Behind the Bastards - Soldier of Fortune: The Deadliest Magazine Ever (with Billy Wayne Davis)

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

Robert is joined LIVE from Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles by Billy Wayne Davis to discuss Soldier of Fortune Magazine.Support Dynasty Typewriter and their employees during this pandemic: Get a ticket (as many as you wish!) to support Dynasty. This ticket will gain you first ACCESS to updates on live streams, podcasts, and the other creative projects they’ll undertake as they navigate this shift. Your ticket purchase will help them survive this time and keep them ready for a quick rebound! You can look forward to these things starting to pop up as early as next week!Ticket Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/support-dynasty-typewriter-tickets-99614884802?aff=odeimcmailchimp&utm_source=Dynasty+Typewriter&utm_campaign=a6ff27b7fd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_19_08_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1585131f02-a6ff27b7fd-58961085&mc_cid=a6ff27b7fd&mc_eid=ee1cf6cb98Shop in their online souvenir shoppe! Get a Dynast-Tee or enamel pin to wear around the living room. Or grab a Dynasty gift card! They’ll open again at some point, and hey! You can use your gift card then! Souvenir Shoppe and Gift Card Link: https://www.dynastytypewriter.com/shoppe?utm_source=Dynasty+Typewriter&utm_campaign=a6ff27b7fd-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_19_08_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1585131f02-a6ff27b7fd-58961085&mc_cid=a6ff27b7fd&mc_eid=ee1cf6cb98 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi guys, everybody ready for the show? Alright, well this is behind the bastards and you might know me as the executive producer Anderson's mom, or who's that really annoying voice laughing obnoxiously in the background. Well thanks guys.

Well first to the stage, let's welcome Reverend Dr. Billionaire Wayne Davis. He's been live in person and not trapped in an iPad. My favorite bastard, Reverend Dr. Robert Evans. So I let it go to my head a little bit. You got so much going on right now. I didn't plan for after coming in with the cape, just for coming in with the cape. You look like one of those people that like, you're going to battle, but then you get to battle and you're like, ah, I did not. Oh, wearing things in battle is horrible. Not think this through.

Man, I'm fucking good. I wanted to thank you, Billy, for the wonderful gift of this machete. I got a new one. Billy just gave it to me. I'm a little bit of a connoisseur and what I love about this machete is that in order to draw it, you have to bring it dangerously close to your throat. And that's the real mark of a quality weapon. Look at that. You do that drunk, you could really damage yourself. That's probably why they had it for sale on Craigslist. I bought that, the guy walked out of an alley, handed me that through my car, just handed it to my car, and I gave him $25.

This is like a real story, you guys. You're laughing, it's not a bid. No, that's, when you see a machete for sale on the Craigslist, you're like, I'm going to go try to buy this. You know one thing immediately, and it's the person you're buying that machete from did not themselves come buy it legally. No, God. That is a stolen machete. But it was in a package. That's a stolen machete. He walked off before I could ask him any follow-up questions, where it was like, how many do you have?

It's a fascinating for me to get into the head of somebody that goes to an REI, and of all of the different high dollar items you could steal from an REI, it makes like the worst price to size ratio. I think that's just opportunity presented itself, and now you have 14 machetes. That happened to me, but all I did was start a podcast. So, Billy, you don't know the subject today that we're going with. No. That's good, that's good. I have a question I'd like to ask you before I kind of lead into things, and I hope it's okay to ask this in front of an intimate group of our friends.

Sure. Billy, have you ever killed a man? On purpose. No, no I have not. But you've thought about it, like that's a male thing, right? I'm not. Fuck off with that question. You can't answer that, and we're recording this.

There's like 180 witnesses with all their names. Have you ever thought about killing someone? If we're honest with ourselves. If we're really being truthful tonight. I think most men particularly, you know, you're in the line at the bank, and you're like, I don't like where this is headed. What if a ninja came in, right? You're at the McDonald's, and you just like, if something happened, if the shit went down, like, could I be a badass and like deal with this situation?

Oh, that way all the time, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Never like, if they weren't on this planet, this would help me out. Never that. Never think that way. You said McDonald's, I thought you were going Trump there, because we know how much you love him, some McDonald's. But he ain't stepping foot in the McDonald's. That's true.

Yeah, so I think it's a pretty normal thing to like, wonder how you would react if like, a situation required you to be a giant badass. But that fantasy isn't enough for everybody. Some people need to really commit to the fantasy that despite all evidence to the contrary, they're huge badasses. And over the last 20 years or so, there's a whole industry that's grown up of tactical gear and tactical contents. Oh man, I am a... And tactical magazines. Goddamn sucker for all this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a bit of that, and I mean, I walked on the stage with it, yeah. It's fine. And I'm going to go, yeah. I don't dive. So, we're all familiar with kind of where the story has ended up in 2020. And today, we're going to talk about the birth of this industry as embodied by a single, periodical, soldier of fortune magazine. Oh fuck yeah. Yes.

Man, I was so hoping you were going to say that. This is a good magazine. Yeah. You might want to hold on to that. No, I know. I know. And by good, I don't mean good. Yeah.

I think... Like a virtue, I mean. Yeah. This is entertaining as fuck. Entertaining as fuck. I think... Reddit is a magazine. You might be surprised by how many people this magazine got killed.

Because it is a lot. That's even better. So, our story starts with a single man, Robert Brown. He was born on November 2nd, 1932, in Monroe, Michigan. And I've been able to find vanishingly little about his early life. Yeah, everything you just said is boring as hell. But he entered college in 1950, and at the time there was a draft on, and Brown saw some sort of military service as inevitable. He decided he'd rather be a fighter pilot than anything else, and he joined the Air Force ROTC to make that happen.

So far, it all scans. And he wound up not doing well in college, and was forced to transfer in 1953 to another university, because in his words, the dean and I agreed it was best I leave Michigan State. I've been on some of those discussions. So, due to a mix of his new college's policies and his bad eyesight, Brown gradually accepted that a career as a fighter pilot was not in the cards. And instead, he joined the Marine Corps Reserve. But then, a military recruiter, he calls a snake oil salesman, convinced him to join the army instead, saying that he would become a special agent in the counterintelligence corps.

Yeah, mother, you got what you deserve. Yeah. So, this was obviously a bald-faced lie, as are most things that military recruiters tell young men. But fantasizing of platinum blondes and Cadillac convertibles, Brown agreed, and he signed on the dotted line. What movie did he ever watch? Even the movies don't make it look great. No. No, he really thought that he was going to join the army and become James Bond. But he was young and dumb. He gets smarter.

So, he enters the army on October 1954, and he loves it. He's particularly taken with arms training and getting to shoot guns a lot. And the whole experience of basic training convinces him that the draft is an awesome idea and should never have been discontinued. He's very emphatic about that. He's very prone to brainwashing. It's very clear. By the end of basic training, he's like, this is the best. Everyone should have to do this. Even the drill sergeant is like, oh, we got to watch him.

We did too good. So, once he graduates training, he is informed that this job as special agent is not going to work out, because it doesn't exist. Who told you? Oh, I know who told you that. He's funny. Instead, he's told that his job is actually going to be clerk analyst, which is essentially secretarial work. So, it's kind of special. It's not below secret agent. It's lateral.

Not a change in money. So, Robert was profoundly bad at this job, and he failed the training course for it four times. You're really terrible at sitting at that desk. Yeah. Keep standing. He just failed down. So, he has admitted sense that he found the idea of doing secretarial work hateful. And this is what convinced him to drop out of that career track and go to officer candidate school as a way to escape the tedium of office work. He graduates.

