ofcourse ive seen it on newstands forever and occationally picked up a copy.....what is everyones opinion of it? never hear much about it.....recently picked up 30 of them from 85-91 off an auction site for less than a buck each shipped and since im always on the look out for new firearms related reading i thought what the hell....

flipping through a few i noticed that these are doing the time when our own sharpsguy was the knife/blade editor for the magazine....having met Bill at the hog hunt i cant imagine he would throw his lot in with a bunch of guys not worth the time....

Used to take it, had some decent info in it.

Subscribed back in the 80s and 90s. Was a good source for world news back then.

I'm sure TRH will chime in...

Haven't read it since early eighties. I remember the donation drive to buy a bullet to kill a commie for mommy. There use to be some hardcore stuff in the magazine.

Used to see it over here from time to time..

Odd good article, but mostly seemed to be aimed at the "Wannabe's"..

The pics seemed to show guys in fatigues, complete with "Magnum" 'taches, but were somehow more "Village People" than ex-USMC or similar..

I always figured back in the day (prior to the internet) subscribing to Soldier of Fortune magazine was a quick way to get a file with your name on it in the FBI

He is the editor don't you know?

That made me grin!

I bet Jorge would have posted that when someone said something about the government listening to everyone's phone calls and flying drones around to spy on them.

That's what he waits for - to discredit someone with his vast knowledge of how things actually are.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I had a good friend who had been a Marine in a recon platoon, serving in Vietnam. He was wounded twice. After his service, he later became a successful documentary producer in L.A.

He told me he went to one of the SoF conventions in Las Vegas, thinking he might run into some former Marines he knew. I believe it was the second or third one they put on.

He said he was wearing a nice sport coat, button down shirt, slacks, polished shoes, etc. Everyone there was wearing cammies and most were overweight, and far too young to have been in Vietnam. The few he talked to had not even been in the military but were sporting all the "wannabee" accessories.

My friend said it was a farce. He never went to another SoF Conventon. He did say he won several hundred dollars at the Blackjack tables so the trip was not a total loss.

I didn't know SoF was still in business.

L.W.

Magazine was sued in the 80's for running a classified ad for the completion of "high risk assignments", which turned out to include murder for hire. Can't remember how it turned out, but the readership was likely stereotyped pretty quick.

Do you normally pause and think before responding? (rhetorical question). BTW, where is the proof of the government actually listening to ALL of our conversations or the FBI's list of SOF subscribers? (source please). Snowdon's apparently been remiss in providing that.

these older ones are more interesting than the couple of new ones ive picked up in the last 10 years.....course part of thats prolly cause i met Bill a few months ago so reading his articles is interesting and then there is the stuff on the Soviets in Afghanistan so thats interesting given the context of today.....seems alot more on firearms and focusing on different military groups world wide than "hey look what i did" articles that ive seen in newer editions....

I can't compete with that wit

if thats the case why are you on this site......if they are keeping lists this site is near as good as any for getting your name on a list....

heck, from the looks of some posters here, they are creating their own list of names to send to the government.

I read a few in the 80's. All I remember is the pictures of dead people with horrendous wounds and the publisher's little sojourn to Afghanistan fighting alongside the people we are now fighting against. Back then they were known as mujahideen.

Never saw a copy. But I love my memory of how it came about and what it soon became.

The guy who started it suggested it to my boss, who sneered at him and impolitely told him to get lost. The guy went ahead on his own � got the backing that he needed and produced a magazine that soon far out-stripped ours in paid circulation.

A later colleague of mine pretty accurately described my boss as "equal parts idiot and ass hole."

Have not read one since Peter Kokalis left. Late 1970's thru the 90's had fairly decent info though.

Fred Reed worked for them for a while.

I suspect his writeup about it is fairly accurate.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/PlayboySOF.shtml

Oh how I can and will use that description in the future! I know a few...:)

been a subscriber for the better part of 25 yrs

Mike

I read it when I was a teenager...then I grew up.

Yup, a GREAT "Mud Check" on places one might be called on to visit, working in the ex-pat theater. Their monthly evaluations of hot spots proved to be good intel for planning and preparation.

Gotta' say that I paid a LOT more attention to what SOF and WHO had to say about areas of prospective activity than the "State Department" or Embassies of ANY Nation.

.....it's a jungle out there,....make it back intact and healthy.

GTC

http://www.sofmag.com/

I've always liked the sobriquet that one of the guys at Brownell's hung on such pretenders �

Cabbage-Patch Commandos

I used to read it when it first came out, this was in the late 70's/early 80's and I was a Screaming Eagle at the time; most of the articles were about mercenaries in Rhodesia.

I knew some of the writers(served with them), knew of the guys they wrote about, and knew a few guys who went to Rhodesia upon ETS.

I remember some guys waited eagerly for each issue, and then bought all of the latest kill gear. I will credit(blame) SoF for the adoption of the M92 Beretta.

Thanks for this link!! That was a good read! I wish he would have mentioned Leroy Thompson. I wonder what his opinion of Leroy was???

I loved SoF in the old days! They also put out a sister publication called "Survive", which catered to the survivalist movement, now called "preppers" in or politically correct, enlightened world. I've been working over the past few years to locate and purchase the entire run of "Survive", and have pretty much accomplished that goal. Now I have the urge to start picking up old issues of SoF for nostalgias sake. The early issues were pretty heady stuff, just reading it made you feel more manly somehow. Oops! "manly" wouldn't be politically correct anymore, would it?