Best of SOF

Editor’s note: We get a lot of emails from men asking us to help them find work as mercenaries. I used to tell them we don’t run an employment agency. Now, I just offer them the inside scoop, and send this story about some soldiers of misfortune who learned a …

by Jim Lechner Editor’s note: Army Ranger (Ret) Jim Lechner wrote the following hymn to comradeship and patriotism – an essay that reverberates among those who long for the lost clarity of war. A veteran of multiple Special Operations missions, Lechner was wounded in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in …

by Cliff Wade Iraq, 2006 We found ourselves in the home of an Iraqi family during a massive clearing operation in an area characterized by terrain varying between urban landscape, farmland, palm groves, and small villages. We had been clearing routes of improvised explosive devices all morning. We had been …

by Susan Katz Keating The Soviets called it Chernaya Gora: Black Mountain. That is where a unit of elite Spetsnaz forces met their deaths in Afghanistan, atop a remote observation post overlooking Kunar. I learned about the treacherous place in 2015, while researching an article for the Army National Guard.  …

by Susan Katz Keating The promise of Red Mercury infiltrated the underworld of gullible would-be tyrants, despots, and autocrats, sparking imaginations and a frenzy of deal-making. But what was this mysterious substance? It was the ultimate black market sensation. A substance so powerful it could transform even a lone terrorist …

by Susan Katz Keating “The Taliban are behind my door.” The whispered words came through the phone in the pitch of night, hours after Kabul fell on August 15, 2021. My friend “Hakim,” a man I had been trying from afar to help leave Afghanistan, called me from inside his …

by Elon Perry The Israeli commandos wrote their farewell letters to be delivered only in the event they were killed on the high-stakes operation. Then they boarded their flights to Uganda, for a rescue raid that stunned the world. Told by a former IDF commando. Sunday morning, 27 June 1976. …

by Gatimu Juma Publisher’s note: Gatimu Juma, who reports from the Horn of Africa, told me last June he was working on a story about the Al-Shabaab terror group. Nearly a year went by, and I couldn’t reach him. Finally he surfaced to tell me where he was all this …

Depressed over the April 30, 1975 fall of Saigon, this Army veteran went to see a new movie. by Jack Hawkins Released in Los Angeles in 1978, The Deer Hunter was already becoming a legendary film by the time it hit “flyover country” a few months later. I was between …

by Susan Katz Keating “There’s a certain sound…” The song stuck with him for years afterwards. He was being marched to his execution in the jungles of Vietnam, and had been ordered to carry a radio to pick up “Radio Hanoi,” but he secretly dialed in to a station that …