Anyone here been raped & speaks English? Quotes

“[...] it's something of a miracle that a Watergate scandal ever gets exposed, and it's probably fair to surmise that had the Nixon administration not adopted a systematic confrontation attitude toward the media, thereby goading the press in turn into fighting back, the chances were that it would have been buried forever. Indeed, the United States was just about the only country in the world where such an investigation could hope to succeed. In Britain the security-blanket "D" notice, for bidding any press mention, would have effectively stopped any reporting on the subject. As for France, the methods used in Washington by Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein would, very probably, have caused them, under French laws, to end up in jail.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“The story was that after a series of crashes, which had left it with only one serviceable plane, a DC-3, the Nepalese government had asked the United Nations for technical assistance in the form of a multiskilled pilot instructor, master mechanic, accountant, traffic manager, and meteorological expert rolled into one. This rara a vis had been found and sent out to Nepal, where he worked hard for several months. When the time finally came for him to leave, he left by jeep.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“But when I think of the horrors and hazards of TV crews, I most vividly remember a story, admittedly told me at second hand, but true, of the British crew in Nigeria filming there shortly after the collapse of the Biafra secessionists. A wave of robberies was being repressed by the government in the most brutal way possible-by capital punishment-and the crew was filming an execution. The unfortunate victim, convicted of some particularly modest robbery, had been tied to a tree and blindfold ed. A priest had administered last rites. An army squad, its rifles loaded, took aim. At this point the proceedings were interrupted by the sound engineer. "Stop everything, please," he said. uThere's something wrong with the set."

The execution squad commander courteously obeyed; the troops grounded arms until the tinkering with the recording machine was completed. "Now let's have a test," the sound engineer said, completely oblivious of his surroundings. "Okay, you can go ahead now.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“LBJ was on his way to one of the largest American bases and was bowling along an asphalt road, in an air-conditioned black Cadillac, one of at least twenty heavily guarded limousines. Suddenly the President spotted a little old Vietnamese woman trotting by the side of the road. He turned to Ambassador Bunker and said, "Does this little old lady know that the USA built this mighty fine road she's walking on?" The answer was noncommittal, but LBJ was in one of his manic Texas moods. The President ordered the whole convoy to come to a stop. He said, "Someone go over and ask her who built this road?" The command was transmitted from ambassador to general to aide to colonel to a junior officer interpreter, who went up to the terrified old lady and said, "Who built this road? The President of the United States wants to know."

The little old lady went down on her knees, sobbing, rolling in the dust, and saying over and over again, "I don't know. I didn't do it. I didn't have anything to do with the road.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“I invariably advised newcomers to soak in as many impressions of Vietnam as they could within the shortest possible period, for after that, I claimed, we all gradually lost our sense of the absurd. Partly this blindness was a consequence of the arrogance of power, of manipulating the extraordinary complex but unsuitable war machine brought to bear in Vietnam and unconsciously shelving unpalatable facts. It also stemmed from a racist attitude toward the Vietnamese, who, in official army jargon, were not people, but only OHBs or "Oriental Human Beings.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“One member of a U.S. helicopter crew, a Hawaiian, marooned on a besieged AR VN fire base in Laos for several days after his own helicopter had crashed, won a Silver Star for helping the AR VN organize their own defense. The true story of his bravery was a little more complicated. One of the reasons he remained so long on the besieged firebase was that he looked too much like a Vietnamese. A particularly daring helicopter pilot ran the gauntlet of enemy fire to land on the firebase and remove the survivors of the first crashed U.S. helicopter. But when our Hawaiian hero tried to scramble aboard, a crew member from the rescuing helicopter hit him right between the eyes, toppling him to the ground, and shouted, "No, not you, you fucking gook.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Now correspondents were coming into Saigon from the outside, traveling on R and R planes. Among them was Oriana Fallaci. She later wrote a book of reminiscences about her Tet experiences which I found somewhat baffling. According to Oriana, she had had to talk panic-stricken U.S. sergeants into providing her with transport to get to the city. The craven U.S. troops at Tan Son Nhut airport had apparently had to be galvanized into action by this frail but intrepid reporter. "Are you a man or a mouse?" she asked them.

[...]

