The most amazing thing came onto my TV screen very, very, very late the other night.
Reality.
More amazingly, this dose of truth was administered in the form of a camo-and-cartridge-belt, gung-ho-action/adventure-bang-bang show called “Soldier of Fortune,” which is all about a band of ex-military mercenaries being hired on the QT by a secret U.S. government agency to kill Iraqi thugs, Latin American druggies, Serbian thugs, South African thugs and assorted other baddies, and to carry out secret, high-risk missions that regular armed services can’t, won’t, musn’t or daren’t.
Many of you, especially you ex-Army types like me, are probably saying, “Oh, piffle.”
Television today is a fantasy land where all of the action characters are either exhibitionist cops or gun-crazed lawyers. David Caruso is even back on the air playing an actual New York district attorney — a politician! — who runs around blasting baddies with a 9 mm Glock automatic.
We all know that the only shots those guys get near in real life are the ones that come with pitchers of beer.
The one military adventure show you do find on the tube, “JAG” (Tuesday at 7 p.m. on WBBM-Ch.2), is about Navy lawyers. Real military lawyers, of course, spend their time prosecuting enlisted men for dropping valuable mess-hall forks into electric potato peelers.
“JAG” lawyers, who of course include a dishy blond, also run around blasting baddies with 9 mm automatics. These baddies in the past have included “rogue U.S. Army regiments.” I’m waiting for “JAG” to take on the Air Force aliens-from-outer-space unit at Roswell, N.M. (Or have they already?)
“Soldier of Fortune,” however, in a remarkable departure for Hollywood, comes close to the real thing. My authority for that is none other than former Vietnam War Green Beret Lt. Col. Robert Brown, publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine.
Other than selling the producer the rights to the name, Brown has no connection with the show but swears by it.
“They got the nomenclature right and everything,” said Brown, who always sprinkles his conversations with words like “zulu” and “nine.”
The show, which airs in Chicago at 12:30 a.m. Saturdays on WLS-Ch. 7, does have a dishy brunette, played by Melinda Clarke, star of the 1996 movie epic “Killer Tongue.” She runs around in a tight, olive-drab halter top and is “stacked and packed,” as Soldier of Fortune would put it. But the character, a tough-as-nails ex-CIA operative, is entirely plausible.
Having interviewed the two CIA women who tracked down turncoat spy Aldrich Ames, and having watched a steely female CIA analyst confront accused terrorist and killer Mir Aimal Kasi last week in open court, I’d say Clarke’s character may be a little too soft.
The rest of the cast, including star Brad Johnson, play characters with names like Brad Johnson, ex-military types who got in trouble in one way or another and find this a neater and more honorable way to make a living than, say, becoming lobbyists for defense contractors.
Unlike other TV action heroes, they do dumb things and make mistakes. Things go wrong, just as they did in every single Army unit I was ever in.
What’s really neat is that their headquarters is a seedy hotel in Venice Beach, Calif. If you’ve ever wandered among the weirdos of this seaside nut colony, you know that demolition specialists who like to run around in sweaty undershirts killing people are not exactly atypical.
And the idea of their undertaking “Mission Impossible”-type assignments for the U.S. government on a free-lance basis is the most realistic thing of all.
Our government actually does employ such free-lance organizations — as does the British government. Take note please of the following list of equipment (obtained through the Center for Defense Information, a D.C. think-tank) that is owned and operated by just one of these outfits:
“Armored personnel carriers equipped with 30 mm cannons, BTR 50 amphibious armored personnel carriers, four-barrel 7.62 mm and O-A-622 machine guns, Land Rovers mounted with anti-aircraft guns and artillery, radio intercept systems, Soviet Mi-24 helicopter gunships, Mi-17 helicopter gunships equipped with 4-barreled Gatling guns and 30 mm automatic grenade launcher, Boeing 727 transport planes, Soviet MiG-23 jet fighter bombers, Swiss Pilatus training planes converted to fire air-to-ground rockets, Soviet Mi-8 helicopters, Mi-17 transport helicopters, SNEB rocket pods and 68 mm 40 A rockets.”
No wonder the show’s on so late at night.
The government wants to keep it a secret.
