All the players, as they used to be called, wanted his attention and insights. For years, everyone who had an interest in frontline and back-country warfare and rebellions knew RKB, and recognized that he was tightly plugged into the world of combat, warriors, and weaponry. The message I want to send today is what RKB means to the world of journalism, and the contribution he has made to writing the first drafts of history the world over.ĭuring his years with SOF, Bob and his reporters have done important work – on the abandoned battlefields of Vietnam and Laos, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and within the convoluted web of international security operations. I’ll tell the story later of how my colleague Mark Tapscott and I then offered RKB a ride into town, and how we stuffed him into the hatchback of a bright red sports car, and proceeded to pepper our captive with story ideas. He repeated his suggestion that I send him “something I can use in SOF.”Ĭheck your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription. So when I ran into him by chance after he’d met with Washington Times editors, I reminded him that I still wanted to write for him. The Colonel, RKB himself, gruffly told me I was welcome to send him something he could actually use. I called SOF headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, and offered to write a story about the mishap. My respondents (and some government types) thought I was trying to raise a private army. At the time, I merely wanted to write about mercs. Brown would sell me the magazine he founded in 1975. I had no way of knowing that one day Robert K. I met “RKB” decades ago in the lobby of the Washington Times newspaper, a couple years after I took out an ad in Soldier of Fortune Magazine, looking for mercenaries. Such as, how I – a conflict journalist who saw urban combat while I was a child in Ireland – came to run this outfit. I’ll go into detail about more of them, below, but first a little backstory. Welcome to Dispatches, the latest in a series of new developments here at Soldier of Fortune.
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