I remember this issue displaying the million dollar reward! Awesome! James M. Simpson over at Big Government writes about this in his second of three posts commemorating the magazine:
[….]
….SOF staff has engaged directly in training of allied troops, supplementing the U.S. military’s effort. They were particularly active in Central America’s recent civil wars. A recent Newsmax article by Barrett Tillman relates:
The byword is professionalism. For instance, a 1983 report describing the work of a 12-man SOF team in El Salvador covers 47 pages. It includes weapons maintenance, sound discipline on ambush, field medicine and sanitation.
On September 30th 1995, the El Salvadorian government awarded Brown their Combat Star medal. The citation reads: “In Recognition of Your Combat Support Services With Units of the Armed Forces of El Salvador, 1980 to 1992.”
SOF provided similar training to Nicaragua’s Contras during the Nicaraguan civil war. While they were at it, Brown grounded the Sandinistas’ entire fleet of Soviet Hind attack helicopters by posting the advertisement shown below. I interviewed Unintended Consequences author and firearms expert John Ross about it by phone, who confirmed the following account:
In the 1980s, Danny Ortega’s oppressive Communist regime in Nicaragua received a fleet of Russian Hind helicopters… to put down the Contras. When the Contras started to take heavy losses from these gunships, Bob Brown single-handedly grounded the entire fleet in less than 72 hours. How? By printing a full-page ad in his own magazine offering a million dollar reward to anyone who would bring us one of these choppers. The Russians knew damn well that every Cuban pilot would jump at the chance to fly into nearby El Salvador and get a million bucks and a Miami liquor license for his efforts. Bob’s actions helped cause Ortega’s fall, and stopped the spread of Communism in Central America dead in its tracks.
