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Playing War

Soldier of Fortune coaxed a generation of armchair mercenaries into state-sanctioned violence The Baffler

It was something out of a true-crime fever dream. According to court documents, a business partner of one Richard Braun had hired a grizzled Vietnam veteran named Michael Savage through an ad in a popular right-wing rag called Soldier of Fortunemagazine. In the classified section of America’s premier paramilitary catalog, Savagedescribed himself as a “GUN FOR HIRE: 37 year old professional mercenary desires jobs. Vietnam Veteran. Discrete [sic] and very private. Body guard, courier, and other special skills. All jobs considered.” 

“All jobs” included homicide, for the right price. Savage would then employ a triggerman, Sean Trevor Doutre, to aid him in the plot. And it was ultimately Doutre who would gun down Braun and injure his son in their Georgia driveway. Years later, in 1992, the Brauns sought to hold the magazine liable and were awarded more than $4.3 million by a judge—though founder Robert K. Brown reportedly settled for $200,000. It was this case that would be how Soldier of Fortunewas recalled in the popular imagination, even if it’s the least interesting part of the story.

At the height of its popularity, Soldier of Fortune, which billed itself as “the journal for professional adventurers,” was a staple publication of gun shows, military barracks, and Veterans of Foreign Wars haunts. By the early eighties, subscription numbers topped 190,000 despite having existed for less than a decade. Within its pages, reporters—often ex-military—wrote gonzo, first-person accounts of their mercenary expeditions into lesser-known Cold War theaters like El Salvador, Zimbabwe, and Laos. Next to these dispatches were pulpy advertisements for vintage World War II firearms, sword canes out of an Ian Fleming novel, and a mail-order crash course on how to become a private eye from the “Global School of Investigation” in Hanover, Massachusetts.

But it was their notorious classified section that would undo the only magazine in the country that could claim to offer guns for hire: be it to work under the employ of the government of Oman or disgruntled small business owners in the Atlanta suburbs.

This would prove to be the climax of SOF. As the Cold War thawed, an uneasy peace brought a decreased interest in avenging the scars of Vietnam. Subscription numbers dipped; forays into video game spin-offs and a Russian edition of the magazine were futile; even the war on terror couldn’t bring in a robust new readership. Eventually, SOF became exclusively digital and now serves more as a hub for veterans to tell old war stories than a glossy combat journal.

But look past the commercial displays of butterfly knives and SWAT-grade artillery, the machismo and the Rambo-esque resentment, the mercenary lifestyle that was both for show and for keeps. Inside the pages of SOF is a glimpse into the psyche of a right-wing subculture taking shape. Lieutenant colonel Robert K. Brown, aka. “Uncle Bob” or “The Colonel,” founded Soldier of Fortune in 1975, basing it out of the “the flamingly liberal People’s Republic of Boulder, Colorado,” as he referred to it. Brown was a larger-than-life character who balanced his steely, combative resolve with a kind of disarming gregariousness and an unfiltered frankness amplified by his stern voice. Even when dressed casually, he seemed to be wearing combat fatigues. Imagine the frothing, anxious anticommunism of General Jack D. Ripper from Dr. Strangelovemixed with the kind of gravelly, didactic frankness of Hunter S. Thompson’s Raoul Duke and you’d have a decent approximation of Brown’s profile—further exaggerated in his prose and editorial persona.

Before organizing SOF, Brown was a military man for much of his adulthood. After a few false starts, Brown would find his way to Officer Candidate School, where he excelled at pulverizing targets with a machine gun and little else. Brown remained in the Army Reserve for some time before a half-baked scheme to sell firearms to left-wing insurgents in Cuba allowed him to try his hand at journalism. “Machine guns + Cuban revolutionaries = money for Brown,” he explained in his memoir, I Am Soldier of Fortune. Sitting on his hands in the midst of revolutionary Havana, Brown found himself asked to interview Alberto Bayo for the Associated Press. Bayo was an exiled Spanish Republican general who had helped train Castro’s Twenty-Sixth of July Movement in the art of war before their invasion. Brown was fascinated by Bayo’s knowledge and tactics, so he acquired the commander’s manuscript “150 Questions for a Guerilla.”

