Near Miss With Soldier of Fortune
Mercenary Rag Needed Stringers
China In Arms BOOKSTORE and GIFT SHOP!
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3 August 2024 (Saturday)
Near Miss With Soldier of Fortune
Mercenary Rag Needed Stringers
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - When I was growing up in rural Indiana, I became a fan of Soldier of Fortune (SOF). A monthly publication started in 1975, with the fall of Saigon, that took articles from journalists who were no doubt insane.
They literally went up river, in the proud tradition of Joseph Conrad, to places that were in complete chaos via civil wars, dictatorships, or plain old fashion wars.
Bored after the Vietnam War, it was this magazine that gave hope to a country boy who came so close to the Vietnam draft, he felt cheated by God himself.
Almost 20 years later, I made a stab in the dark by sending SOF a letter of offer.
Why? Especially when most “professional” journalists would have been embarrassed to have their names in the magazine? My answer was simple: it was the only publication that gave ground reports of combat action in the darkest parts of the planet.
But for me, and this was after my first book, Spies and Provocateurs (McFarland, 1992) and writing for the legendary Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, I still felt I had nothing to lose by muddying my name for the sake of high school nostalgia.
Perhaps it was the white trash in me. Somewhere inside my psyche I was still that naive, gun-toting, and potentially violent red neck from high school.
While going through my file cabinet this week, while tossing and/or shredding old documents, I found a letter with a contract from SOF that I had completely forgotten about.
I was fortunate that I did not write for them because Jane’s Defence Weekly picked me up as the Taiwan correspondent and later I got a real job as Asia Bureau Chief for Defense News in D.C.
SOF would have been a blemish, even if I secretly loved the old rag.
There was criticism of SOF for running advertisements in the back for mercenaries to fight in third world horror shows. Many of those men were Vietnam veterans and others were just adventurers with military experience. And many of them found themselves over their heads when they arrived at their destinations.
One of the most obvious examples of naive foreign adventurers getting killed was discussed in former CIA officer John Stockwell’s memoir detailing his time in Angola as the Chief of the Angola Task Force: In Search of Enemies (1978).
SOF’s advertisements did not go unnoticed resulting in lawsuits against SOF for “recruiting” people to die in hell holes. To be honest, SOF basically stole the very same advertisers that pitched their “want ads” in the back of the elitist New York Times during the Cold War.
But still, SOF in its glory days was a professional publication that pushed the envelope for reporting from the assholes of the world.
Note the second paragraph:
Below: Wendell Minnick in 1997.
