“No one gets left behind, you know that.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“Do me a favor, okay? Tell my parents that I fought well today. And tell them that I... that I... that I fought hard.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“(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 the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more recent example - don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it." (pg 334-335)”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“Excited. In a good way. I've been training my whole life for this.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“I'm not a ranger, I'm a pilot.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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 strengthened the clan’s resolve. Even if the Habr Gidr were somehow crippled or destroyed, wouldn’t that just elevate the next most powerful clan? Or did the Americans expect Somalia to suddenly sprout full-fledged Jeffersonian democracy?”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“They had traveled the world, to Korea, Thailand, Central America ... they knew each other better than most brothers did.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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 rabble. Their future was setting with this sun on this day and in this place.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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 his scars, and tell embellished stories of all their great feats of battle. These stories he will teach his son and from this day until the end of the world we shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for whoever has shed his blood with me shall be my brother. And those men afraid to go will think themselves lesser men as they hear of how we fought and died together.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“It was the way he lived. He could walk out of that building at a moment’s notice and leave behind no personal trace.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“Garrison wrote in his memo to Hoar. “There is no place in Mogadishu we cannot go and be successful in a fight. There are plenty of places we can go and be stupid.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“Man, God really does love medics.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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 would say, this man needs to die. Just like that. Some people needed to die.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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 it also wasn’t heroic. At a certain level he knew Telscher had made no choice, just as he was not choosing to be unafraid. It had just happened to him, like he had passed through some barrier. He had to keep fighting, because the other guys needed him.”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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. They lived and trained endlessly for moments like this. If there was a chance to succeed, these two believed they would”
― Mark Bowden, quote from Black Hawk Down
“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, quote from Black Hawk Down
Mark Bowden
Born place: in St. Louis, MO, The United States
Born date July 17, 1951
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“শক্তির দুটো অংশ আছে — এক অংশ ব্যক্ত আর-এক অংশ অব্যক্ত, এক অংশ উদ্যোগ আর-এক অংশ বিশ্রাম, এক অংশ প্রয়োগ আর-এক অংশ সংবরণ — শক্তির এই সামঞ্জস্য যদি নষ্ট করে তাহলে সে ক্ষুব্ধ হয়ে ওঠে, কিন্তু সে ক্ষোভ মঙ্গলকর নয়।”
― Rabindranath Tagore, quote from Gora
“In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life.
Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no other against which human advancement could be tested.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.
They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.
It is impossible to understand what minds of that age—the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind—were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers—dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past. And—oh.
Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting—”
― Stephen Baxter, quote from Manifold: Time
“That was . . .” I trailed off trying to find the proper adjective.
“Long overdue?”
“Long overdue? You’re the one who got skittish when I mentioned how I felt and backed away when we almost kissed.”
“You call me on all my crap, don’t you?” He laughed throwing his head back. “That’s one of the things I love about you,” he said. His fingers
skimmed up my shoulders until they cradled my neck and my whole body tingling.”
― Lani Woodland, quote from Intrinsical
“Music is the universal language no matter the country we are born in or the color of our skin. Bring us all together”
― Justin Bieber, quote from First Step 2 Forever
“Sobre todo, no podemos permitirnos el lujo de no vivir en el presente.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Walking
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