The publisher, fresh off the plane from Johannesburg, breezes into the office and props his feet on a desk. "The Colonel," as he likes to be called, discusses upcoming story ideas. Should next month's cover feature a new machine gun, which the Colonel himself tested in South Africa? What's the latest battlefront news from Afghanistan and El Salvador? The executive editor is there, but not the small-arms editor or the sniping-countersniping editor. The meeting soon breaks up, but not before the Colonel warns a staffer headed for Central America, "Be careful down there."
No, this is not the office of Vanity Fair. Perhaps the only place where such a story conference could occur is at Soldier of Fortune, the macho magazine for adventurers (armchair and otherwise). The Colonel is Robert K. Brown, 52, a.k.a. "Uncle Bob," the onetime Green Beret who started the magazine in 1975 and owns it lock, stock and carbine barrel. Soldier of Fortune is a direct reflection of its creator: blunt, individualistic, muscularly anti-Communist. As Brown celebrates Soldier of Fortune's tenth anniversary this month, he makes no apology for the combative style--either his or the magazine's. Since its founding as a quarterly with a print run of 8,500, Soldier of Fortune, based in Boulder, has grown into a glossy monthly with a circulation of 166,000, as much as such dissimilar journals as Harper's and Mother Jones. "We have found a spot," says Brown. "We put our lives where our mouths are, and readers can identify with that."
Brown has certainly given new meaning to the phrase participatory journalism. The magazine has collected more than $100,000 for the Afghan rebels and dispatched its explosives-demolitions editor to instruct the mujahedin on the use of antitank mines. Brown has organized a dozen teams to train the Salvadoran army and loaned nine staffers to teach the contras fighting the Nicaraguan government. Brown still promises a $10,000 bounty, announced in 1979, for the return of Dictator Idi Amin to Uganda to stand trial. But that reward is peanuts compared with his latest offer: $1 million to any pilot who defects with an Mi-24 helicopter, the Soviet hightech chopper delivered to the Sandinistas last year.
The foreign ventures usually end up as stories in the magazine, along with reminiscences of wartime derring-do, eyewitness combat reports and ratings of the latest weapons. (Like publishers sending their books to a magazine for review, gun manufacturers ship their latest products to Soldier of Fortune editors, who test them at a nearby range.) The prose is meat-and-potatoes style, heavy on facts, strategy and rip-roaring action. The September issue includes a feature about British Gurkha troops stationed in Belize, an interview with an Israeli army sniper and a story detailing which stainless-steel handguns fare best in the rust-inducing jungles of El Salvador (answer: the Randall LeMay and the Walther PPK/S).