I just want to tell people what to do. If I can't handle this desk, I think I should be in charge of a lot of people's lives instead. Yeah. So, he graduates, and he would later brag of two accomplishments at officer candidate school. Number one, he received more demerits than any other member of his class. And number two, he was the best shot with a heavy machine gun. I was the angriest and the best at machine guns. And that checks out.

You can be a dick when you're good at the machine gun. Really, all that matters is good at machine guns. I'm good at machine gun. Fuck all you guys. It's wild that we haven't had a presidential candidate run on that platform. We got some months. That's how Bloomberg could have come in. He still got time. So, Brown's dreams of daring due in the army were initially cut short by his father's untimely death.

Death. He opted for a stateside job in Wisconsin, working what he calls a cushy desk job. He left active service in 1957 and spent the next few years in the army reserves, mostly participating in marksmanship competitions. To say some of his desire for action, when Fidel Castro launched his rebellion against the dictatorial rule of Fugincio Batista. So, this happens right as he gets out of the army. And for a few months, Brown improbably became a pro-Castro activist, even purchasing and hiding an illegal machine gun with the goal of running weapons to Cuban rebels.

In Wisconsin. From Wisconsin! You know the classic Wisconsin to Cuba flight path everybody takes. The French connection. They call Wisconsin Big Cuba. So, eventually he tricked his college's student newspaper into issuing him press credentials, and he spent a brief period of time in Havana, but failed to see any action. He was repeatedly invited by contacts he'd met in Havana to participate as a war correspondent

in a number of revolutions throughout South America, but never quite managed to make it work out, mostly because he was afraid he'd get killed. Man, that really gets in the way of the secret agent work. It does. That would be a bummer. If you had to go alone into a dangerous situation. The whole time I was about to kill me, I'm not going to do this. I keep missing meetings. There's a lot of anxiety, you guys.

So, he manages to get hired by the AP to interview a refugee Spanish general promising to overthrow Francisco Franco, Spain's dictator. What do you mean he man- I mean, there's some places where there's just refugee generals left and right, man. He just got a... He sounds like Bean. He's just stumbling into all this stuff. That is kind of his life, actually.

He's like, I was in Wisconsin, and I was like, I'm going to go to Cuba for a minute. And people were like, okay. Robert. So, he writes an article based on his conversation with this general, and it did well, and Brown struck up a friendly acquaintance with the general who had helped to train Castro's guerrillas. So, this guy gives Brown a copy of a book called 150 Questions for a Guerrilla, and it's the militant kind, not the...

Yeah. It's a manual for like how to... It's so funny. I just picked up Miles' book on guerrilla warfare, and the first thing I thought was like, while I was reading it, I was like, so he taught guerrillas to fight like this. This is the dumbest joke, but it made me laugh for a good 15 minutes. Yeah.

And I haven't been able to start that book, every time I do. So, it's a manual for like how to wage an insurgent war, right? So, he gets a copy of this book from this general, and he instantly sees dollar signs, and he opens a publishing company to translate the book into English and sell it in the United States. So, that's his first business. He's a real smart condo.

That's where the most guerrillas are. Yeah. So, Robert worked as a reporter for a little while, writing articles for Guns Magazine and similar publications. But has the Vietnam War kicked off for the U.S. in the 1960s? Time for Simpler then. You gonna make a magazine? What's about guns?

I got a dirty one, it's called Jugs. They really should have merged, I feel like, in 2020. And I own the gas station. So, the Vietnam War kicks off, and Robert Brown finds himself drawn back to his dream of experiencing combat. He rejoined active duty and became a green beret, serving from 1968 to 1969. It was easier then. You're just saying stuff.

This is like a weird mad lib of, like, this dude's life. Because he's like, he's bad at desk work, couldn't be a fire department. Then he's like, then he went to Wisconsin, got really good at desk work. And then he's like, fuck this, I'm going to Cuba and doing some weird light spying. That's our show. Again, with all of these guys, it's an ability to pivot that makes them great. It's impressive. And he's a pivoter.

So he pivots all the way to Vietnam and gets horribly wounded in 1969 in a mortar attack. And on daddy pivot, right at the last second. So he was pretty good at a soldier up until getting wounded. But he would eventually retire from the service as a lieutenant colonel. But sadly, for him at least, the Vietnam War did not end well for the United States. Sorry if that's a spoiler to anybody. He returned home to a nation that widely considered the war he'd nearly died in to have been a colossal waste of money. Many protesters called soldiers like him baby killers.

And Brown quickly recognized that he was part of a new generation of retired warrior who felt increasingly isolated from mainstream American society. See, World War II had been this widely celebrated collective endeavor, but Korea and Vietnam weren't. And that left hundreds of thousands of veterans feeling like their service was neither appreciated nor understood. And a big chunk of those men, including Robert Brown, still found themselves drawn to stories of combat and daring due. In 1975, the same year that Vietnam War ended, Robert Brown found himself traveling around Africa and basically living as a war tourist, visiting combat zones just to hang out somewhere exciting. You never done that Billy? I never thought that that's a thing.

You're like, hey, I won't go watch a little bit of war for a while. Have I ever told you about Iraqi margaritas, by the way? Look, I get it. I used to not understand people watching the Civil War from a field, but now I understand some people like to fight, so you just go, hey, we're just going to watch them do it. But the way he's doing it is not. No. Cool.

So while he's touring around and just hanging out in war zones, Robert Brown befriended some mercenaries on their way to Oman to put down an insurrection for the Sultan. Spirit air? Spirit air, yeah. So meeting these guys gives Robert Brown the idea to write the Oman Ministry of Defense, inquiring about taking the job himself. And they sent him a contract, just like a blank contract to be a mercenary for the government of Oman. He's like, this checks out.

Well, no, he recognizes immediately, anyone who's just going to send me become a mercenary letter, sight unseen in the mail, I probably don't want to fight for that army. Not a great idea. But he has a smarter idea for what to do with it. So... Go on. He takes out ads in a series of gun magazines, reading, want to be a mercenary in the Middle East?

Send five dollars. All y'all think this through. This was not internet where you're like, click, that's hilarious. That was, this is going to take some time. This is some errands involved. It's like four to six weeks to get the letter there. Yeah, yeah.

And then you got to wait for the money to come back. Look at all this through. He's a smart man. So when people would send him five dollars, he would just Xerox the contract he'd received and mail it to them. Brown later recalled. I'm not mad at him at all.

No, no, no, this is kind of brilliant. Yeah. I don't get to where he's a bastard yet. So Brown later recalled, I got scores of replies. Newsweek spotted this and did an article on my ad and it went through the roof. Brown replies from people in Bangladesh, Greece. I was in the army in Turkey for five years.

I want to be a mercenary. I realized I was on to something. Hell yeah, you are. It ain't good. It's not a good thing you're on to, no. And it's unlikely that any of Brown's clients wound up actually fighting for Oman. One assumes most men who volunteer to join a war effort

based on an ad in a magazine are not particularly enticing specimens of soldiery. But the financial success... Yeah, I've been here in a couple of years. The financial success of the endeavor convinces Brown that there's a lot of money to be made in playing to the dream in every man's heart

that he might, in the right circumstances, be a fucking badass. So this is the thing he realizes. And so Robert Brown uses the $10,000 he made scamming gun nuts to fund the creation of a new magazine, Soldier of Fortune. That was the appropriate applause.

