Has interest in the magazine shifted with the proliferation of private contractors working in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict zones? And do you see those companies - and their employees - as having some affinity with the ethos of your magazine? Or are you wary of the corporate consolidation of the soldier profession? There is no place where those folks can go and fight the good fight and make some money.” Clearly, that’s no longer true. There was once a fortune to be made in being a soldier. He bled to death before we could get him back over the border to Thailand.Ī New York Times article about the magazine in 2000 quoted a professor of media studies as saying “ Soldier of Fortune has become an oxymoron. He ended up with the Karens in eastern Burma, where he caught a shrapnel round to the skull. He started working with us, traveling to conflict zones all over the world. One that comes to mind is the story of Lance Motley, a West Point graduate who left the army after five years because he was bored, even though he had some good assignments. I’ve had several of my reporters killed in the course of pursuing their vocation, working primarily as writers but also giving advice and training to these groups. And in many cases we were involved in training various and sundry troops, from ethnic minorities in Burma to the Christian militias in Lebanon to the Contras. In a large number of cases, we sent reporters over on what we called “participatory journalism” assignments. When you did have the money to send reporters around the world, what were the magazine’s most ambitious missions - both in terms of the conflict and what the reporters were tasked with doing, beyond reporting. These vary from former government officials and military personnel to anti-communists from foreign countries to contractors and freelance journalists. Over the last thirty-five years, we have developed an extensive network of contacts who provide us with material like the story on corruption in the ATF. And you still provide extensive coverage of issues, open-seas piracy, and military quagmires like the narco wars in Colombia, before the mainstream media does. We no longer have the budget to send reporters to various arcane locations throughout the world.īut you continue to publish investigative work, such as the recent exposé of four million dollars in unlawful perks to ATF personnel in Iraq. We have downsized over the years because of that. And as you know, print magazines have taken a heavy hit recently. Many of the regions we covered back in those days hold no interest anymore. They’ve sunk back into the same position that they were in before the conflicts there, into obscurity. Nobody is particularly interested in Mozambique or Angola or Central America anymore. Readership has changed a lot over the last fifteen years. How has the magazine been impacted by the recession and the shift from print to the internet? Approaching its thirty-fifth anniversary, Soldier of Fortune is one of a dwindling number of independent investigative magazines.
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