The politics of Cuba helped drive Brown to adopt a rigid form of anticommunism. He would finally see actual combat and demonstrate his mettle against the Red Menace in Vietnam, where he served as a Green Beret in the late sixties. But after a mortar attack on the border with Cambodia ended his tour of duty and almost his life, Brown returned home never to move into the highest echelons of the service; he was too libertarian, too liquid to be wrapped up in bureaucracy. Faced with an uncertain career, he remembered the wisdom of the old Spaniard and how he had forecasted much of the warfare that had come to dominate the world’s post-colonial conflicts. With Paladin Press distributing Bayo’s work to military aficionados, Brown stumbled upon his métier as a man of literature and a man of violence, all rolled up into one profession.

The birth of Soldier of Fortune coincided with defeat of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese regime?and a nadir in its international conflict with communism. In the minds of Brown and his growing editorial staff, they had been unable to, as the magazine’s informal slogan declared, “Kill ‘Em All And Let God Sort ‘Em Out.” SOF’s editorial mission was, in a sense, to alert both service members and the general public that any kind of “Vietnam Syndrome”—a reluctance by the American citizenry to underwrite any new excursions against the Soviets—would only allow the kudzu of international communism to creep onto the continental border. Furthermore, Brown and some Vietnam veterans believed that it was the effeminate hippies, cowardly politicians, and ineffective defense apparatchiks that had lost them the war. Viewed from this angle, SOFwas also a place for aggrieved warriors to commiserate in a burgeoning subculture.

Though the magazine’s seemingly anodyne premise centered on exploring the perilous corners of the world, coverage was more based around armed reporters engaging in so-called “participatory journalism” wherein the writer partnered with a counterinsurgency waging war in the Global South. Almost always anticommunist in character, these groups were either staffed by a right-wing government, composed of ultraconservative paramilitaries, or some combination of the two. The typical SOFcover story involved a correspondent parachuting into some far-off land that would inevitably put him in the middle of a conflict between freedom fighters and Bolsheviks. Brown and other SOFreporters were often, at best, indifferent to the kind of human rights abuses of the groups they backed. Nothing made that clearer than SOF’s initial fixation of the magazine’s inaugural issue.

“How does an American become a mercenary in Africa? Why would one want to? I found the answers to both these questions and a few more when I visited Rhodesia during the spring of 1974,” Brown declares in the first SOFcover story, next to a gruesome picture of a black Rhodesian with his head shot open. The crisis in Rhodesia had become one of the new causes célèbres for rightists incensed by decolonization efforts taking place in the Global South—and the left-wing revolutionary groups that tended to fill the power vacuums left after each upheaval. “American Mercenaries in Africa” reads more like a work of agitprop than a piece of journalism, and it essentially encourages ex-military members seeking work as privateers to enlist in the Rhodesian Army—a fully detailed PO address is inscribed near the bottom of the piece for those interested. SOF and other groups like the “American Rhodesian Association” played a minor role in the conflict. Their recruits often only lasted a few weeks before returning to the States—and a handful of American recruits died in the fighting. The war ended with a political negotiation and the insurgent Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) won the country’s election in 1980. Robert Mugabe, a ZANU leader, was made head of state and would go on to rule the country, first as prime minister and later as president until 2017. Yet the Bush War, as it was called, became a radicalizing moment for the fringe right that was once again bubbling to the surface. Rhodesia was evidence for Brown and his compatriots that anti-colonial struggles were a cover for the leftism they feared. The arrival of Ronald Reagan to the White House would soon turn paramilitary strategy into a fledgling modus operandi.

In the November 1979 issue of Commentary, a neoconservative publication, future Reagan-appointed UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick laid out a path forward for the Cold War in her influential essay “Dictatorships & Double Standards.” Kirkpatrick argued that the complacent foreign policy of Jimmy Carter’s presidency had weakened American influence and allowed Soviet-backed governments to surge into power—all while undermining conservative regimes because of a preoccupation with human rights violations and racial apartheid. Kirkpatrick’s consternation would move from page to policy with Reagan’s ascension and his hardline stance on communism. A more aggressive approach to the Soviet Union and its allies would follow, leading to covert campaigns that included increased support for the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan and the Iran-Contra affair. In the realm of popular media, it was Brown and Soldier of Fortune who were shaping what became known as the Reagan Doctrine, which preached that anticommunist guerillas across the world needed as much American sponsorship as possible. As one CIA officer noted, the administration seemed to have drawn in “an awful lot ofSoldier of Fortune readers.”

