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 …
Read More »Missed by a Keystroke: A Typo Enabled the Boston Bomber to Slip Through Security Net
COMMENTARY by Susan Katz Keating The case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev is a grim lesson in what happens when the security safety net has holes. Long before the smoke cleared on Boylston Street in April 2013, long before the manhunt in Watertown gripped the nation, warnings had come in. They arrived not …
Read More »A Nuclear Blast Would Bring Hell on Earth: Blinding Light, Searing Heat, and Intense Winds
The degree of hazard depends on the type of weapon, height of the burst, distance from the detonation, hardness of the target, and explosive yield of the weapon. by Susan Katz Keating Russian President Vladimir Putin again raised the specter of nuclear war when he announced that a conventional attack …
Read More »The Guns of 1916: Ireland’s Easter Rising Was Fought With Smuggled Rifles, Stolen Revolvers, and Improvised Weapons
by Susan Katz Keating The Asgard came in low, riding heavier than it should have for a vessel of its size. Below deck, rifles were stacked four feet high. The ship sailed into Dublin Bay, through one of the most consequential gun-running lanes in modern military history. THE ARMS SITUATION …
Read More »Silenced in the Streets: What the No Kings Protests Left Behind
by Susan Katz Keating The No Kings protests advocate for people who live on the margins. We found the ones they pushed aside. The bomb went off on a Saturday afternoon in a town center full of shoppers. Omagh. August 1998. Twenty-nine people and two unborn children who had nothing …
Read More »No Kings, No Credit: Lenin’s Old Playbook Gets a Reboot, Without the Byline
COMMENTARY by Susan Katz Keating I’m told that Vladimir Lenin has been spotted again racing through American streets with fire in his eyes, trying to make it to the revolution – but they started without him. Poor Vlad. He dragged himself out of the mausoleum, dodged Teslas and taco trucks, only …
Read More »Soldier of Fortune Was Forged in the Fires of Vietnam
COMMENTARY by Susan Katz Keating Fifty-plus years of Soldier of Fortune brings one question repeatedly to my inbox: Where did this all begin? The answer is not a mystery; it’s history. Soldier of Fortune grew from Vietnam, and its legacy still drives us today. To understand Soldier of Fortune, you have to …
Read More »We Knew They Weren’t Coming Back: Vietnam’s Brutal ‘9 Days in May’
by Susan Katz Keating“We weren’t Special Forces or Airborne. We were mostly just a bunch of draftee grunts who turned out to be damn good soldiers.” The soldiers proceeded cautiously through the jungle highlands west of Pleiku, near the Cambodian border, on the morning of May 18, 1967. The men …
Read More »‘We Shoot Fascists’: A Soldier of Fortune Correspondent Was Threatened Before He Asked One Question
by Susan Katz Keating My correspondent called me from downrange on assignment in Minneapolis. I cut him off when I heard the threats. “Get out. Now,” I said. I am not printing his true name in this article. That decision is mine — one I made as his publisher, and …
Read More »Crossings in Wartime: Sabotage in the Supply Chain
In Part 2 of our investigative series, we examine how booby-trapped equipment slipped into wartime aid networks in Ukraine, targeting Russian soldiers. by Susan Katz Keating The Russian soldier placed the FPV goggles on his head, and flipped the switch on his drone console. He expected to see real-time images …
Read More »
Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers

