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“And in that vast emptiness, two heads bobbed above the surface without a sound, just one hundred feet from them.”
― Michael Parker, The Devil's Trinity

“As well, I want our special force commandos to silently slip into Cat Bi and Gia Lam airfields and destroy the aircraft stationed there. That will deal the French forces at Dien Bien Phu a stunning blow!�� (Giap, 1990)”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume One

“‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“This faulty light fitting at the front door with the dangerously flickering bulb looks rather festive. Who says I don't do Christmas?”
― R.D. Ronald

“As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas.
This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training.
So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems.
The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam.
Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists.
The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done.
The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s.
On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.”
― Michael G. Kramer, A Gracious Enemy

“The imbalance of power in the employee-employer relationship puts the onus on leaders to address fairness at work”
― Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction

“Marco’s heart swelled with pride at his culture. Maybe it was the coquito, but his eyes teared at this beautiful Reyes celebration, heavenly food, lush green mountains, clean air, and his family’s delighted faces. He felt sorry for the stiff people at the Casino de Puerto Rico, pretending to be jíbaros and eating food half as delicious as this. Actually, no. He didn’t feel sorry for them. It was precisely what they deserved.”
― Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage

“Tenderly he reached for her and lightly took her hand, lifted it, and touched it to his lips.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Steel Blood

“With the conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, non-assertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.”
― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage [Adaptation]

“المرء لا يستطيع عد الأقمار المشعة على سقوفها ،،
أو الألف شمس المشرقة التي تختبئ خلف جدرانها !!”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“I have never lied in these journals, although on occasion, I wanted to. I have, however, hidden certain truths, omitted to mention important details, and for this, I am truly sorry.”
― Jana Petken, The Guardian of Secrets

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants�� found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks�� in our species�� history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died�� (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity

“He felt he was a pin in the hinge of power. Saw the commonplaces of life as newspaper headlines. Man Walks Across Parking Lot at Moderate Pace. Women Talk of Rain. Phone Rings in Empty Room.”
― Annie Proulx

“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.”
― George Eliot