This would play out in the pages of SOF, whose coverage (and logistical backing) of hard-right paramilitary groups lionized the often unsavory groups that received military assistance under Reagan. SOF’s reportage in the eighties was especially focused on areas that Reagan’s foreign policy gurus were infatuated with. Places like Afghanistan, El Salvador, and Nicaragua became mutual obsessions. In El Salvador, SOF’s journalist-cum-military advisors were embedded with pro-junta squadrons, who were waging a civil war against left-wing peasant insurgents. Fearing that the country could go the same way as Nicaragua, Brown helped organize a paramilitary team to make up for the restrictions placed on official American military personnel, who could only function in advisory roles. Furthermore, the Democratic-controlled Congress had placed conditions on aid to the famously corrupt Salvadoran government—so Brown broke out his reactionary Rolodex to help raise enough money to furnish additional arms. Because SOF’s editors were private citizens, they were free to assist their anticommunist compatriots without public oversight, even engaging in firefights in the field. Brown and his veteran compatriots primarily helped improve the regime’s beleaguered reserves by training Salvadoran soldiers in everything from counterinsurgency tactics to first aid.

Succor was also offered to the right-wing death squads in neighboring Nicaragua, who were attempting to overthrow the nascent left-wing Sandinista government. Marxist rebels had successfully removed the autocratic, pro-U.S. regime in 1979. Specifically, it was the Contras—synonymous with war crimes—who would attract the affection of American anticommunists. In 1984, as U.S. funding of the Contras was restricted, Brown bragged about delivering millions of dollars in supplies and one hundred American mercenaries to aid their operations. It was well known that the reactionary paramilitary group was engaged in a campaign of mass murder, torture, mutilation, and kidnapping across the Nicaraguan countryside. Given the circumstances, the CIA attempted to seem ambivalent about what were essentially civilian interventions. However, those existing as intermediaries between the national security apparatus and SOF, like early CIA recruit John Singlaub, insisted their informal contributions to the Cold War were fully sanctioned by top brass. Even then, as Brown would argue, wouldn’t the battle against international communism be better served by nimble, consolidated advisors that existed outside the restraints of democracy’s prying eyes? Brown asked in a 1986 issue of the magazine:

Much of the efficiency in small-unit ops finally acquired by the Contras came, not from spooks, but from private-sector trainers. Might we not all be better off if the CIA stuck to gathering intelligence and left military training to military professionals? . . . So qualifiedprivate sector aid is vital. Not to fight, but to teach, to preserve hard-won wisdom, and put it to good use. Let us not again waste talent and dedication as in Vietnam, especially in our own backyard.

Tensions between Brown and the “establishment” bled into Afghanistan, where the CIA had launched perhaps its largest and most expensive operation to date. Following the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan had become a priority in U.S. foreign policy—where the hope had been that the “graveyard of empires” would become Russia’s equivalent to the Vietnam War. Since the waning days of the Carter administration, CIA paramilitary officers had been covertly delivering weapons to the multinational coalition of Islamic fighters and Afghan locals—collectively known as the Mujahideen—engaging the Soviet military. Soldier of Fortuneimplored readers to donate to a fund that would supply the Mujahideen with a steady flow of arms, and they dedicated a cover to Hollywood superstar Sylvester Stallone and his third Rambo film—which involves the eponymous hero duking it out with Soviets in the arid Afghan mountains. Throughout the eighties, members of SOF’s editorial team, led by the chief himself, made countless excursions to Afghanistan wherein the group offered tactical support, fought alongside the Mujahideen, and attempted (with little success) to dig up the dastardly plots of the Russkies.

The Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Their failures in the region ushered in the twilight of the Soviet experiment and a victory for a far-right subculture that had spent decades fantasizing about the collapse of their ubiquitous foe. The nineties would lower the stakes for a prospective mercenary now that the grand ideological wars of our time had come to a close. The fringe right that Soldier of Fortune was entangled with would spend the rest of the decade draped in a kind of racial paranoia. However, the dawning of the millennium and the rise of new power politics created new opportunities for paramilitary violence run rampant in the conflict zones of the world.

Even with its waning cultural influence, the editorial line of Soldier of Fortune continued to be a prophetic right-wing entity. Case in point: the politicization of America’s border with Mexico. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the anti-migrant coverage of SOF reached a fever pitch. Even with the invasion of two countries in full swing, many issues published in the new millennium contained inflammatory reporting of immigration and border policy. According to the SOF line, untold numbers of “illegal aliens” were making their way through the Southern border, little more in the eyes of the reactionary right as a vehicle for sex trafficking, drugs, and terrorism. This was par for the course. During the early years, the publication ran stories with titles like “Silent Invasion: Brown Tide Threatens America” and had helped cultivate within the xenophobic right a penchant for vigilantism and ad-hoc, civilian-led border patrols. This tendency among the growing number of border vigilantes has led to an informal partnership with local police and immigration enforcers.

SOF was predictably on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul after the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. And with the imposition of transitional Iraqi and Afghan governments, so were an abundance of subcontractors: everything from IT support to diplomatic security was outsourced at the request of secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, private military companies featured prominently in SOFs recounting of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The most visible one to make a name for itself in Iraq was the firm Blackwater. Founded by Erik Prince—who now sits on SOF’s advisory board—Blackwater became synonymous with the legion of security groups and, well, soldiers of fortune that swarmed into Baghdad to feast on the bounty of contracts distributed by the interim Iraqi government. The number of enterprising combatants would soon balloon to 160,000, which was close to the number of actual American soldiers in the country. In 2007, a group of four Blackwater mercenaries would commit a massacre of seventeen civilians in Nisour Square. But PMCs in Iraq were protected from local laws and the four men would be pardoned by President Donald Trump before he left office the first time. PMCs are now an indelible component of modern warfare, raking in $80 billion annually.

Just as punk aesthetics or hippie imagery became absorbed into the mainstream zeitgeist, so, too, did the sentiments of SOF—with its belligerent anticommunism and antiestablishment bonafides—become a critical undercurrent within America’s military and police subculture—one that prioritizes indiscretion and officially sanctioned vigilantism against everyone from perceived “communists” to migrants fleeing the very countries that were destabilized with the help of SOF. From the hinterlands to the frontier, the suggestions and advocacy organized by Bob Brown and his merry band of mercenaries finally coalesced. We now live in a world in which opaque, decentralized organizations play a significant role in enforcing empire.

Yet according to the magazine’s new owner, an SOF alumni named Susan Katz Keating who bought the magazine from Brown in 2022, such connections don’t seem relevant. For her, any indiscretions by Bob Brown or his staff “were something from the past.” She wasn’t the only one who would have been skeptical of the impact of SOF on the modern reactionary coalition. In one of Brown’s few public interviews, the granddaddy of the modern mercenary movement expressed doubts about the ascendance of Donald Trump.

Or maybe they were just “playing war,” as a former SOF staff writer named Fred Reed described in a 1987 feature for Playboy. According to Reed, the whole production was a grift to milk money from those who yearned to be the next Rambo from the comfort of a La-Z-Boy. Yet the trajectory of the mercenary, from the pages of SOF to the world’s battlefields, seems too historically grounded to dismiss. And one can’t help but be troubled by the slow but steady movement by the right-wing regimes to remove all oversight of state-sanctioned violence. Be that through informal paramilitary forces or as a government contractor, the goal remains the same: replace traditional state functions with a new, unaccountable network of anticommunist vigilantes and for-profit “freedom fighters.”

And when we look at the future that could be created, Erik Prince might have summed it up best. In a recent interview with the fascist influencer Bronze Age Pervert, Prince implored the American military to respond to the success of Russia’s mercenary army, the Wagner Group, in providing security to African countries. His solution was to let mercenaries take center stage. “Look, there’s all kinds of hand wringing and idiot shrugging in the Pentagon and Washington halls of power about what to do about Wagner,” Prince said. “It’s very simple: out-compete them.”