Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
Four true accounts of men who ran out of options, water, and luck on the continent, and found a way through anyway.
Africa doesn’t negotiate. When things go wrong, the nearest help may be hours away, and the backup plan may come down to whoever is standing beside you. Soldier of Fortune has collected a few stories of people who found themselves on the wrong side of that equation. Different times, different dangers, same rule. When there’s no rescue coming, you work the problem yourself.
Deadly Venom: I Was Bitten by a Black Mamba Snake in Africa
A journalist takes what’s supposed to be a quiet break between reporting assignments, a week of photography in South Africa before returning to a dangerous story on Al-Shabaab in Somalia. Instead, one of the most venomous snakes on the continent turns the trip into a fight to survive, followed by a long, difficult recovery far from the story he’d actually gone to write.
This piece captures something readers may not expect: the deadliest threat on a reporting trip through unstable regions wasn’t a militia or a border checkpoint, it was a creature in the brush during what was meant to be downtime. It’s a reminder that danger in Africa doesn’t wait for a byline-worthy moment to show up, and that survival sometimes has nothing to do with the mission a person came to do in the first place.
An Angry Rhino, Three Rookie Trackers, and Trouble in Africa: ‘She Wants to Gore Us’
Anti-poaching work is often framed as a fight against armed criminals, but this story shows a different, more immediate danger: the animals the trackers are there to protect. A green tracker and his partner find themselves in the direct path of a mother rhino defending her calf, with no time for anything but instinct and terrain.
There’s no weapon that solves this problem cleanly, and no backup arriving in time to matter. This piece strips survival down to its rawest form, a physical, split-second reckoning with an animal that outweighs a vehicle and has already decided to charge. It’s a story about learning, in real time, what all the training beforehand was actually for.
Alone in the Sahara, SAS Corporal Jack Sillito Survived the Impossible
In 1942, a British Special Air Service corporal finds himself alone in the Libyan desert, more than a hundred miles from camp, with a rapidly dwindling flask of water and no realistic hope of rescue. What follows became a benchmark for endurance inside the SAS, the standard every soldier who came after him was measured against.
This story addresses the desert’s oldest, most basic threat: heat, distance, and the slow arithmetic of dehydration. There’s no enemy to fight here, only the math of survival, and Sillito’s account is a study in what the human body and will can withstand when every external option has run out. It’s a stark contrast to the animal-encounter stories, proof that the terrain alone can be just as lethal.
Captured in the Desert: A Soldier’s Misfortune With the French Foreign Legion in Algeria
A century ago, the French Foreign Legion offered a place where a man escaping his past could disappear entirely and become someone else. This story follows one such Legionnaire through the harsh realities of desert deployment in Algeria, where survival wasn’t only about the terrain, but about the isolation of having chosen a path with no way back.
Sometimes it’s not the absence of a rescue team, it’s the absence of an old identity to return to. Decades later, that same unforgiving desert still holds stories like this one, proof that some kinds of vanishing have always been possible for those willing to risk everything to disappear.