Yeah, that was the right amount of applause for that. That was hard for him. Yeah. He's like, one gun fell out. Yeah. And just fell apart. During the summer of 2020,

some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes,

you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season, we'll take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story

is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a car. A cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date,

the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What I may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and he's floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth,

his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days

that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, Apple Podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, who was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on Trial on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brown stated to rehabilitate the image of the warrior in American society. Man, he's so foolish. I love him at this court. I like him a lot.

And Soldier of Fortune Magazine probably would have just been a blip on the radar if it weren't for a real stroke of marketing genius by Robert Brown. As a magazine for military veterans, of which there are only a few and even a smaller number who glorify what actually happens and more,

he fashioned Soldier of Fortune as the Journal of Professional Adventurers. A magazine for mercenaries and people who think it would be cool to be a mercenary. Do you like hiking? And pretendin'. So... Well, they won't let you get boys' life anymore.

So, then as now, there were at most a couple thousand English-speaking works in the world who were actually mercenaries, but Brown's real target was not hard-bitten mercenaries. It was aging baby boomers who thought they probably could have been hard-bitten mercenaries if they didn't get back in 62.

All that mud at Woodstock or I'd have been in Vietnam. Thor some ligaments doing fucking. Here's how Mike Royco of the Chicago Tribune described the magazine in 1984. It's directed at professional mercenaries, men who will fight for pay and those who want to hire them. But since mercenaries represent only

a tiny portion of the reading population, the magazine tries to broaden its appeal to include those who might be called war fans. And they don't get their work through a magazine. Yeah, so the first ever issue of Soldier of Fortune features a glossy color picture of a soldier with a rifle behind a barbed wire fence with a red sun

setting in the background. The whole image was cast in a green tent as it being viewed through night vision goggles. Articles included. You're gonna like this Billy. Water knife fighting techniques. Lunge. Lunge again.

Breathe. And it tells you kind of where I am on this spectrum that I get understanding like, yeah, I want to know what it's like to fight with a knife in the water, but I recognize that having techniques applied to it is ridiculous, right? Do it better.

So in addition to urban knife fighting techniques or underwater knife fighting techniques, sorry, urban streets of survival. Part one, I'm going to guess we all assume how racist that article was, right? Like I don't need to like. Yeah, and then an article titled American mercenaries in Africa.

Now that last article, I'm going to guess the person who said, huh knows where we're going with this. I don't like it. It was a feature about the conflict in Rhodesia. Yeah, we're going to talk a lot about Rhodesia right now. I was having fun. What do you know about Rhodesia?

I don't know much and judging by their reaction, I wish I could leave. I was like, this is a fun one. Nothing bad has happened. It can't all be underwater knife fighting. It can't all be underwater knife fighting. You really can only do that once. It's a general rule.

Rhodesia was a white supremacist state in modern days in Bobway that broke away from the British Empire in 1965 over the issue of whether or not black people should be able to vote. The 3% of the nation that was white did not think they should.

Okay, from a logic standpoint, if you want power, I could see where they're like, We've been so shitty to you guys for so long. Ah, shit. What if y'all can't vote? Nope, fuck. Feel like 3% enough

for us to keep a lid on this thing? This wanting to vote thing? Jesus. I'm going to read a quote to you, Billy, from Soldier of Fortune magazine, describing the Rhodesian conflict, and they have a different take on it than I do. In 1965,

the Rhodesian government got together with the British government to try to sort out a way to end the war that was smoldering and about to explode. Ian Smith was the governor of Rhodesia and leader of the Rhodesia Front. The insurgents were on the move. The 1965 talks accomplished nothing. What the Brits wanted was for the blacks to get the vote.

One man, one vote. Of course, that would mean the blacks would get into power. So the white Rhodesians unilaterally implemented the Universal Declaration of Independence in 1965. So that's how Soldier of Fortune magazine breaks things.

They wanted to vote? No. You can't have your country. Have you not read history? So a lot of Rhodesia's black residents decide that we should probably overthrow the government, which is a reasonable conclusion to reach given the circumstances.

Yeah. I bet they all came together at once and been like, hey! Hey! The British Empire is on the reasonable side of things. I think these guys might be really bad. Yeah.

Yeah. We've never had a chair for them before. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Having lived under an oppressive capitalist system their whole lives, most of these rebels decided communism sounded pretty good. The USSR and China

wound up backing separate guerrilla armies, and the two fought each other sometimes, but they put enough pressure on the embattled white minority that things began to get very dire for the Rhodesian government. This racist nation's problems were compounded by the fact that virtually the whole world, except for South Africa,

slammed Rhodesia with sanctions. Why not South Africa? You know, Billy, I've never heard anyone theorize on that. I'll look it up later. We'll look it up later, yeah. As life in the tiny landlocked country grew more difficult for a large...

grew more difficult, a large chunk of the white population fled the country, mostly for South Africa. Hey, you guys. I know a place we can go. Getting there is going to be interesting. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the Rhodesian government decided to turn their national struggle into a cause

celeb for the racist right-wing worldwide. Of course, they didn't frame it as a racist crusade to stop black self-determination. Instead, they build it as a fight against the encroachment of communism. Prime Minister Ian Smith called his nation the ultimate bastion against communism on the African continent.

And this worked pretty well. Mainstream American Republicans tend to do embrace the idea. No way. William F. Buckley. William F. Buckley. Found it, organized the Friends of Rhodesian Independence campaign.

He just forgot his mask that day. Just had a lot of thoughts and prayers. Yeah. This campaign worked to spread propaganda about what a cool place Rhodesia was. But no single public... Other fuckers. William F. Buckley.

Historically, mother fuckers. What's your legacy? I'm a mother fucker. And I made a lot of money being a mother fucker. But I don't spend it like you think I would. So, Rhodesia had a lot of support in the worldwide right-wing, but no single publication did as much

popularize the Rhodesian cause as Soldier of Fortune magazine. Starting in 1975, they ran a series of lurid articles about the American volunteers already fighting in Rhodesia. Interviews with these men focused on the failures of the U.S. to stop communism from getting a foothold in Africa,

which was heightened after congressional Democrats stopped the CIA from aiding fascists in Angola against the socialist regime. One mercenary in that first Soldier of Fortune issue complained, the West isn't doing its job. Especially isn't doing its duty. If they're too scared to fight the communists,

then people like me have to act independently. I consider it my duty to fight in Rhodesia. After Vietnam and Angola, we can't afford to lose any more countries. I ain't allowed to kill in America. Let me go over and do some killing. So, while Soldier of Fortune was smart enough to not throw out any racial slurs,

the racism in its Rhodesian coverage was pretty obvious. At one point, a mercenary was quoted as saying, what we have here is an ideal core of white people who are able to raise the standard of living among the Africans. Without us, conditions will decline rapidly. Yeah, but you guys, he didn't say slurs.

He didn't say slurs. Didn't say slurs. I bet he has strong opinions about the fact that that's free speech and he should be able to. But... Let me communicate my ideas! After Vietnam, the U.S. had probably a population of unemployed combat veterans in the world.

A few of these men joined the Rhodesian fighting effort and rose to high levels in its military establishment. But most volunteers were far from hardened operators. Instead, they were folks who'd missed out on their chance to fight in Vietnam, but wanted desperately to experience combat. Oh, I wish we had videos.

Yeah, you kind of do, right? Yes, just like F-troop. So, for these men, Soldier of Fortune published a series of articles written by Major Nick Lamprecht, the chief recruiting officer for the Rhodesian army. He provided step-by-step advice for how they could apply to join

and be flown out to the country to be inducted into the army as conscripts. Lamprecht promised that the work would be difficult but rewarding. Sometimes there's a delay when I have to switch pieces of paper. Oh, what's going to happen? He gets edited out by Daniel, so let's give a shout-out to him.

Yeah, that's right! And by Chris, who's not here tonight, but is also great. Yeah, let's give it up for Chris, too. Y'all don't like Chris, okay. This is Nick Lamprecht. Rhodesia has many things to offer. Good Rhodesian beer,

friendly populace, and what I would... Already, stop it. God damn it. And what I would describe as a free and easy, unhurried ways of life. Lots of wide-open spaces. And they're filled with some of those friendly locals

with sniper rifles shooting at us for unexplicable reasons. They hate these cans. Yeah, they hate these cans of good Rhodesian beer. Yes. For years, Soldier of Fortune ran glossy recruiting articles with full-page spreads featuring the elite Rhodesian light infantry

and cellist scouts locked in glorious combat. Some 400 men were eventually induced to join the fight by Soldier of Fortune magazine. And as you might expect, they were not very good at it. Most Rhodesian... It's hot in Africa.

Yeah. Hot. Most Rhodesian volunteers were people whose lives in the U.S. were going badly enough that they opted to join the Army of a racist pariah state based on magazine ads. Shit, tomorrow.

Whatever I'm doing feels worse than joining the Army based on a magazine ad. Yeah, I've been there. Yeah. I've been there several times, where I was like, what's in the back of this magazine? Wait, you're telling me the guys that saw a glossy magazine ad,

and it said, beer, we're not great fighters. No, not ideal soldiers, no. So, in 1979, one reporter noted, the majority found the routine too rough to last more than a few months.

The desertion rate among American citizens who have joined the Rhodesian Army over the past two years is estimated to run about 80%. That's awesome. Yeah, that's pretty great. But those 20%, I don't want to meet those guys. No, no, no. There's some legitimately scary guys among the 20%.

Yeah, they're like, this feels right. Yeah. And of course, a good number of the American volunteers did not survive their time in Rhodesia. John Allen Coey. Yeah, that's fine to clap. A lot of claps for dead Rhodesians.

That's what I like to hear. No, I don't know. John Allen Coey, a medic from Cleveland, Ohio, joined based on a soldier of fortune article and died in combat almost as soon as he arrived in the country. It's dangerous over there.

Soldier of Fortune published a hagiographic article quoting him as saying this, since coming to Rhodesia, I've often heard people remark that it's inevitable for the country and all of southern Africa to follow the winds of change and go the same way as other former colonies to the north. This is rubbish

and only indicates a lack of fighting spirit, guts, and the will to rule a civilization built by better men. What did that last part mean? He was being vague? I don't know that they couldn't ask him a follow-up question because, you know... Yeah, well, because a better man got him.

Yeah, better man got him. So, Soldier of Fortune articles on Rhodesia rarely made blatant lies. It was a lot easier to just ignore facts that didn't reinforce their narrative. In one piece they noted... That is better. It's a lot easier. You can lie, it makes everything easier.

The unrivaled Sela Scouts, the covert elite special force regiment of a thousand that consisted of black and white, with a majority of blacks, were credited with gathering spot-on intelligence for the regular army. And it is true that the Rhodesian armed forces were mostly black, but Soldier of Fortune neglected to mention

that only white men were allowed to be officers. What are you shocked about? This is consistent. By ignoring the uncomfortable reality of Rhodesia, Soldier of Fortune succeeded in painting a picture of a gallant lost cause fight. And it's not wildly different from this, from the lost cause narrative of the Confederacy.

Actual articles from real journalists who visited Rhodesia, like this 1979 Washington Post article, made the reality clear. The first impressions are of the rural south I knew as a boy in the 1930s. Black maids and house boys earning $20 to $60 a month fetchin' bow,

saying master and boss. Black laborers working for $12 to $20 a month plus rations cluster in grass on the white farmer's land, like the Mississippi sharecroppers of the remembered past. Past. They are like children, a housewife says. You have to do everything for them.

You have to stand over them to get anything done. It's more trouble than it's worth sometimes. It's not like South Africa. A young woman asks if we have a dishwasher, a clothes washer, and a dryer. She laughs. You know what we call them here? And then she says, what is essentially the N-word? Thank you for coming to the comedy show.

This is the only part of history that's like this. Everything else is actually pretty great. The Rhodesian bush war ended in 1979, when rebels succeeded in blowing up the nation's entire strategic fuel reserve. The Rhodesian bush war ended in 1979, when rebels succeeded in blowing up the nation's entire strategic fuel reserve.

The Rhodesian bush war ended in 1979, when rebels succeeded in blowing up the nation's entire strategic fuel reserve. Probably shouldn't have kept it all in the one place, huh? Not a great call. Especially on beer night. Yeah. At final toll,

more than 1,100 Rhodesian soldiers died, along with roughly 10,000 rebels and more than 20,000 civilians. It is unlikely that the few hundred mercenary soldier of fortune induced to join had a measurable impact on the conflict. But they did an awful lot to influence how Rhodesia's gone on to be remembered

by racists around the world. You remember that soldier of fortune article I quoted from earlier that talked about how weird it was that the blacks wanted to vote? Unfortunately. Now, when would you guess that article was written, Bill? I don't want to guess. Probably like the 70s, right? Probably?

No. It was 2012. Oh! Oh! Oh! It's all in the news. Yeah! Somebody all need to go home and Google the news. And you're going to be like,

What in the fuck? We should do something. We should. We need to do something. Maybe find us a strategic element. No, I'm not going to. Probably shouldn't make statements like that here. Yeah.

So... I should note, before we get on to the more fun wacky stuff, that three years after that article was published in 2015, Dillon Roof walked into a black church in Charleston and shot nine people to death. His stated goal was to provoke a race war,

and he left behind a manifesto titled The Last Rhodesian. Oh! Yup! Yup. There's a whole Rhodesian chunk of YouTube too. You do not want to read the comments. Did you?

Did you read the comments? Yeah, I figured you did. So... Most of Soldier of Fortune's argument in favor of the Rhodesian government came from the fact that the government it replaced was ruled by Robert Mugabe, a Hitler-loving monster who killed a lot of people.

Mugabe was absolutely terrible. But the argument Robert Brown would make that the Rhodesian government was the only thing that held Zimbabwe back from tyranny and that Mugabe didn't take control of the guerrilla forces fighting Rhodesian government until the previous commander was assassinated by Rhodesian forces in the late 70s.

Mugabe rose to power because there was a civil war, and he was good at fighting it. If Rhodesia had transitioned into a democracy in 1965, Mugabe wouldn't have come to power. SOF's articles also ignored the brutal realities of the Rhodesian regime, which jailed peaceful black political leaders and mosques and employed a torture technique

on them known as Skullbashing, which probably shouldn't be referred to as a technique. It's not a technique if it's just in the name. It's just what you're doing to them. That's not a technique. That's not something you need to learn.

That's just human instinct. While the Rhodesian bush war was a disaster for humanity, it was a great time for Robert Brown and the writers of Soldier of Fortune magazine. They got to take all sorts of little trips to the country and bring in guns and take part in gunfights because they were helping bring in soldiers.

Sure, you can go shoot at strangers in the middle of the savannah with us. Absolutely. It was a really fun time for them. It was a perfect situation for Brown. He got to play Soldier whenever he wanted and then head home when things got really scary. He didn't have to hang around for strategic oil reserves

blowing up in the light. It's like a rich guy hunter. That's what it is. My friend does it in Alaska. He tracks bears and they get the thing. I literally just do everything and they come over and they pull the trigger. It's good for conservation.

He explained it to me. He's like, but fuck those motherfuckers forever also. I was like, I'm so conflicted. I don't know how to tell you that. He's scary. He hunts bears. It's like volunteerism. But with war. Yeah.

That's what the Soldier of Fortune writers get up to while this is all going on. The whole performance did great things for Soldier of Fortune subscription numbers. By the end of the war, more than 100,000 people were signed up for the magazine. So it turns out this is a good business. Ah, yay.

Capitalism. Don't worry, nothing like this ever happened again repeatedly. Refixed it. We learned our lessons. A brief FBI investigation into whether or not the magazine was breaking the law by soliciting mercenaries also helped drum up interest in Soldier of Fortune.

Okay, that is a good question I've been having in the back. I was like, yo, can you just do that? Yes, you can. And here's why. See, the men who joined the Rhodesian military were conscripted. So they became regular soldiers. So they weren't mercenaries.

So it wasn't illegal to induce people to do this. That makes sense, right? Everybody's on board? I love a loophole. You know what I mean? No, I'm not a mercenary by loophole. Yeah. And so, as the 1970s rolled to an end, Robert Brown continued to send his writers off

to little wars around the world. He focused primarily on struggles between communist and anti-communist forces, like the fighting in Angola. Brown was canny enough not to solicit mercenaries directly this time. But he did allow his readers to place classified ads in the magazines with no restrictions

whatsoever. Oh, those are good. You guys ever been on the internet? That's what that is. One of these ads caught the eye of a con artist... The fact that Soldier of Fortune had this classified section caught the eye

of a con artist named David Buffkin. A former... I know, right? Like, what's in a name? You know David Buffkin is a man who starts like a mercenary con. I was like, he's just flipping through. Soldier of Fortune, like, I got a fucking idea. Well, prior to finding that,

he was a crop duster. And he decided that crop dusting had gotten old, and he would rather be a mercenary recruiter. So he started putting up ads in local newspapers and Soldier of Fortune magazine, trying to raise 100 mercenaries to fight against the communists in Angola. To make his case seem more legit, he lied,

and claimed that he'd been given an $80,000 contract by the CIA for this. Let's check this out. Yeah. So a few dozen would-be warriors reached out to Buffkin, but as one actual mercenary later recalled, Buffkin obviously had no funds available.

He operated out of motels. In his office, potential recruits had to pay their own travel expenses. It was definitely a shoestring operation. Now, if I'm going to go fight for your country, you've got to pay for me to fly out there. You notice how he said motels? Yeah.

I'm going to give you a lot of exposure, though. It's going to really help your career. So a few very dumb men did agree to join. Yeah, they did. Former CIA officer George Bacon read this ad on Soldier of Fortune magazine and joined the war effort, which the CIA does a lot of

shady shit, but let's not pretend they're smarter than they are. Okay? See, that's someone that got-he programmed and it's not right. And then he thought he was done, and he's like, no, I read the thing. It still happened. I'm in the SIG, and they're like, oh, fuck.

We fucked Bacon out, didn't we? He might have been one of the ones they gave too much acid to. Yes. So like many Rhodesian volunteers, Bacon was killed basically immediately. Yeah. Since he and his fellow anti-communist

fighters were vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers. You think there was like a last second thing where he was like, this isn't the CIA? Yeah. You know what? This doesn't feel like the CIA. This isn't-oh, no, it's updated. I don't know, you know, the Bay of Pigs wasn't

that long ago, so this kind of does feel like the CIA. Yeah, he gets over it and is like, this has the CIA written all over it. Yeah. This is fucking mess. Yeah, there's 30 of us in a lot of Cuban army guys. Yeah, this kind of feels like the CIA.

Oh, I'm dead. Yeah. Daniel Gearhart, a 34-year-old Vietnam veteran in financial distress, also replied, his wife told him this was a terrible idea, but Buffkin managed to convince him, and soon he found himself over in Angola.

He goes, isn't that bitch? Come to Africa. He was captured instantly without ever getting into combat. God damn right he was. His wife and family begged President Gerald Ford to do something, but if you know one thing about Gerald Ford,

no, no, no, not unless you're Richard Nixon. The government of Angola... I think they made that dirty. That was a weird reaction, you guys. So, the government of Angola sentenced him to death and executed him with a handful of other mercenaries in 1976.

He and George were not the first soldier of Fortune Readers to die as a result of the magazine's classified ad section, and they would not be the last. We have a legacy to uphold here. Now, Billy, I found a copy of the magazine from the year of our lord, 1980, and I'd like to read you a handful

of the different ads in it. I'm excited. Don't worry, no more depressing racism, some depressing murder, and some depressing racism. But entertaining murder probably at the end. Entertaining murder for sure. I don't know if you guys have noticed that,

or you guys are like, oh, and then somebody else dies, and you guys are like, yeah. It's a bit of a whiplash episode. We're all over the place tonight. So, ad number one. Male, 25 years old. Five foot nine, 135 pounds. Desire security position, any location.

Excellent marksman and speaks fair German. I'm anti-social and prefer working alone. That's like the Vegas like, just let me kill a German dude. You need a German killed, I'll do it. I'm quiet. Oh, I read something else, and speaks German and likes to shoot,

but... and anti-social. Oh! Oh, there's a lot of bad people in this magazine. Yep. The next ad. That's what he's trying to help. I get it, that's bad.

It took me a minute, and I'm glad it did. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season, we'll take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the same time, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced,

cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure

he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23,

I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union,

is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science

in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. So the next ad. XCIA Attaché seeks area in U.S. to fulfill purpose. It actually does. But like, like proud boy kind of racist.

So seeks area in U.S. pro-western ideals and their success trade crafts many cut out sanitization sanctification playback disinformation bag jobs false flag legends peeps and sounds

sneakies and sisters available. I don't know what sisters means in this context. I bet he'd use the same thing on his dating profiles. Yeah. No yet 30 years later and this is just an okay cupid.

Yeah. Sneakies. Oh, I gotta read you the ad Billy. Former agent in place qualified encounter ops brief debrief war planning interrogator 223 and 308 arms

dead serious inquiries only contact micro data systems of Huntington Beach, California. That's awesome. I don't want to eat bullshit. The next ad I live in Orange County. It's pretty

cheap. Madman's book of formulas how to make step by step goodies like knockout drops explosives silencers poisons letter bomb and many others. You need to know to make a letter bomb

knockout drops. I bet they're good. I bet they work. I bet that's where Cosby got his. I'm just kidding. It was probably a real doctor. Come on. In the last little ad we're going to

read Billy wanted patriots especially veterans who see the coming national crises and desire to be prepared right to for free information to Christian Patriots Defense League. Yeah. Hail, yeah.

We've moved on to Christian Mingle is what you're saying. Yeah. Farmers only. I do whenever I see farmers only I can't imagine someone saying the name of the service without holding a gun. Yeah.

No, I think the people that came up with that were like, yeah. Now the slogan for soldier of fortune magazine displayed in vibrant color on a poster in their Boulder, Colorado office was killing is our business and business is good. Actually, our business is a

magazine. And we mostly get so much cooler than just, you know, we do a lot of ink writing. So all fat. And I have to say though, like the fact that their business is killing

and it's good was not as untrue as you'd think because throughout the early 1980s soldier of fortune did a brisk business in selling ads to contract killers. Yeah. For you back page. Yeah, it's wild because like they kind of

went into the dark web before the dark web, but while all of the hitmen on the dark web are just FBI agents, like this this actually happened like real people did murders through these guys. Yeah, I'm going to quote now from a legend.

