1/14/2024 0 Comments 1970s soldier of fortune magazineWe had contacts and occasional “contact” with all these people. In the north it warred with Khun Sa, the Opium Warlord, but also was in contact with the Lao Resistance, the Cambodian resistance, and in conflict with the Communist Party of Thailand and the Communist Party of Malaysia. Thailand was in several wars internally and on its borders. I said Coyne would shoot it and I’d write it up if he did, but he didn’t want to do it alone, so we dropped that one. He was disappointed when Coyne and I flat refused. “C’mon, we’ll drink cobra blood and take pictures. I wasn’t enthusiastic, but Bob was on fire to try it. This was a specific treatment for virility. Pay a vendor a little money, and he’d slash a cobra’s throat and you could drink cobra blood directly from the cobra. On the way back he fell into conversation with our cab driver, who told us it was possible to drink cobra blood early in the morning near Lumpini Park. Once he and I went to his old headquarters to transact some business. Heinie had been the last US general out of Laos. Heinie was there looking for American POWs in Vietnam and Laos, which was the major reason we were there. In 1982 he and I, Jim Coyne, SOF correspondent and doorgunner in Vietnam, and Tom Reisinger, the SOF business manager, former SF medic in Vietnam, shared a penthouse apartment in Bangkok with BG Heinie Aderholt, USAF (ret.), and my then wife, Kathy, an ace photographer, administrator, social coordinator and intrepid correspondent. At one point he mounted his own insurgency in Laos. During the time I knew him he made three trips to Afghanistan, getting in firefights with the Soviets every time. He has that boundless enthusiasm, and a knife in the teeth “Charge!” instinct that tends to put him in situations that most people would prefer to avoid, like sitting in an ambush position in the middle of the night in Rhodesia, or hosing down a Soviet camp in Afghanistan with a Dashika. I love the guy, but I think of him as the world’s oldest seventh grader. Every individual is unique, but Bob is more unique than most. So I moved to Boulder and started working for them full time. I did, and wrote them a three-part series that was well received. Next time I heard from SOF they wanted me to go to Beirut. Not bad for two hours work, but then again it’s about seventy percent of all the money I’ve made in a fifty year career as a military journalist. Eventually it was made into a Disney movie, and I made about a quarter of a million for it. It had taken me about two hours to write, and I thought $250 an hour was pretty good pay. The article was adapted from a term paper I had done in grad school on the three best stories I had covered as 5th Group Information Officer. I had no idea which article, but it was Operation Dumbo Drop, and SOF paid me $500 for it. Then, more than four years later, in Fayetteville AR, I got a postcard from Bob Poos, the new editor, a former Korean War Marine and AP bureau chief, accepting my article. In the next few years I made four trips to Boulder for other reasons, but every time I tossed the SOF offices, and never found my box. He took my cardboard box back to Boulder and promptly lost it. My lady at the time was nonplussed when he ate his salad with his hands. Why not? It was only 500 miles out of his way.He stayed for dinner. When I told him I had a cardboard box full of stuff I had written about SF in Vietnam, he said he was going to reserve summer camp and he’d swing by and look at it. So, I called this guy, whose name, as it turned out, was LTC Bob Brown, and who it also turned out had been a captain in the 5th SFGA in Vietnam. Before my last Vietnam tour I had sold a couple of military pieces to Esquire, but times had changed and to achieve publication about Vietnam in a mainstream publication in 1975 it had to be subtitled mea culpa. That struck me as one of the nuttier ideas I had ever encountered, but on the other hand they might be interested in Vietnam stuff that I hadn’t been able to sell anywhere. Sometime in 1975 I read a piece in the local paper that some guy in Boulder CO had started a trade journal for mercenaries.
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