Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
Along the remote U.S. southern border, Soldier of Fortune’s Heath Hansen has found tools of the trade, warnings, and objects whose purpose remains a mystery.
Walk a smuggling route along the U.S.-Mexico line, and the trail itself starts to talk. Soldier of Fortune correspondent Heath Hansen has spent years in these corridors, and some of his most unusual finds are the objects people leave in the dirt.
“During my many trips to the U.S. southern border, I have always come across telltale signs of illegal activity,” Hansen says. “From black plastic gallon jugs that don’t reflect the sun’s glare, to carpet shoes used for covering footprints, to macabre doll heads placed in conspicuous places to serve as warning signs for anyone unaware of who owns the territory, they have become obvious indicators of dangerous ground.”
Here’s how he’s covered it for Soldier of Fortune.
Cartel Carpet Shoes on the Border: A Fake Set of Green Beret Slippers, Discarded in No-Man’s Land
They look like a cheap Halloween costume crossed with a shorn teddy bear, and they’re one of the smartest tricks in the smuggler’s kit. Smugglers slip on soft carpet shoes to cross sandy ground without leaving deep prints, then ditch them when the terrain turns rocky. Hansen found a discarded pair bearing part of the U.S. Special Forces shoulder patch. Nobody thinks the cartels were trying to pass as Green Berets, but the image sticks with you. It’s a small, odd clue to how carefully these crossings are planned.
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At ‘OP Baby’s Head’: Water for the Cartels, Cross-Border Mules, and a Skull in the Badlands
The place got its name from a Mexican doll head that a Sinaloa Cartel member stuck on a post near the border years ago. It was a warning to anyone crossing cartel turf without permission. Hansen spent a week with Arizona Border Recon watching the gap that carries the name. He saw scouts working satellite phones, smuggling mules waiting in the shade, and a supply drop that raised hard questions about who was helping whom. Then there’s the skull, with a clear crack on one side, that AZBR founder Tim Foley found in the desert. He believes it belonged to a murder victim dumped by cartel rivals.
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A Strange Doll Stands Watch Over a Remote Ridge Campsite Near the San Diego Border
This time Hansen isn’t on patrol. He’s hiking with his dogs in the mountains outside San Diego when they stop at a pile of fish tins. Nearby he finds the usual leftovers of a smuggler staging spot; kids’ backpacks, space blankets, trash bags. Then he notices a small rubber baby doll with one arm missing, glued to a rock and facing the camp. It’s a spooky echo of the Baby’s Head doll hundreds of miles east. Hansen admits he may be stringing coincidences together, but the doll is hard to shake. Some of these relics may be trash, and some may be messages. The tricky part is telling which is which.