I'll be getting people in trouble here. I'm going to quote now from a media matters right up one of them Knoxville, Tennessee, one of them and Knoxville operator and former prison guard named Richard Michael Savage said that he received 30 to 40 calls a week after

he placed this ad in the June 1985 issue of the magazine gun for hire thirty seven year old professional mercenary desires jobs, Vietnam veteran discreet and very private bodyguard courier and other special skills all jobs considered which is a nice way of saying I'll kill

people. I'll kill him. Yeah, I'm from Tennessee. I'll kill somebody that was one of the ads. I'm from Tennessee. I'll kill somebody. You don't understand like the volunteers they think that's our nickname. No, that's because whenever there was a kid like war or anything, every Tennessee

is like, well, it's okay to go kill people there. I'll be there. I don't give a shit which side is just something I'm good at. And the Tennessee mercenaries doesn't have the ring to it.

No. Because you got to sell that shit. We're learning. So one of the people who called Richard Savage wanted to recruit a small army to raid a gold mine in Alaska. You just

go to a bar in Alaska. It's really, it is not hard to find armed men looking for work there. Who's got a gun? Everybody? Oh, you brought them. Follow me. That's it.

I'll be their maker. Another caller pitched him on a plot to steal an army payroll in South America. And based on its interview with a friend of Richard Savage who was in contact with him during this whole period,

People Magazine reported this in 1986 quote, yet another wanted to raid Nicaragua and promised to supply guns, camouflage clothing, rubber boats, and $50,000 for each mercenary when the raid was completed. Savage was enthusiastic about every It's a good deal.

I'd do it. You don't have to complete the mission. No. Savage was enthusiastic about every harebrained scheme he heard, but ultimately was persuaded to concentrate on murder. So if the caller sounded discreet, Savage would ask

for a roundtrip airline ticket of $50,000. The two would meet face to face, then feel each other out until each was certain of the other's credentials. It's a good business to be in getting paid $1,000 just to talk about killing a guy. That's not against the law probably.

Anyway, I got a new business idea, Billy. I think DC is the place for that. Yep. In a way, Robert, yeah. Oh, sorry. I just gave that out a little earlier there. I know. I know. I'm fucking

hacking a fraud. So Savage took on a job to kill Richard Brown, an Atlanta man. He and two triggermen also recruited through Soldier of Fortune magazine, ambushed Brown and his teenage son with a Mac 11. They killed Brown and wounded his boy. Four months after this, Savage was hired

to kill Anita Spearman of Palm Beach, Florida. He subcontracted the hit out to yet another Soldier of Fortune reader. Yeah. Listen, I got a lot going on. Yeah. A guy named I'm gonna find somebody work for me.

So Savage and the guy that he subcontracted were paid $20,000 for the hit by Spearman's husband, himself a big fan of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Another hit man. I'm a huge fan. Would you murder my wife? I'm a little nervous.

I've always wanted to do this. Sorry. I'm a little starstruck. I'll get used to it. Here's the money. This is her. She's right here. She is in the car. Should I bring her in? I don't know. Another hit man

was Texas trucker John Hearn. In 1984, he ran an ad in four issues of the magazine looking for high risk assignments U.S. or overseas. So many people called Hearn that he had to hire an answering service to handle all the demand.

He estimated that 90% of his collars wanted him to commit some sort of crime, ranging from bombings to jailbreakings to simple assault. He received, he says, three to five contract murder offers every single day, which says a lot about the readers of Soldier of Fortune magazine.

Finally. Yeah, in February 1985, Hearn took on the job of murdering Sandra Black. Her husband paid him $10,000 to shoot his wife to death. How do you decide the first one if you're getting that many? You know, that's a very good question. I would love to ask him that.

Same with the other dude. He was like, listen, they were all great offers, but I got in this to do murder. Yeah. You know, Billy, a big part of success when you do what you want for a living is figuring out how to say no, you know? It's a struggle.

It is. I sympathize with him. I have no problem saying no. So Richard said, oh, yeah. So Hearn was eventually caught and tried, and he insisted that he never would have gotten started as a hit man if it weren't for

Soldier of Fortune magazine. What a sentence. Richard Savage was also caught by the law. He too squealed on Soldier of Fortune magazine and suddenly a deluge of news coverage hit the magazine. Robert Brown denied any responsibility for the deaths. He ordered his executive editor

to make this statement. Where as copable as any newspaper, which accepts an ad from a used car salesman to reject the condition of the brakes. Same thing. Air tight. Jesus. Yeah, it's amazing. Do you think they had a meeting like,

we're going to go with this one? Oh, they must have workshopped the shit out of that. So we're going to go with the used car thing? All right, boss. I'm glad we all got guns. Still, Brown was wise enough to stop running ads for murderers in 1986. If he felt any guilt over all the deaths,

he did not show it. Writing in a 1986 editorial, for the last decade, I have hunted terrorists with the Rhodesian-African rifles and fired up a Russian fort in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen. Between firefights, takeovers, and insurgencies, I managed to put out a magazine.

I'll kick him into balls. He also managed to get sued by Richard Brown's sons for his role in their father's murder. They were awarded $4.3 million in civil judgments which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1992. The New York Times wrote this about the case.

The 11th Circuit panel said, however, that while the advertisement in the Texas case was facially innocuous and ambiguous in its message, Mr. Savage's advertisement clearly conveyed that he was ready, willing, and able to use his gun to commit crimes. Yeah.

I got that. I got what he was getting at. A couple other people got that, too, Billy. Yeah. I'm not good at codes, either. Brown wound up settling with the Braun family for $200,000. When he was interviewed about this later in 2016, he said this.

They really tried the magazine, not the cases. Two guys meet through the magazine. They have a friendly relationship for six months. They don't talk about anything illegal, but then six months later, they agree to commit this horrendous crime. Well, if they meet up in a bar

six months later, they say, let's rob a bank. Should the bartender be held liable? It was total crap. Well, he's good at knowing which things are the same. The bar was like a bartender, like a bar for people that rob banks. Yeah, if it was a...

Then the bartender would probably be like, the police would be like, yo, I feel like the booze was just a... Then the bartender would be like, you got me. The parking ID is the bar required you to plan to murder someone's wife in order to enter.

Then the comparison would be valid. I will say that. Well, that's an Applebee's. That is an Applebee's. And some waffle houses. Not the good one. Yeah. So, from that point on,

the Soldier of Fortune classified ad section turned to slightly more licit fare. They sold mail order brides. Bounty Hunter training manuals. There's no victim. Also, no victim to Bounty Hunters. All of a sudden, I got real serious. Fuck you guys.

That's how you treated that one. They sold mail order brides. Bounty Hunter training manuals. Secrets of the Ninja lessons. Old Nazi equipment. Functional machine guns. What does that mean? I think you know what it means.

I know what it means. As well as silencers and sniper rifles. They just send you a potato. Soldier of Fortune also did a brisk business in selling the kind of t-shirts that are all too common in randomly generated Facebook ads today. I do not want to know what the t-shirts say.

Shirts with slogans like Happiness is a confirmed kill. There are a few social programs that can be solved by the proper application of high explosives. And the ever popular kill them all and let God sort them out. That's just a good shirt.

That's just a good saying. Yes, we have Robert Brown to thank for launching the bafflingly violent t-shirt industry, which by my rough count provides roughly 60% of Facebook's operating revenue today. Heal them all, let God sort them out. Thank you, sir.

Soldier of Fortune also contributed to the birth of the needlessly aggressive sticker industry selling door stickers later. Now I'm mad. Is there life after death? Trespass here and find out. And never mind the dog, beware of owner. And of course bumper stickers like

the only way they'll get my gun is to pry it from my cold dead hands. And the irony of that one. So Robert... Robert Milch wrote Red Dawn classic movie. There's a very famous scene in the beginning when the Soviets are invading where you see a guy with a...

