Magazine with a Body Count

Notes from a misspent youth reading Soldier of Fortune

I’m a workaholic, so when I was sick for a week over Christmas last year, I took it easy — and by “took it easy,” I mean that I wrote 40-pages of essays about my favorite magazines. Two of these, Soldier of Fortune and Mondo 2000, I loyally read when I was in high school. The other, Los Angeles Free Press — not a magazine, actually, but an underground newspaper — I fell in love with as an adult, after I acquired a few back issues while researching a book about Timothy Leary. With any luck, Cheerleader for Evolution will be published by Inner Traditions in 2025. In the meantime, here’s something I wrote about Soldier of Fortune magazine when I was sick with a fever.

In 1975, forces in Hanoi began their final assault on South Vietnam, ending twenty years of American military occupation.

That same year, a 40-page black-and-white men’s adventure magazine debuted. The publisher, Robert K. Brown, chose the name Soldier of Fortune “because it had a certain mystique.” By 1981, that mystique had transformed his modest publication into a glossy enterprise with 180,000 readers and $6.4 million in revenue. Nearly half its readership, Brown noted, had served in Southeast Asia. They were men who had known real war, yet they turned to these pages for something between memory and fantasy—a continuation of their warrior identity in a nation only too happy to pretend the war had never happened.