I'm just finishing up listening to the audiobook editions of former Special Forces operator, security consultant, and general adventurer Nick Brokhausen's memoirs, which were all in the "included with your membership" bin at Audible this month. There are three volumes:

We Few, which covers the first half of his career as a MACVSOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations Group) recon operative in the late 1960s;

Whispers in the Tall Grass, which covers the second half of his MACVSOG career; and

Vagabonds: Tourists in the Heart of Darkness, coauthored with colleague Jeff Miller, which covers the adventures of Brokhausen, Miller, and a cast of like-minded weirdos as they tried to parlay their Special Forces experience into some kind of career in security, military-and/or-police training, and other somewhat stranger jobs on the fringes of the business.

All three are quite funny for what they are--you wouldn't think that running recon missions behind enemy lines (insofar as the Vietnam War even had lines) would have much humor value, but in Brokhausen's hands, they do. To hear him tell it, he spent his entire MACVSOG career getting drunk, stealing stuff, pulling elaborate pranks, and oh yeah, occasionally defying death for several days at a time in the jungle with what felt like half the North Vietnamese army trying to track him down and make a lampshade out of his skull.

Vagabonds is even wackier, because Brokhausen and his pals come across in that one like they could have been the inspiration for The Losers--a hard-luck band of soldiers of fortune always searching for the big score, sometimes finding it, but never managing to hang onto it. They run a well-regarded program to train Marines for irregular combat... until one of their business partners "fires" them all and steals the follow-up contract for himself. They rescue kidnapped children from their mother's vindictive Algerian ex-husband and, despite the operation turning into a complete clusterfuck for reasons that are mostly not their fault, manage to pull it off without a scratch... but thanks to the complications, barely clear their expenses. And. So. On. And they keep it up for decades, until they're well into their sixties and clearly getting Too Old For This Shit--but what else do they know how to do? They're not accountants, they're mercenaries.

The tone of all three, but especially Vagabonds, is overtly Thompsonian (at one point one of the crew even makes a direct reference to the "facilitates the tanning process" joke from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), which is probably part of why I've enjoyed them so much. Brokhausen's a little more wry and self-deprecating than HST usually was, but the overall "I am just a piece of this madness and must follow where the Great Magnet leads" vibe is very similar. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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