The Fire Pit

The world of anti-poaching is difficult and dangerous. Especially when you come face to face with an enraged rhinoceros. by S. Anderson I’ve always been fascinated by the African Bush. Lions, Leopards, Cape Buffalo, Elephant, and Rhino. The Big 5. Endless rolling hills, dense bush, and undisturbed ecology. Growing up, …

At Soldier of Fortune’s Boulder office, a ringing telephone could bring a request from Hunter S. Thompson or the FBI. Former editor Martin Kufus recalls life at the magazine in this excerpt from his memoir, Plow the Dirt but Watch the Sky. by Martin Kufus The phone call had come in …

by Mikial The author tells Soldier of Fortune: “All of my work was with Department of Defense contractors. We never considered ourselves mercenaries although we were called mercenaries, gunslingers, and worse at times. It was difficult and dangerous work and also sometimes boring. We often lived rough in camps and …

by Martin Kufus Somali piracy already was waning in 2012 when I arrived on the Indian Ocean as a member of a four-man rifle team guarding a client’s cargo ship against hijack. It was my first time aboard an ocean-going vessel. This one was an Asian-flagged liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) …

This particular quietness may have been the reverberation of something spectral moving through the earth. by Heath Hansen I slowly poured a bit of water into my MRE heater bag and waited as the chemicals reacted and began to warm. I slid the main course into the packet and folded …

We ate in Soviet mess halls and fired AK-47 rifles on their shooting range. by Rick Kiernan, The War Horse On Oct. 28, 1991, I settled into an hours-long commercial flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Moscow. By year’s end, the iconic Soviet flag would fly over the Kremlin for the …

by Friedrich Seiltgen  The young aviator never returned from Okinawa, but his bones found a home among the Navy’s Jolly Rogers. Ensign Jack Ernie was a pilot assigned to the original VF-17, the Jolly Rogers. The unit was legendary and ruled the skies above the Solomon Islands, with a Pacific …

The Marines were hunting us, our water was running low, and then the bees attacked. Before extraction, we had one last move to make. The metal monster boomed over us and arced up and away to the south. It had disgorged its 13 passengers – a U.S. Navy SEAL team, …

A routine pre-deployment paperwork check at Fort Bragg uncovered a situation nobody expected. by Heath Hansen “Listen up, Charlie Company. You all know we’re deploying to Iraq in a few weeks. On top of all the equipment, weapons, supplies, and gear we need to prepare, there’s a lot of paperwork …

Aboard a hot, bucking C-130, a young 101st Airborne paratrooper fought to hold himself together until the stick began to move. by David F. Crosby The C-130 rocked back and forth and lurched up and down. The late summer air made flying low in the afternoon turbulent, and the aircraft’s …