Maybe Oriana Fallaci's readers were conditioned to see every manifestation of their heroic girl reporter in cliche, comic-strip terms. Correspondents have a technical term for this kind of reporting. It comes under the generic term hyping. Oriana Fallaci, and a few others, were masters of this peculiar art form, which invariably requires an element of factual truth to which the hype is convincingly added. Thus, Oriana Fallaci undoubtedly arrived in Saigon in the middle of Tet, and yes, she did get to Hue in the middle of the fighting with a number of other reporters. But no sooner did she reach the outskirts of Hue than she had to be put back on the first truck convoy, with a bad case of nerves, by Philip Jones-Griffiths, the Magnum photographer. This proved no bar to her subsequent personal account of the fighting, which—as in the case of the Dak To assault—drew liberally on other reporters' stories.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Several reporters were already in the area, and from the large numbers of dead and wounded landed on the base it was clear that we were witnessing, at second hand, a major disaster. I shared a tent with Oriana Fallaci, the well-known Italian columnist and interviewer, and her photographer, a handsome Italian, who kept saying, "I am not going· on the hill." Neither, to my knowledge, did Oriana Fallaci get there until the battle was over, though I later came across her description of the Hill 875 fighting which—to say the least—failed to make this clear.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“A young Puerto Rican soldier, both legs shattered, continued manning a machine gun to cover the withdrawal of his platoon to a better defensive perimeter, until he was killed. The posthumous award of a Congressional Medal of Honor—though rumored in his division—never materalized: a good example of the gearing of such awards, for morale and propaganda purposes, to victories rather than stalemate encounters and defeats.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Some of the Vietnamese bar girls were only a few years removed from childhood and a village upbringing. Many spent their not-inconsiderable gains on futile gadgets, and on eye and nose jobs; it was one of the grotesque paradoxes of Vietnam that a country so lacking in rural doctors had a plethora of plastic surgeons in Saigon itself.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“I came across a GI openly smoking heroin through a rifle barrel. I decided on an on-the-spot inquiry.
"How do you feel?" I began somewhat cautiously.
"Terrible, I can't eat, I can't sleep, and I haven't had a shit for a week."
"Then why do you do it?" I asked.
The soldier looked around us, at the expanse of red laterite dust covering everything, at the helicopters taking off and landing, and said, "I do it to feel normal.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Rumor had it that the South Vietnamese troops were purveyers of heroin, and I wandered into the South Vietnamese unit's perimeter and, in French, asked a sergeant for some. He summoned another soldier, and soon I had in my hand a plastic envelope with minute quantities of white powder in it. "C'est de la bonne qualité, au moins?" I asked. And to try to show some expertise, I added, "Pas trop de lactose?"—the powdered milk with which heroin was habitually cut. The sergeant grinned, showing a formidable expanse of gold teeth. "Lactose cher, héroïne pas cher," he said.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Opium, the only drug consumed on a large scale by the Vietnamese themselves, was never a favorite with the Gls, because it required a relatively complicated apparatus: pipes, a lamp, and time to coax the opium into a hot, bubbling, gluey pellet. But many reporters, especially the French contingent, smoked opium regularly, in a variety of opium dens whose addresses were passed on from one visiting batch of reporters to the next.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“The biggest change in the Army's behavior from 1967 to 197 1 centered on drugs. From the start of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Gls had been enthusiastic consumers of hashish, and Vietnamese had soon found that the sale of local marijuana was a rewarding occupation. By 1967 a pall of fragrant marijuana fumes hung like an invisible cloud over practically every American firebase and bunker in South Vietnam, with nearly all officers and NCOs turning a blind eye.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“One had only to sun oneself around the pool of Saigon's Cercle Sportif or fly from Saigon to Paris in an Air France plane packed with the student sons of affluent Vietnamese families, able to avoid the draft (Air France ran a Friday-night special which made a stopover in· Nice, where many rich Vietnamese had second homes), to realize that South Vietnamese society was corrupt, class-ridden, and profoundly unjust. But in similar circumstances, how would their American counterparts have reacted? It's arguable that it was only when the sons of affluent American families, hitherto protected by generous deferment terms, became liable for the draft-and Vietnam-that the U.S. Establishment's hostility to the war became irrevocable. For most of my own involvement in the war, fighting infantry and marine units were 50 percent black, Chicano, or Puerto Rican—[...].”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“[...], in the darkest days of the Sukarno maladministration, Indonesian museum curators had, some of them, sold off part of their surplus stock of treasures to private collectors, not necessarily for personal gain but to pay their staffs and repair rotting museum buildings-and I never came across an enthusiastic Western collector of Chinese porcelain who refused such deals.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“[...] the account written by Andre Malraux, in his Antimemoires, of his conversation with Mao the following year was thought, by many French diplomats and experienced China watchers, to contain more Malraux than Mao.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“I remember the disgust felt by William Porter, then U.S. consul general in Algiers, at a cold-bloo4ed killing of Algerian civilians inside the U.S. consulate compound. Three Algerians had fled inside the consulate to avoid an OAS killer commando. But the OAS car simply swung into the consulate courtyard, mowed down the unfortunate Algerians on the consulate lawn, and made a getaway. The French Anny conscripts on the guard outside the consulate building failed to fire a single shot or do anything to stop the killers.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Algerian and French gamblers, side by side, seemed completely unaware of the carnage which was a daily feature of their lives beyond the hotel walls. Some, I'm convinced, came to gamble small sums simply to find a relatively secure haven, for never once was the Aletti Hotel the target of OAS violence, after the generals' putsch, and there was no doubt in my mind that the casino operated with the tacit consent of OAS leaders, perhaps as a convenient means of raising revenue.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“OAS killer teams made a specialty of gunning down Algerian civilians, especially veiled women on their way to work as domestic servants. A French publisher who later read the manuscript of one minor OAS leader's autobiography in the late sixties described it to me as "his callous account of how he butchered a series of Algerian cleaning ladies.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Some of the OAS and counter-OAS terrorism was in fact a straight-forward settling of accounts between rival Corsican personalities. One murder of a Corsican major (and head of an anti-OAS squad in Algiers itself) had little to do with ideology but was the culmination of a longstanding rivalry between different groups of Corsican pimps, all intent on controlling high-class prostitution in Algiers.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“Exhausted and covered in dust and dirt, the Tunisian soldiers stood, dazed but defiant, and the French paratroopers, furious at the casualties the Tunisians had inflicted on their unit during the siege, angrily muttered something about lining them up against a wall and shooting them.

