Mark Bowden Quotes

As Donilon [President Obama's security advisor] would tell me, Obama said: "Here's the deal. I want this hunt for Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to come to the front of the line. I worry that the tra...

The whole experience ought to have (but has not) taught Americans to cultivate deep regional knowledge in the practice of foreign policy, and to avoid being led by ideology instead of understanding. T...

About Author

Mark Bowden (; born 1951) is an American journalist and writer. He is a former national correspondent and longtime contributor to The Atlantic. Bowden is best known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, which was later adapted into a motion picture of the same name that received two Academy Awards.
Bowden is also known for the books Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001), about the efforts to take down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and Hue 1968, an account of the Battle of Huế.

I'm not a ranger, I'm a pilot.

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...

It's what you do right now that makes a difference.

The domestic enemy’s inner sanctum, the National Press Club.

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.

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

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.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,

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

No one gets left behind, you know that.

Hot vit lon, a local favorite, a duck embryo boiled and served inside the shell—

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...

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 Nix...

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...

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.

His only cause, ultimately, was himself.

Over four months in December 2008 and January, February, and March 2009, as Conficker assembled the largest botnet in the world, government, which would seem to have had the largest share of overarchi...

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 Eston...