They'll get my gun when they pry it from my cold dead hands lying dead behind his truck with a 45. Robert Milch was the subject of like a 10 page spread article in Soldier of Fortune magazine. It's just fun. It's just a good time. Boulder's a nice place, too.

It is a nice place. He went there for college and likes it. He went to college in Boulder? Yeah, I went to the University of Colorado. How do you go there and then be like, I'm going to be a professional keyword? Well, he was a different age. Okay, because I don't know if you've been to Boulder lately,

but no one has murdered anything there and even soap. That don't... It's just where if rich kids go they can't get into Ivy League schools. So, in addition to all this, Soldier of Fortune continued to play host to a series of classic articles

for the modern man who's pretty sure he would have been Conan the Barbarian if a few cards had landed differently. And I think... Genetic cards. Yeah, time cards, too. Lot of cards, actually. And I think the single best example of this magazine's content

is this classic article that I'm so excited to read to you, Billy Wayne Davis. Wow, that's not a good sign. Secrets of Modern Battle Axe Fighting by Jeff Cooper. This ain't everyday knowledge. No. And this ain't old-school shit.

Modern secrets. Modern Battle Axe Fighting. Trying to hit them in the neck. Lot of people don't know that. Some important shit here. Neck. Weak. Do it with your hands.

The article opens with Jeff announcing that, for reasons that are never made clear, he is one and award that also happens to be a hand-forged Norse battle axe. Being the kind of man who writes for Soldier of Fortune magazine, Jeff Cooper decided he desperately needed

to know how to kill people with this axe. Unfortunately, the only manuals he could find on axe fighting were archaic and not very detailed. So he and a friend decided to spend the afternoon inventing a modern... He kept saying I had to drink mead first. So he and a friend spent an afternoon inventing a modern science of battle axe fighting

by Jeff... An afternoon. Yeah. That's Kung Fu was written in an afternoon. A long afternoon. Yeah, it was daylight saving. It was in like August. So they did this

by jabbing vaguely at hay bales in an empty field. Now, Billy, I'm gonna need you to take a look at a picture from this article. Then I've studied how to do this. I want you to look at the picture and I want you to notice that while he is jabbing this hay bale

violently with an axe, he's wearing a gun on his hip. And a fedora. And a fedora? Yeah, that is... We're gonna pass this around. This is... He looks like he think he would.

Yeah. Like, you can't see his eyes, but they're beady. You know they're beady. Oh, I gotta finish reading the page. We'll pass this around because you really need to see Jeff Cooper doing the pike thrust. The straight right. The full overhead and, of course, port guard.

Sometimes you forget you got your gun. I think he might have a cigarette in his mouth in the last of these two. He didn't even know he lit it. That's how people smoke back at the end. How'd they get it? I don't even know. So, the business of writing articles like this was rather safe,

but Robert Brown was not satisfied with safe. He still found himself desperately addicted to war tourism, and the primary purpose of Soldier of Fortune magazine was to enable his habit. Throughout the mid-1980s, Brown and his magazine got increasingly involved in the El Salvadoran Civil War. He visited for the first time in 1983

and spent several happy days fighting alongside a cadre of mercenaries and paramilitary fighters backing Roberto de Obeson. De Obeson was, in the words of the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, a pathological killer who bragged about the need to exterminate 200,000 to 300,000 people

in his country. He was like, I don't want to be angry with you. What's up? I'm going to pass these battle-axe photos around because I have a moral obligation to show them to you all. Yeah, you guys need to see him. He looks like...

He looks like... He looks like he's going to... Like, if he was around today, he'd have a red hat on in those pictures. Oh, no. Very specific brand. Oh. What happened with the light? I don't know, but just these people are important, though.

Hi, y'all. Fuck you guys. Looking very nice. I was hoping... It was shining on Katie Stoll and Cody Johnston. It was just like a random surprise. Oh, yeah. That's like old school Vegas. We were like, hey, Dean Martin's in the audience.

Yeah. Dean Martin is in the audience, but... Turn it off. Turn it off. So... Dobson ran death squads, which massacred women, children, and a huge number of priests,

and Robert Brown was only too happy to help with that. By 1984, he claimed to have sent more than 100 mercenaries into El Salvador. He also claimed that his... None came back. A lot didn't. He also claimed that his readers had donated more than $4 million in supplies

to fight the contra rebels in Nicaragua. When he was criticized over the fact that his magazine was actively enabling death squads in multiple nations, Robert Brown wrote this. We are not content to just tell the story. To the best of our ability, we also help equip, aid, and train the world's anti-communist freedom fighters.

We make no apologies about this, or for our virulent anti-tyrant, anti-communist editorial stance. Now... Hey. Hey. Not only do I report what happens, I shoot people. From a safe distance. From a very safe distance.

Now, tragically, Billy, and this is really going to bum you out, Robert Brown's second planned trip to go fight in El Salvador was canceled. Oh, no. I know. I know. It's a bummer. But we all, you know, sometimes you get sick and you can't make that trip.

Sometimes, as in Brown's case, one of your own mercenary shoots you in the leg. It took a long time. It really... Well, that's... you're going to do some other stuff after you do that. Well, here's how the Chicago Tribune

describes what happened. You're going to enjoy this. Colonel Brown and his kitchen table buddies were talking about a flight to El Salvador that Brown was to make the next day. Brown, who was a captain in Vietnam, claims to be helping to train the Salvadoran army on an unofficial basis.

He says he's making them tougher and more disciplined. He's like, hey, I'm just going to war these people up a little bit. Just an ad hoc thing. Don't you mind me, artificially. Teach them how to kill. As the evening wore on towards midnight, one of Brown's buddies,

who writes for Soldier of Fortune, took out an automatic pistol he was carrying and showed it to Brown. Brown's buddy talked about his pistol's heft, the trigger action, and the other qualities that police gun lovers. When Brown's buddy, a gun expert, pulled the trigger, there was a loud explosion.

Never heard that before. Scared me. He stood there for a moment with his mouth wide open. Then he looked at his hand and saw a hole. He had shot a hole through his hand. Brown looked down at his leg. His leg hurt. He saw blood running out of his calf. The bullet, after blowing a hole in his buddy's hand,

had blown a hole in Brown's leg. The owner of the gun was right. It did pack a wallop. I told you. I told everyone of you. Y'all like, ah, that didn't look like a strong gun. I told you. Brown looked down at his...

Brown, you're lucky it slowed down through his hand. That coulda hurt you. That woulda done some real damage. That coulda fucked you up. Brown looked down at his bleeding leg. Then he looked at his buddy and said, you stupid son of a bitch, you shot me. And now I can't go to El Salvador.

That's a good story. That's a feel good moment right there. We're all nine years old. We never get past that. That's our media. Just like, hey, now I can't go to the water park. When I think about situations that scare me, it's like a journalist embedded with a group of people.

