![]() Enter these rare men, the “adventurers” who regularly read Soldier of Fortune, to fill in the gaps left by this loss. In short, in 19, it appeared to the typical ultra-conservative rightist-militarist that the Reds were winning everywhere, and the United States after Vietnam was seemingly no longer the staunch leader of a global anti-communist axis. In 1980, Soldier of Fortune‘s focus naturally shifted to new hot spots on the globe: away from Southeast Asia (as the Vietnamese regime solidified its power and routed the neighboring Khmer Rouge forces of the eventually-Thatcher-and-Reagan-backed Pol Pot in Cambodia/Kampuchea) and to brushfire actions like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe’s forces had just ejected the white colonialist leaders of Rhodesia and of course to Iran, where hostages were still being held by the revolutionary student movement of Ayatollah Khomeini. ![]() Seething beneath the surface of every on-the-spot article, every strident editor response to a reader letter, every tossed-off joke about Jimmy Carter, every desperate want ad placed by mercenaries looking for a new duty station, is the unfocused fury of a blind, impotent, idiot revanchism: a sense that an old world is fading away in favor of one unmarked by an eternal war against communism. GRASSO: It is, Kelly, absolutely, but I’m also just going to say it: as horrifying as the political implications of this 1980 issue of Soldier of Fortune are, it was also a hell of a lot of fun to read-perhaps in a “can’t look away from a car crash” kind of way. More than perhaps any other example from the time, Soldier of Fortune is symptomatic of a white masculinity crisis that has poisoned the bloodstream of America-a wound untreated leads to sepsis-for almost 50 years. The disastrous events of the last month in Southeast Asia are not only an appalling human tragedy for the peoples of Cambodia and South Vietnam, they are the most serious defeat of Western Christendom in a generation, and the final requiem of the United States as a great power. ![]() If you happen to doubt the unheralded political and social impact of the loss, here’s part of the editorial from SOF‘s first issue: Kennedy, the world’s foremost superpower, victorious against supervillains Hitler and Hirohito 30 years earlier, had been laid low by an enemy so small (and, in the case of Vietnam, so not white) that it was literally unbelievable. ![]() As in the case of the assassination of John F. The cultural injection of militant right-wing media during and especially following the Vietnam War- The Executioner novels and their countless facsimiles, the Dirty Harry franchise, the Death Wish franchise, the Rambo franchise and its Cannon Films progeny-was a direct attempt to treat and/or exploit the festering wound inflicted upon the national psyche by vastly outnumbered and outgunned “third world” communist guerillas. Brown wanted to repair the “image of the warrior,” so tarnished in the public eye after Vietnam, and, to a large extent, he did: SOF was a massive success for over a decade, selling more than 180,000 copies a month by 1988. Army veteran who had served in Vietnam as a Green Beret in Special Operations Group (SOG) from 1968 to 1969. ROBERTS: It’s certainly not a coincidence that the first issue of Soldier of Fortune: The Journal of Professional Adventurers was published in spring 1975, mere months after the Fall of Saigon.
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