
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3db1734
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For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,
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Mark Bowden |
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b11d425
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Never had a general so effectively willed away the facts.
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Mark Bowden |
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3572565
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The city was shredding them block by block. No place was safe. The air was alive with hurtling chunks of hot metal. They heard the awful slap of bullets into flesh and heard the screams and saw the insides of men's bodies spill out and watched the gray blank parlor rise in the faces of their friends, and the best of the men fought back despair. They were America's elite fighters and the were going to die here, outnumbered by this determined..
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Mark Bowden |
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e40103c
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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43b6ba0
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John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of "antiwar," which he felt, and I'm paraphrasing him here, was like being "anti-food" or "anti-sex," since war was such an essential element of human experience."
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Mark Bowden |
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b77289b
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Like most of the great turning points in history, it was obvious and yet no one saw it coming.
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Mark Bowden |
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900954d
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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1a4142e
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General Garrison assembled all of the men for a memorial service, and captured their feelings of sadness, fear, and resolve with the famous martial speech from Shakespeare's Henry V: Whoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed his departure since we wish not to die in that man's company. Whoever lives past today and comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbor h..
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Mark Bowden |
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42a538b
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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..
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Mark Bowden |
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d10d973
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Viva Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!
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Mark Bowden |
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1fa801d
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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c5f5a24
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Soldiering was about fighting. It was about killing people before they killed you. It was about having your way by force and guile in a dangerous world, taking a shit in the woods, living in dirty, difficult conditions, enduring hardships and risks that could--and sometimes did--kill you. It was ugly work. Which is not to say that certain men didn't enjoy it, didn't live for it. Garrison was one of those men. He embraced its cruelty. He wou..
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Mark Bowden |
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cfdc0b0
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He would think about this a lot later, and the best he could explain it was, his own life no longer mattered. All that did matter were his buddies, his brothers, that they not get hurt, that they not get killed. These men around him, some of whom he had only known for months, were more important to him than life itself. It was like when Telscher ran out on the road to pull Joyce back in. Carlson understood that now, and it was heroic, but i..
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Mark Bowden |
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488bdbb
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It was terribly risky, maybe even hopeless. But one or two properly armed, well-trained soldiers could hold off an undisciplined mob indefinitely. Shughart and Gordon were experts at killing and staying alive. They were serious, career soldiers, trained to get hard, ugly things done. They saw opportunity where others could see only danger. Like the other operators, they prided themselves on staying cool and effective even in extreme danger...
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Mark Bowden |
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3cc49e0
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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?"
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Mark Bowden |
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4077eb4
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Beware of men with theories that explain everything.
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Mark Bowden |
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96862e6
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His only cause, ultimately, was himself.
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Mark Bowden |
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e38f60f
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General Maza, the survivor of two grotesque assassination attempts, put it bluntly: 'This country won't be put right as long as Escobar is alive.
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Mark Bowden |
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feef186
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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."
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Mark Bowden |
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1b31716
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Today the most serious computer predators are funded by rich criminal syndicates and even nation-states, and their goals are far more ambitious. Cyberattacks were launched at digital networks in Estonia by ethnic Russian protesters in 2007 and in Georgia before Russia attacked that country in 2008; and someone, probably Israel or the United States (or both), successfully loosed a worm called Stuxnet in 2010 to sabotage computer-controlled u..
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Mark Bowden |
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63aa29d
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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f215ffc
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the Tet surprise was regarded by Westy as proof of Hanoi's weakness. Nowhere in his understanding of the war was there room for the size and quality of the force that had taken Hue. So the MACV in Saigon and General LaHue in Phu Bai simply refused to believe it had happened. Reports that contradicted this high-level understanding were dismissed as unreliable, the cries of men facing real combat for the first time, and panicking. Against the..
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Mark Bowden |
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dcfb22d
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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05f9e9d
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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b2fb481
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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.
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Mark Bowden |
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4c3572d
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Hue had become a city of the dead.
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Mark Bowden |
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b79cb5e
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There were splits within families over the present war, where one son had sided with Saigon and the other with Hanoi. The "liberation" of Hue suspended law and order and upended basic decency, giving retribution an official stamp of approval. It tapped a deep vein of savagery. In"
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Mark Bowden |
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cfb72c1
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whirlwind of war.
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Mark Bowden |