It seems Gen. Sherman had it all wrong. War isn’t hell. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.
That’s more or less the guiding philosophy of former Green Beret officer (also former armored car guard, health studio instructor, free-lance photo journalist, ditch-digger, cowboy, trail crew chief, logger and hard-rock miner) Robert K. Brown, best known now as the editor and publisher of a unique and uniquely American publication called Soldier of Fortune, “the magazine of professional adventurers.”
For Brown, who retired from the U.S. Army reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel, the last 20 years of civil strife, border clashes, insurgencies, counter-insurgencies, racial and religious conflicts, genocide and assorted other kinds of military mayhem that have broken out all over the world have been, well, a blast.
In some places, after all, you get to ride elephants. In others, you get to fire rockets at Russian forts, and get your picture taken. More to the point, these events have provided the principal editorial fodder for the colorful (some say “grotesque”) Boulder, Colo.-based periodical Brown and some of his fellow Vietnam veterans created two decades ago, just as that lost war was ending. Hence such articles over the years as “Double Cross in the Congo,” “Combat in Chalatenango,” “The Evil Empire Eyes the Big Enchilada,” “Kabul’s Urban Guerrillas” and “SOF Inside Afghanistan: Staffers Join Siege of Russian Fort.”
Brown concluded his seven years of active duty with the army in 1970, but, even now at 63, he’s still a military guy. On the phone, he says “stand by” instead of “please, hold,” and “out” instead of “good-bye.” When he says “merc,” he’s not talking about a car but a “mercenary.” He can’t remember how many guns he owns, but is quick to tell you none of them are automatic.
“If you collect automatic weapons,” he said, “you’re gonna get federal agents.”
He offered that bit of wisdom in an interview last week during one of the regular trips he makes to Washington as a director of the National Rifle Association.
I first encountered Brown 28 years ago in Florida, when he was between active-duty stints in the Army and fooling around with anti-Castro groups. A Christmas card came from Brown a few years later. Sent from Vietnam, it showed him in his Green Beret uniform, cradling an M-16 rifle. The Christmas message was, “Today Uncle Ho, Tomorrow Uncle Fidel.” He signed it, “Love, Bob.”
As he says of Soldier of Fortune, “we don’t do fashion and entertainment.”
Not only have surveys found its readership to be “ninety-nine point something percent male,” it’s a publication for people who don’t eat quiche, but fantasize over guns and gore the way male readers of Playboy and Penthouse presumably do the female anatomy. It’s a magazine to make a Tom Clancy seem a wimpy techno nerd. What other periodical lists on its masthead an “explosives/demolition editor,” an “unconventional operations” editor and a “gun rights” editor? What other carries the names of editors killed in action?
Needless to say, with its relish of armed conflict, its weapons-toting brand of “participatory journalism” in world trouble spots and “gun nut” philosophy, Soldier of Fortune long ago drove political liberals up the wall and has kept them there.
“They even had my face on a bull’s eye,” said longtime Brown nemesis Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who once had the magazine investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly recruiting for the Rhodesian army. “Isn’t that nice?”
Brown, who beat that rap, calls her “Peppermint Patty.”
“One of my greatest pleasures in life,” said Brown, who grew up in Highland, Ind., and played war games in the cornfields there as a kid in the 1940s, “is to tweak not only the Establishment, but the liberals. I like to cause them as much heartburn as I can.” Nevertheless, the Oklahoma City bombing and the “militia mentality” that fostered it have pushed Brown and Soldier of Fortune into something resembling the mainstream.
Moving away from the militias
“Those militia people have leapfrogged over Soldier of Fortune to their own extreme, far-out position,” said Schroeder. “They have their own newsletters that go far beyond Soldier of Fortune.”
Of course, Timothy McVeigh, the ex-soldier arrested and charged with the Oklahoma City massacre, was a Soldier of Fortune reader–for a time. Brown isn’t exactly thrilled about that.
“He was a subscriber for a year,” said Brown. “For whatever reason, he didn’t renew and we pulled his name off our list.”
Though it hasn’t retreated from its “right to bear arms” credo, Brown’s magazine is now amazing many by taking on the militia movement with the same combative brio it used to expend upon Schroeder and peace groups.