We reporters overheard these remarks. To the everlasting credit of our number, an Italian journalist, whom I had never seen before and have never seen since, quietly walked over to where the Tunisians were standing and stood, hand on hip, in front of them. Dramatically, but without saying a word, he made the point that if the paras executed the Tunisians, they would have to shoot him, too. It was one of the bravest acts I have ever witnessed, all the more so since there was no gallery to play to. An officer arrived, calmed his men down, and the Tunisians were marched away into captivity.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“In what was meant to be a touching example of interracial goodwill, Algerian women joined the predominantly European crowd on the square, but their credibility was somewhat strained by my discovery that some of them were from the Algiers Casbah's many maisons de tolerance. Others were in regimented squads with carefully prepared "integration" banners. Indeed, lurking behind almost every women's contingent was a French "special affairs" army officer, recognizable by his pale-blue kepi.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“The Algerian government's reactions to the book went far beyond my apprehensions. A few months later, in 1975, I took a plane to Algiers to report for Newsweek on Algeria's bid for leadership of the Arab world and was held at the airport, made to remain in the transit lounge, and put on the first plane out of the country. In vain I begged to know the reason for such treatment. I had been blacklisted, I later found out, because of my book review.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“For all foreign correspondents know of the hoary cliché situation, involving their arrival in some Arab country, to the accompaniment of the police inspector's greeting: "Welcome. Welcome to my country. Why do you tell untrue facts about my country? You will please wait at airport. Welcome.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“During the course of the Algerian War (1954-62), I had probably done more than most reporters to try to explain why the Algerian National Liberation Front had been compelled to engage in a cruel struggle for independence, using terrorism as a weapon. I was on one occasion threatened with expulsion from France, for "pro-FLN bias," and a cover story I had written for Time in 1961 on the counterterrorist French OAS was one of the few U.S. magazine issues seized by the government of General de Gaulle, which eventually allowed it to be distributed in France, but with a blacked-out cover where ex-General Raoul Salan's picture had been (...).”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“On my frequent postindependence assignments to Algeria, I have been constantly reminded of the brutality and the merciless quality of the independence struggle. Here, at a street corner, I remember watching a young Algerian, blown to pieces by his own bomb, lie dying, half hidden underneath a car, being surveyed with unmistakable glee by an elderly French lady of obvious means. She bent and scooped up a severed finger, which she slipped into her handbag as a souvenir.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“There we were, in bed," said the Muhammad Ali man, "and a butterfly came into the room and landed on the bed. And what do you think happened? She ate the fucking butterfly!”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“FLN terrorists, masquerading as municipal workers, filled the bases of seven streetlamps in a central Algiers street with explosives, timed to explode at peak traffic hour. They went off as planned, and the carnage was spectacular. The French reaction was predictable. The day the French victims were buried, Frenchmen fanned out into the streets, killing and beating senseless any Moslems who happened to be in the vicinity of the funeral procession. The sight of Moslems being beaten to death with meat hooks taken from nearby butchers' shops apparently gave the mob some satisfaction, and there was precious little interference from either French troops or police, though individual French officers did attempt, quite ineffectively, to get them to stop.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?

“If the United States had its My Lai in Vietnam which, more than anything else perhaps, brought home the unacceptable, dehumanizing nature of the Vietnam War, France had dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of My Lais in Algeria. The difference was that few French soldiers came forward to denounce their comrades, and the press, under few restraints in Vietnam, was almost completely hamstrung in its efforts to report the war from the field ·during the Algerian War.”
― Edward Samuel Behr, Anyone here been raped & speaks English?