Soldier of Fortune Magazine

Four true accounts of men who ran out of options, water, and luck on the continent, and found a way through anyway. Africa doesn’t negotiate. When things go wrong, the nearest help may be hours away, and the backup plan may come down to whoever is standing beside you. Soldier of Fortune has collected a few stories of people who found themselves on the wrong side of that equation. Different times, different dangers, same rule. When there’s no rescue coming, you work the problem yourself.

Dispatches 10 Views by Susan Katz Keating World SitRep tracks selected developments in conflicts, armed networks, and illicit activity, focusing on significant shifts and emerging patterns. A smuggling network uses airline passengers to carry hundreds of millions of dollars in cash bound for Hizballah, the US Treasury Department said. The couriers travel aboard commercial flights between Lebanon, Türkiye, the UAE, and Iran.

War 6 Views by Jonathan Stumpf Life with a frontline mortar crew, where an old Soviet weapon fires from the countryside as the war in Ukraine moves toward Chasiv Yar. “Tri, dva, simdesyat,” crackles over the radio. “Tri, dva, sim, nol,” I repeat as I lay the old Soviet 120mm mortar onto the new target. The Belarusian gun chief drops the mortar round – loaded with five propellant increments – down the tube. I check that the baseplate is still seated properly in the pit and that the numbers are right.

The author (right) in 2003. War 23 Views by Mark Grdovic In the spring of 2003, the US Army’s 10th Special Forces Group tied down 60 percent of the Iraqi Army north of Baghdad while US and coalition forces attacked from the south. Mark Grdovic was on the ground as part of the mission he helped design. The following is a chapter from his book, Those Who Face Death: The Untold Story of Special Forces and the Iraqi-Kurdish Resistance.

by Jerry Kraus South African parachute veterans, a black Super Huey, and one hell of a water jump over Florida. Last fall, I attended a small reunion of Soldier of Fortune friends at the NRA Whittington Center in Raton, New Mexico.

Some never made it off the drawing board. Others are carried, worn, and remembered more than a century later. Walk across a modern military installation and WWI keeps turning up. It’s in the arms room, the protective-equipment locker, procurement contracts, and even over the radio. The war produced an extraordinary amount of raw invention into four years. Some worked. Some never made it beyond paper.

by Igor R. Salikov Excerpted from Putin’s ‘Viper’ Detachment: One Man’s Role in a Russian Special Forces Unit and the Invasion of Ukraine, by Igor R. Salikov, published by Frontline Books. War is a tiresome thing, even in conversation. Especially if you tell the truth. These are not dashing stories and descriptions of great battles on new equipment, movie shootouts from modern blasters, launching deadly rays into columns of the advancing enemy.

by Sean “Sako” Sakinofsky Few movie knives are as famous as the custom Jimmy Lile survival Bowie carried by John Rambo in First Blood. It became one of the defining images of 1980’s action films. The likelihood of a Green Beret medic like Rambo walking out of military service with such a knife isn’t impossible, but it’s probably not very plausible, especially for someone returning from Vietnam.

After that night our extended holiday in Mozambique ended. The war had come to us. Story from Jaime De Melo. Written by Royce de Melo Things had been very quiet since my battalion’s arrival by ship in Mozambique in August 1970. We had been posted to various sectors in the north for three months, skipping from one post to the other before my platoon was exclusively stationed in Chioco, a village in Tete province near the Malawi border.

Security 9,109 Views by A.R. Fomenko Hidden beneath the border, sophisticated tunnel networks have turned Ceuta into one of Europe’s most enduring corridors for organized cross-border smuggling. VIENNA BUREAU – It was the kind of pursuit that runs slow and cold. Spanish authorities hunted in vain for years to uncover a smuggling tunnel between Morocco and a tiny exclave of Spain within the North African country.