http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/magazine/sleep-away-camp-for-postmodern-cowboys.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130721The men of Team America were missing an assault rifle. “Everybody pulled a rifle, right, guys?” Eric asked. A 38-year-old ex-Navy lieutenant, he had blond hair to his shoulders and a few days’ worth of deployment stubble.
“We’re supposed to have eight,” Brian said. He and Eric worked SWAT together in Virginia and sometimes hunted together, too.
Brandon, 33, had six 9-millimeter Glock pistols stuffed in his pockets. He surveyed the room: “Two . . . four . . . six. . . . “
Carey, a sniper, tried to stifle a laugh. “Good thing they don’t have a counting event.”
It was a spring Saturday at the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center (Kasotc) in Jordan. The members of Team America were in their barracks after a morning at the range, cleaning their guns so the desert sand wouldn’t jam the actions. Kasotc — it rhymes with aquatic — sits in the blasted-out canyon of a rock quarry on Yajouz Road about 15 miles north of Amman. It’s a state-of-the-art counterterrorism-training base, with 6,000 acres ringed by sentry towers and razor wire. The sound of gunfire echoed off the limestone cliffs, spooking the sheep on nearby bluffs.
Team America were at Kasotc for the fifth-annual Warrior Competition in which 32 teams from 17 countries and the Palestinian territories would compete against one another on mock missions. Organizers have referred to it as “the Olympics of counterterrorism”: over the next four days, the teams would raid buildings, storm hijacked jets, rescue hostages and shoot targets with live ammunition, all while being scored for speed and accuracy. It was a stage-managed showcase for the 21st-century soldier — not the humble G.I., but the post-9/11 warrior, the superman in the shadows, keeping the world safe from murky threats. Bill Patterson, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier who oversees training at the base, said, “When you’re on that Black Hawk at 2 in the morning, on your way to target, and the bad guy you’ve been hunting for months is in that building, and there’s 25 guys with machine guns and only 6 of you — that’s a thrill you’ll never forget.”
Around 11 a.m., two Boeing Little Bird attack helicopters roared overhead, sending the base’s resident black tabby scurrying for cover. It was time for the opening
ceremony. As the teams gathered on the parade ground, they sized one another up. The Swiss team, the Skorpions of the Zürich Stadtpolizei, looked like off-duty ski instructors in their matching black jackets and mirrored sunglasses. The Lebanese Black Panthers, the SWAT team for Lebanon’s Internal Security Force, strutted in black hoodies and combat boots. The Jordanian special ops team stood straight-backed in their red berets, quietly confident in their home-field advantage. And the Russians, a bunch of ex-Spetsnaz and K.G.B. members who now worked for a private bodyguard service based in London and owned by an Iranian, showed off Chechen bullet wounds and waved the flag of the Russian Airborne. Its motto: “Nobody but Us.”
Everyone agreed that the Canadians would be tough. They were from Canada’s Special Operations Regiment. Recently back from a tour in Afghanistan, they sported combat beards, intimidating tattoos (Revelation 6:8, “And behold, a pale horse: and its rider’s name was Death”) and the kind of burly frames that come from carrying big guns over tall mountains for weeks at a time. “They look like the dudes from ‘300,’ ” a member of one of four U.S. teams said. Another said, “They look like werewolf lumberjacks.”
But most eyes were on the Chinese. China had two teams, both from the Chinese People’s Armed Police Force. The Snow Leopards were the favorite: formerly the Snow Wolf Commando unit, they were a counterterrorism squad established ahead of the Beijing Olympics. There was a rumor going around that they had been to eight more-specialized competitions and never finished lower than second. (The Chinese maintained this was their first competition.) They marched to the mess hall in formation and did push-ups for fun. By comparison, the American teams — three Army and one Marine Corps, who were at that moment posing for team pictures and smoking cigars — looked like high-school kids on a field trip.
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Team America, with their anonymous uniforms and nonregulation scruff, were the competition’s wild cards. The Dutch marines were pretty sure they were Deltas. The Canadians thought they were SEALs. During the ceremony, a Kasotc representative accidentally introduced them as “American Special Forces,” adding to the intrigue.
The truth was, Team America wasn’t actually called Team America. It was a nickname they chose for themselves, after the movie by the “South Park” creators — a sendup of patriotism that they knowingly repurposed as actual patriotism. Their official name was Team I.D.S., for International Defense Systems — a military supplier that specialized in tactical equipment and ballistics gear. In keeping with the corporate outsourcing of war, I.D.S. was a sponsor of the competition. The team was here not to represent the United States, but to promote the brand.
“Our guys are SEALs, S.R.T.” — special-response teams — “SWAT, ex-Secret Service,” Sebastian Van Duin, a consultant for I.D.S., said. He was a former intelligence specialist from the French Foreign Legion, who knew the team’s leader, Fred, from a job overseas. (What kind of job? They would rather not say.) A former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security, Fred had chased boats in the Caribbean, drug traffickers through Peru, a sniper in post-Katrina New Orleans and gunrunners in Iraq. For the Warrior Competition, he assembled a crew of guys he knew from his time as an S.R.T. commander in Washington, D.C. Most were ex-military: Brian, 35, had served in an elite Coast Guard unit, and Carey, 35, was an antiterrorism sniper in the Marines. Because they still worked in law enforcement, some undercover, they asked to be identified by their first names. One of them, A., did sensitive work for the government and asked to be identified only by a middle initial. Most of the other teams also requested anonymity for their members for security reasons.
