by Susan Katz Keating These endorsements are about who can lead the fight now. By popular request, and after careful consideration, Soldier of Fortune is making a rare endorsement for the National Rifle Association Board of Directors. Soldier of Fortune and I endorse Major General (Retired) Ken Bowra and Jerry …

Editor’s note: Longtime CIA covert operations officer James Parker Jr. often talked to me about his days in Southeast Asia, including the secret war in Laos. He told stories of another case officer and former Green Beret, George Washington Bacon III, who became a mercenary in Angola. Here is an …

by Susan Katz Keating Morning reveille had not yet sounded at the Marine Corps barracks on Oct 23, 1983, when a Hezbollah terrorist drove a bomb-laden truck into the building in Beirut, Lebanon. The massive blast lifted the barracks off its foundation, and reduced it to rubble – instantly killing …

by Susan Katz Keating It remains one of the strangest and most unsettling unsolved mysteries of the Vietnam War. The stories were too strange to be true; and at first, no one believed them. American patrols in Vietnam returned from the jungles near the DMZ and along the Laotian border …

by Susan Katz Keating “I lie awake at night, filled with regret. I deeply regret that my bombs didn’t kill more people.”  That’s what the so-called “Terror Priest,” Father Patrick Ryan, told me when I asked what he wanted people to know about him. A fierce Irish nationalist, he was …

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.  …

COMMENTARY by Susan Katz Keating The work has been called the most dangerous form of journalism. Amid my daily influx of emails, text messages, and phone calls, I frequently am hit up by people who want to go downrange under my name. They approach me with variants on the following requests. …

by Susan Katz Keating My K-Zero is missing. For those of you who are not up to speed on the plate carrier drama, there was an issue previously when I asked my friend Skip to help test the K-19 carrier from Agilite. The plan was to see whether the one-size …

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 Susan Katz Keating America’s fight in Southeast Asia began before our country knew that a war was unfolding, on a single night when two men were the first to die by enemy fire in Vietnam. It happened on July 8, 1959, in Bien Hoa, some 20 miles outside Saigon. …