One of them is being there for that and having to, like, not laugh. Because you really can't in that situation. Because one bullet's already gone off. They're not against using another. Yeah, we can correct who tells this story after this. A different version of this gets out. As the 1980s wore on and the Cold War neared its end,

so too did the business of soliciting mercenary fighters to crush socialist movements. Being a far-right crypto-fascist, Robert Brown transitioned seamlessly from demonizing left-wing movements around the world and towards attacking the U.S. government. As the Cold War ended, Soldier of Fortune became one of the prime sources

fueling the American militia movement. In April 1995, it did a cover story on the Michigan militia, the largest such patriot group in the country. That same month, Soldier of Fortune's subscriber and former Michigan militia member, Tim McVeigh, set off a truck bomb outside them

in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring 700. When McVeigh was caught and his car was searched, the police found a photocopy of an underground right-wing zine called The Resister. 60-minute correspondent Steve Croft described it as a political warfare journal

describing the U.S. government as a deadly enemy that needed to be crushed with lethal force. Its publisher, Stephen Berry, was a former Special Forces man who went on to work for the National Alliance, at the time the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States. The FBI obviously wanted to track down

how this copy of The Resister had wound up in McVeigh's hands, and by reading the fact signature of the paper, they were able to trace it back to Soldier of Fortune's offices. Because it turns out Robert Brown had sent out 900 free copies of this zine to Soldier of Fortune subscribers as part of a promotional offer.

Cool. Guys, this is a good deal. It is a two for one, you know? That's going to spend the money anyway. The Bureau wanted to know if Stephen Berry, Nazi, had any ties to Robert Brown, so they leaked him false intel

and watched as, sure enough, that false intel appeared in Soldier of Fortune magazine. No way. So Brown found himself regularly under investigation and sued, but he always managed to stay in business and just shy of getting convicted

of any felonies. I had committing any felonies, but he absolutely committed some felonies. Allegedly. Allegedly. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the Patriot movement got too toxic for Soldier of Fortune to cover.

But once the 90s ended, Soldier of Fortune was able to pivot yet again by focusing on the dangers of immigrants and Muslim extremists. In 2003, Soldier of Fortune published a two-part article on a group called Ranch Rescue, a border vigilante group that later pistol-whipped and set Rottweilers on immigrants in Arizona and Texas.

In October of 2009, Soldier of Fortune did a feature on Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County. Yeah. What, you guys? This is a funny cartoon. Writing, his tough stand on illegal immigration is what he's getting beat up for by liberals

promoting illegal immigration. These people respect another people. They neglected to mention that dozens of prisoners under Arpaio's jails at that point, often by being illegally restrained and boiled to death in 145 degree cells under Arpaio,

the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office paid out more than $140 million in wrongful death suits. We don't like to talk about that. Shockingly, Robert Brown was not an instant fan of the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. When interviewed about it in 2016, he expressed his belief that the man was a buffoon

and would hand the election to Hillary Clinton. Meaning Robert Brown was optimistic. He has kept his mouth... He's wrong about everything. Yeah, he really is. It's amazing. He's kept his mouth mostly quiet about Trump since then, involving himself primarily

in internal NRA politics. He was once the organization's vice chairman. No way! Soldier of Fortune no longer publishes a physical magazine. Brown had to lay off almost all of his staff and go digital a few years back. The periodical is still online, and still just as racist

as ever, although its increasing irrelevance has made it less dangerous. In late 2019, the online edition of the magazine republished that 2012 article about Rhodesia. Whatever you can say about Robert Brown, he's not a quitter, although he really should be.

Is he still alive? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. That's frustrating, isn't it? It's just one of those things where like, man... I wonder what he's doing right now. It's not good. It's not good.

He's too old and sick to do as much of the bad stuff. No, that's when the chick gets bad. He said like a year or two ago that he thinks he's got one more good war in him, so... That's the right reaction when anyone says

shit like that. Yeah, I got one good war left. Yeah, you got one more war in me. You shouldn't say things like that. Now, everybody, I know this has been an emotionally taxing episode. I know this is an emotionally taxing year, and on top of all that... Well, a lot of them

have to not read Soldier of Fortune anymore, and that's hard. I know, that's really a bummer to everybody. Like, a lot of people weren't prepared for that walking in. Turn in your killing people T-shirts. It's a bummer. It's a bummer. I got, courtesy of Sophie,

a truly unreasonable number of bagels. And I want to pass those out to people in the crowds, and then you're going to take turns tossing them at us, and we'll knock them out of the air. And... And... And... The water boy's not going to be excited about it.

Yeah. And there's already some in the crowd already. Okay, good. Looking at you, Daniel, Jamie, Katie, Cody. Now, if we hit your bagel, you're protected. If we don't, I'm sorry. It's not a perfect science.

This wouldn't be a legitimate medical practice if we claimed it was perfect. I got to put it... Hey, you also have to do diet and exercise with this. Stay off planes, all that stuff. I have to put it back around my neck to draw

it again, because it doesn't feel right unless it's dangerous. It looks good. I mean... Okay. All right, now... What a weird... This is the weirdest shit. So, now... Okay, Robert, he looks like he defends

MacArthur Park every night. Now, Billy, I want to ask you to remember all of the safety precautions we talked about before this. You want to hold the machete real loose. And you want to swing it at the ground? And just as hard as you can with a loose grip.

Just right at the ground, right? Critical. Okay. Senator Buck from Colorado taught me safety. Now... Yeah, you're right. I don't want to chainy the mic stand. By the way, I could use your help with making chainy a verb for that specific reason.

So... I don't think chainy gives a fuck. No. These are just CDs. We're not going to destroy these. You can... Well, fuck we can't. These are just... You guys can have these. These are my first CD.

I bought a bunch of them, and then they... Yeah, bag will be up there. No, it's a CD. You guys don't. Cheers is a heavy fucking flyer. I'm giving you. All right. All right. Billy, it's time. Okay, it's time. Are you ready, Reverend Doctor?

I'm fucking you. All right. Start throwing. Holy shit, they're just coming at us? Oh, yeah. Elga! What a terrible idea. It is... It's... Well, because it just comes out of the darkness.

Oh! Because you can't see them deep enough and they just show up. It's like an old video game. We're not great at this. It's not... Don't cheer. Billy.

Okay. Yeah, nice talk. All right, you do it with the machete. I'm gonna miss, and people don't... I'm just gonna toss it at you. And everything. Oh, shit! Yeah!

Oh, God. Don't... She swung that right at the crowd. You guys... Oh. Holy shit. There are so many bagels on the stage. I'm not cleaning it up.

I don't know how to explain this to me. I... Now, I mean, I don't know if... Oh, we really want to watch the first 15 minutes of the Adam Sandler show. Where he's just walking around like, at a medium pace. Why are all these bagels here? I mean, the good news is that...

And then six months later, he's like, I'm the bagel man, right? Motherfuck! I think... We need that bagel money. One thing we've learned... Oh, there is still... Oh, Billy, Billy. We got to do the throwing, the whole thing between it. Because that's how you make it explode.

Okay. Yeah. Here, just pass that around. This is a new machete. I'm not as used to hitting bagels. Grab as many as they're free. You can take ten. I don't give a shit. It's heavy, so...

You can have that bag. I don't give a fuck. There we go. Ready? I'm doing it vertical or horizontal. So aggressive. Here, throw it high. I'm gonna chop it down. There we go.

And... Oh, so high. So high. This is not... You just can't just sit that down. It's not a handy weapon. Oh, no. Stop... Stop hitting it toward the crowd. If you don't throw things at the crowd,

then they don't know you're not engaged. Can you tell I have a ten-year-old and everything? I'm like, this is... It's not good. I don't want to go to the emergency room. I'll thank you so much. Do it one more. That guy's getting fucked up.

All right, all right. We have to stop doing this because this is actually a very big problem now. So we have to clean everything. But... Yeah. I want you all to take with you the knowledge that through the good graces

you are all now protected. And that's legally... You're not. All right, everybody. Thank you guys for coming. That's all we got. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation

of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We will not allow a difference. But deep down in our hearts, we have a mystery to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.