“He hasn’t always taken the best care of himself, so somebody has to look after him,” the 77-year-old tells me.
Known as “Bac si” to his buddies (which means “doctor” in Vietnamese), the soft-spoken Bernard still keeps a close eye on the colonel’s health. Perhaps the oldest pal in the group is Robert Bernard, the Army medic who saved Brown’s life back in 1969 when he was seriously wounded in a mortar attack in the central high- lands of Vietnam. His colorful personality commands attention and brings out a mixture of awe, respect, and genuine affection among the gang of pretty gruff guys. While many of them have also known each other for years, the linchpin of the get-together is undeniably the colonel-often referred to as RKB or Maximus by friends. Some of them have been with me in the shit, others I know be- cause they have written for us, and then there are guys I’ve met in fighting for gun rights,” he says. “The vast majority of the people I have been close to have had some involvement, in one way or another, with the magazine.
Some he has known since his days in Special Forces in Vietnam, and others he has met on a variety of battlefields along the way. Several members of his entourage have traveled hundreds, even thousands of miles to join the colonel for the weekend. Brown says the showcase demanded more manpower than his downsized magazine could staff, so he pulled the plug a few years back in favor of just spending time with his close friends. The small weekend gathering at Whittington has effectively replaced the annual Soldier of Fortune conventions Brown held for two decades that used to draw hundreds of camouflage-clad war buffs to the desert for displays of military firepower, weapons, tactical training, and apparently quite a lot of drinking. In many cases, its writers really were mercenaries, and six Soldier of Fortune correspondents have been killed in action over the years, in places like Angola, Nicaragua, Burma (now Myanmar), and Sierra Leone (where legend has it that the remains of reporter Robert C. “We would create the story, gin up a lot of action, and then write about it for the glistening pages of our bad-boy magazine,” is how he de- scribed it in his 2013 memoir, I Am Soldier of Fortune: Dancing with Devils. Its reporters have operated unlike most, carrying guns along with their pens and cameras, writing first-person accounts from battlefields around the world in what Brown likes to call “hardcore participatory journalism.”
#SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 1 DRAGON FIRE PROFESSIONAL#
“You know what they say about the golden years? It’s bullshit.”ĭubbed “the Journal of Professional Adventurers,” Soldier of Fortune has, since 1975, chronicled a shifting, no-holds-barred world of black ops and mercenaries fighting Communism and terrorism. I come down here to cleanse my soul,” Brown tells me, the words coming out of his mouth in bursts like machine-gun fire. “Boulder is 25 square miles of hippy-dippy bullshit surrounded by reality. flag and a bald eagle, Brown continues to work full-time
With a pistol strapped to his belt whose custom grip is emblazoned with a U.S. But he is not a man to be messed with. By his count, he has seen action in more than a dozen conflicts around the world and been shot at more times than he can remember. “Any other comments, gentlemen?” Brown says.Īt 83 years old, the colonel seems like a feisty grandfather at first, wearing Ambervision glasses, temporary braces on both knees, white socks pulled halfway up his calves, and hearing aids from years of being around loud, high-powered weaponry.
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