Para USA was not always known as Para USA. It may be better known to many readers as Para-Ordnance. Ironically, the company that took the M1911 to new heights was not from America, it was from Toronto, Canada.

PROFESSIONAL CONTEST

It’s not easy to hit a small target bobbing along in the current as your helicopter shudders around you, 200 feet in the air. Add the pressure of international competition and things can get really difficult.

AN ALL AMERICAN NICARAGUAN

Part of David Baez’s story is All American – high school in San Francisco, a hippie commune in New Jersey, a blonde, blue-eyed wife and a dog, the U.S. Army’s Green Berets and a tryout for Delta Force, America’s premier military unit.

The Falklands War of 1982 was one of the defining conflicts of the decade. The United Kingdom fought a war practically on its own thousands of miles from home. However, the conflict spread wider – and included the island of South Georgia, where Royal Marine Section Commander George Thomsen would become a legend. Part II continues with the bloody battle.

In the Oct 2009 SOF issue we began a series on the adventures of the colorful Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County and his accomplishments, America’s toughest Sheriff.

Not long after Mr. L. James Sullivan designed the .223 caliber Mini-14 for William B. Ruger in 1967, a U.S. Army general officer told Bill Ruger that had the rifle been available a few years earlier, the U.S. Army would have adopted it. It’s true that a decade earlier, General Willard G. Wyman, commander of the Continental Army Command (CONARC), had twisted Eugene Stoner’s arm to design a rifle similar to the U.S. M2 carbine in the new “twenty-two” caliber.

Soldier of Fortune was at full force at the May 2009 NRA Convention in Phoenix, Arizona. We met with Sheriff Joe Arpaio for two afternoons to interview America’s most controversial hard-core sheriff, and particularly to discuss his hard-core illegal immigration policy. This is a guy SOF had to meet.

WHY DID THE CIA PROCEED WITH A BROKEN PLAN?

The Cold War was fully underway. The two great superpowers were in a military standoff, but surrogate forces were in conflict in various parts of the world.

SAS troopers carried out their first major parachute operations since the 1956 Suez Crisis in Iraq, targeting insurgent leaders and bomb-making factories.