He says he is still a colonel in the Army reserve. Army between 19 and between 19, when he said he served in Vietnam as an intelligence officer commanding 12 GIs in charge of 570 Vietnamese soldiers. He said his military experience has been limited to two stints in the U.S. Last year Brown was outmaneuvered on the Angolan mercenary effort by recruiter Dave Bufkin.īrown laughingly admitted he has never been involved in a "big-time" mercenary exploit, the type his magazine advertises and writes about. In the 1960s, Brown acknowledged, he almost hooked up with a plot to bomb the palace of Haitian President "Papa Doc" Duvalier and in the early 1970s he said he negotiated with the sister of an American jailed in Mexico over an escape plan, but another mercenary group got the deal. He was never able to contact Castro, however. Brown said that as a college student he belonged to a group that opposed the old Cuban dictatorship. In his first escapade in the late 1950s, Brown said he made three trips to Cuba to try to contact Fidel Castro, then a guerrilla leader. The sampling also revealed that 43 per cent earn more than $15,000 a year, and that 54 per cent are college graduates.īy Brown's own admission, however, he peddles information on a field in which he has limited experience. In a recent interview with the Village Voice, Brown elaborated: "Thanks to Vietnam, the largest number of unemployed combat-trained soldiers in the world is in the United States today.That's where I foresee most of the new mercenaries coming from."įigures purportedly from a recent readership survery show that 56 per cent of the magazine's readers are veterans and that the average reader owns $2,650 worth of weapons. So they're trying to market their military skills, the only skills many of them have, elsewhere." "It was also tough for a lot of these guys to get jobs when they got back. A lot of these guys came back embittered, psyched about further (Communist) expansions, like in Angola or Rhodesia," Brown said during an interview in Rhodesia. "Americans have recently had experience in war, a sense of involvement in the international Communist aggression. The Vietnam war appears to be the main factor that made Soldier of Fortune possible. Brown claimed that there are 12,000 subscribers and 70,000 paid circulation after only five issues. The combination apparently has some appeal. Another ad sought "mercenary work anywhere" for a man who described himself as an "ex-Marine counterinsurgency expert who spent two tours in Vietnam." One advertiser sought recruits, saying he is attempting to sell a "Complete military unit to foreign government." "Will be dirty job with little glory," the ad said. Yet, the classifieds are perhaps the most telling reading. The advertisements are also eye-catchers, offering deals on original World War II Nazi helmets, weaponry for "men of action" and posters of barechested women fondling automatic rifles. Mercs and Financiers Oust a Red Regime," and "Underwater Knife-fighting Techniques." His magazine almost appears to be a self-parody, featuring articles like, "U.S. He is a hulking tough guy talking big-money exploits, advanced weaponry, and "kill ratios." He proudly boasts about his 14 scars from a mortar in Vietnam, and uses profanity in every sentence. The advertisement was cited by the Angolan judge as one of the main reasons for the death sentence, and as an indicator of Gearhart's character and intentions.Īrticles and advertisements in Brown's magazine also have helped the majority of an estimated 400 Americans find their way into the Rhodesian army, bolstering the white-minority government in its battle with black nationalists.īrown, a former Green Beret and Vietnam veteran, seems almost a caricature. He was captured by the Cuban-backed opposition after only three days in action, tried and executed. Through the ad, Gearhart signed up last February with pro-Western forces fighting in Angola's civil war. It was his Colorado-based magazine that ran an advertisement for Daniel Gearhart, a Vietnam veteran from Kensington, Md., who was looking for employment as a mercenary. Then he saw the marketing potential in his exploits and started calling himself a "professional adventurer." Now Brown is making a small fortune telling others how to be one, too.įor the past 18 months, the 44-year-old publisher and editor of the quarterly Soldier of Fortune, "the fighting man's factual magazine," has become the chief spokesman and source of information for Americas mercenaries. Brown was one of those guys who just drifted - from soldiering to logging and mining, selling weapons to teaching judo, construction work to guarding armored cars.
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