In columns and articles, the magazine now attacks domestic terrorists as enemies of liberty (and of law-abiding gun owners). In its forthcoming August issue, SOF devotes two long articles to debunking two widespread myths being promulgated by militia-type “conspiracy theorists.”
One is that a fleet of “black helicopters” has been readied for use by a “mysterious Multi Jurisdictional Task Force (MJFT), part of the New World Order, manned by UN stormtroopers or American soldiers under U.N. command and organized to hunt down good patriots bearing arms.”
The other is that a train of flat-bed cars carrying UN tanks and armored cars has been sighted near Salt Lake City.
“We explore all these allegations,” Brown said, “prove it’s all fantasy and b.s. But with a lot of these people, if you tell them definite facts that do not meet their agenda, they simply discount it. They simply will not give you the time of day. They don’t want to respond to anything that is going to adversely impact on their preconceived biases and prejudices.”
Brown’s term for the Spotlight, a newspaper published by the ultra-ultra right wing Liberty Lobby and a favorite of militia paranoids, is “dreadful.” In his column “Command Guidance,” Brown warns liberals that the government may seize upon the domestic terrorism issue to go after protest groups of every ideological stripe, including the African National Congress, Greenpeace, Act Up and the Black Muslims.
“The measure the White House is attempting to pass in order to attack the Right,” Brown wrote, “can just as easily be used to savage the Left.”
But for Brown, life isn’t all bad these days. He just got married to his longtime girlfriend, Mary. And this summer, he’s going on another trip to Bosnia, to help the Croatians fight the Serbs.
“I try to get to a Third World country twice a year,” he said.
Not counting Vietnam, where he served as a Special Forces captain near the Cambodian border, Brown’s nearly 40 years of adventuring have taken him to a whole atlas full of countries, including Cuba, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, Namibia, Afghanistan, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Lebanon, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Colombia and Peru. He’s also been to the Persian Gulf area, which he calls “the biggest kitty litter box in the world.”
He tried to cover the recent war there the way SOF does most conflicts, but, like most of the conventional journalists assigned to the story, he was confined to a headquarters briefing compound in Saudi Arabia. He hated that, and most of the conventional journalists, too, calling them “dorks and buffoons.”
The road to war
But Brown’s world is not one of complete conflict; he does have friends.
One of them is John Donovan of Danvers, Ill., who said, “I love Bob. He’s one of the great human beings of all time.”
Donovan was also a Green Beret captain in Vietnam and was Brown’s jumpmaster at parachute school in Ft. Benning, Ga. He’s Soldier of Fortune’s explosives/demolitions editor and runs Donovan Demolitions, a company that blows up buildings and bridges and “is the largest user of plastic explosives in the United States outside of the government.”
Brown turned up for the interview at a suburban Virginia hotel, hard by Arlington National Cemetery and the Iwo Jima monument, in the company of G. Gordon Liddy, the former CIA operative and convicted Watergate felon, who had interviewed him for his radio talk show.
Apparently impressed, Liddy gave Brown a salute in the hotel lobby before departing. He may not have known that, at the moment, Brown is a registered Democrat. He voted in that party’s primary last year to help a friend who was running for the Colorado legislature. Neither would Liddy have known that Brown first got his soldier of fortune juices flowing as a pro-Castro student activist hanging out in Chicago’s College of Complexes beatnik era coffee joint in 1957.
He went over to Cuba in the summer of 1958, stayed at a hotel in Havana, and let it be known he wanted to go into the hills and meet Castro. When no one came to take him there, he went back to the U.S.
“I was a neophyte young American, 26 years old,” he explained. “Had I waited, I probably would have gotten back in the hills with Castro, and knowing my mentality, I would have picked up a gun and gone with him. Keep in mind the time. Battista was a bad guy. Castro himself seemed to be a liberal social democrat working to overthrow this vicious evil dictator.”
Brown was born in Monroe, Mich., in 1932, the son of Florence, a schoolteacher, and Earl Brown, a World War I Navy vet turned Inland Steel mill superintendent. From age 7 on, Brown lived in Highland, Ind. His father was not a hunter and Brown had no special interest in guns or military adventuring. But he did enjoy causing trouble.
After two years at Michigan State University, “the dean of men and I decided I should leave.” He switched to the University of Colorado at Boulder and managed to acquire a bachelor’s degree in history in 1954.
“Given my state of immaturity, it was a mistake to have gone into college right out of high school,” he said.
Rather than be drafted, he enlisted in the army and won acceptance in officers candidate school, where he “scraped through . . . excelling in two areas. I had the largest number of demerits and I had the highest score on the machine gun range.”
After leaving active duty in 1957, he went back to the University of Colorado to work on a master’s degree in political science, which took him until 1974 to acquire. In the meantime, he began adding all those odd jobs to his resume, in between adventures, a return to the army and assorted mischief.
In Miami, he located a CIA front called Caribbean Marketing and Research, which he figured out from going through its garbage was being used to debrief Cuban refugees about secrets they knew. He then tipped off an FBI agent he knew about the front’s security breach (the garbage), and got an immediate response.
“They stopped putting out garbage,” he said. “I love to with the government.”
Broke, he borrowed $400 and started an outfit called Panther Publications, selling first an English translation of a Castro guerrilla field manual written by a Spanish Civil War veteran through the mail, and then other how-to military manuals.
With the U.S.’ involvement in the Vietnam War under way, he tried to get back into the army, but was at first rejected for being too old for his rank of captain. In 1967, the rules were changed to meet the need for field officers, and he was recalled to active duty.
He served for a time in the Special Forces, was wounded in an ambush by a mortar round that permanently scarred his face and impaired his hearing, got tossed out of Special Forces, pulled strings to get assigned to intelligence work and ended his active duty as commander of a basic training company at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo.
The home front
Though Brown has been in a lot of action as a “journalist” and unofficial adviser, the only time he knows for certain he shot someone was in Vietnam, when he was transporting a prisoner of war.
The man bolted from Brown’s Jeep, and Brown began firing at him. Finding a trail of blood, he followed it to a village when he found the fugitive had been captured by South Vietnamese troops. He had shot the man through the sole of the foot while he was running.
Returning to Boulder as a civilian, Brown worked at keeping Panther Publications (renamed Paladin Press) afloat and did more odd jobs. In 1974, nearly desperate, he applied to the government of Oman, which was recruiting mercenaries.
They sent him a 40-page information packet about service in their military. Brown decided not to enlist, but took out ads offering to sell others the information about Oman mercenary duty. The large and varied response he got, from people in all walks and stages of life, convinced him that a publication about mercenaries might have a future.
“I was 42 years old, virtually unemployable and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life,” Brown said.
“Bob had done everything,” said Donovan. “He had a master’s degree. He was a rodeo rider and a ditch digger and this was his last hurrah. He felt that this had to fly for him or he’d be back digging ditches. It did fly. It really came out at the ideal time. It was orientated to the Vietnam era. There was nothing, no periodical in the country, addressing that particular group of people. And then it picked up its following, and we were able to branch out from that. I’ve been with Brown from Africa to Bosnia.”
The magazine has 23,000 subscribers, newsstand sales of between 65,000 and 80,000 and an estimated readership of 290,000 to 300,000 a month.
Advertisements range from realistic-looking water pistols to very real firearms and daggers to lots of fatigue uniforms and camouflage gear to mail-order brides from Russia and the Orient.
“Between 11 and 12 percent of our readers are law enforcement,” Brown said. “The rest cover the whole gamut of society, from dishwashers to bank presidents, taxicab drivers to executives, privates to colonels.
“Sure, we attract some Walter Mitty types, but it depends on how you define the term. A Vietnam veteran who’s in his late 40s now, got a family, got a job, he’s not going to pick up a gun and go to some dreadful dismal Third World country and do dorky things.”
Using press credentials issued by host governments or military organizations, Brown concedes that he and his staff members often get themselves into situations in foreign countries “where we might be called upon to defend ourselves,” but insists they follow U.S. law against foreign military activities “carefully” and that he and his staff have never had their passports revoked.
Asked what he might say to a “conventional journalist” who objected to his sporting weapons while working as a correspondent, Brown said, “I’d tell him to go (expletive) himself.”