These were self-proclaimed “regular guys” who chewed tobacco, talked camo patterns and sometimes educated one another in the ways of the world. (“Dude,” Brandon said one afternoon, “I just saw two Jordanian guys holding hands! They do that?” “Dude!” A. said. “That’s how you know that’s your bro!”) In idle moments, they would cast themselves in the kind of action movies that celebrate the soldiers they want to be: Brandon was Kevin Bacon. Fred was Bruce Willis. Carey, the “funny, fat guy,” was Jason Statham, “plus 40 pounds.” And A. was Matt Damon — the trained killer.
After some speeches by the Jordanian brass, the teams watched a demonstration by Jordan’s renowned counterterrorism unit, the 71st. A dozen commandos in black balaclavas stormed an Airbus A-300, while a dog named Nero apprehended a bad guy in a bite suit. The finale was a big gun battle that lasted five minutes and involved about $10,000 worth of live ammunition; but, for safety reasons, the spectacle unfolded on a shooting range that no one in the stands could see. It sounded very impressive.
Afterward there was a reception with tea and carrot cake, and the soldiers mingled with diplomats and military attachés. Over in a corner, Team America plotted how to smuggle a bottle of whiskey onto the base. “Hey, look,” Eric said, “they’re giving out free Cokes.” He walked over and stuffed a few in his pockets, to use as mixers later.
The Kingdom of Jordan is shaped like a holstered gun, which isn’t a bad metaphor for the country as a whole. A constitutional monarchy with a well-trained military and a relatively secular population, it is — for now — one of the most stable countries in a very volatile neighborhood: Syria to the north, Israel to the west, Saudi Arabia to the south, Iraq to the east. Jordan’s intelligence agency, the G.I.D., is a close partner of the C.I.A. in the Arab world, and over the past five years, the United States has given Jordan more than $3.3 billion in aid and pledged an additional $200 million to help cope with the refugees who have poured over the Syrian border since August.
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Kasotc was aid of a kind, too. The base was built by a U.S. construction firm on land donated by the king and paid for by a Defense Department program that provides weapons and infrastructure to friendly foreign governments. In the opening-day speech, Frank Toney, a retired U.S. brigadier general and commander of the Army Special Forces, who now works as Kasotc’s director, said, “We believe that if your partners are strong, then you will be strong.”
Training at the base is handled by the Jordanian armed forces and the ViaGlobal Group, a military contractor based in Annapolis, Md., and the base is staffed by ex-Army Rangers, Deltas and SEALs. (They don’t like to talk about it, but they helped teach the actors playing SEALs in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”) A week of training at the for-profit Kasotc can cost up to $250,000, including lodging, meals and ammunition; the Warrior Competition, however, was free to any team that could get there. “This is a marketing tool for Kasotc,” Patterson said. “We’re advertising our capabilities.”
Most countries send their elite teams to the Warrior Competition — the Malaysian special forces, the French Commandos Parachutistes de l’Air — but the United States often sends infantry regulars. Several Special Ops veterans said they wouldn’t risk tipping their capabilities. “Even when we train guys, you never teach them all the tricks,” one said. “Who knows? We might be back fighting them in a couple of years.”
There was another U.S. presence at Kasotc, this one more subdued: a couple hundred Army troops in combat fatigues, who spent their days lifting weights and smoking cigarettes and trying not to be noticed. They had come to Jordan to plan for a possible spillover of the Syrian conflict. The troops did most of their work in an aluminum-sided building with blacked-out windows and satellite dishes on the roof, separated from the rest of the base by concrete barriers and barbed wire. An Army M.P. stood guard nearby, shouting, “Don’t look over the wall!” at anyone who got too close.
One afternoon, on the patio outside the base’s store, two of these American soldiers sat at a table, drinking Red Bulls and snacking on Doritos. A Kasotc promotional video was playing on a video screen, and they watched it with interest. In one scene, a group of trainees practiced evasive maneuvers on the driving track. In another, they shot their way down a mock city block while explosions went off around them.
“Dude,” one said, “I want to do that!”
The other nodded glumly. “All this cool stuff, and we can’t do any of it.”
Luca Locatelli for The New York Times
Members of “Team America,” from left: Matthew, Fred, Sebastian and Brian.
The next morning, the Chinese jumped out to an early lead, winning the first three events. They were well on their way to winning the overall trophy. Watching them conquer an event called Method of Entry — breaking down three doors, scaling the side of a building, shooting a series of steel targets and sprinting back to the start — was simultaneously impressive and terrifying. Team America, who spent the previous night in their barracks drinking contraband rum, had trouble getting inside: they wasted five minutes trying to open the door the wrong way and finished near the middle of the pack.
At 12:45, the call to prayer sounded over the loudspeaker, and the teams went off to have lunch. A sign on the mess hall read, “Reminder: no weapons inside the dining facility.” When the Canadians learned they had placed second in a shooting event, sandwiched between the two Chinese teams, they joked that the third-place team was off somewhere getting 30 lashes. (They were actually doing wind sprints.)
That afternoon, during their downtime, the teams checked out the event’s vendors. Part of the draw for sponsors at the Warrior Competition is that they can show off their products to their target audience. The competitors play soldiers while on break from playing soldiers while on leave from being soldiers. If someone wanted to shoot a SIG716 rifle or knock a door off its hinges with a tactical breaching ram, he could do that. If he wanted to fly a small, unarmed drone that fit inside a suitcase and retailed for $200,000, he could do that, too. And if he wanted to try his hand at the AA-12 — a fully automatic 12-gauge shotgun (tag line: “Don’t Fight Fair”) capable of firing 300 rounds a minute — he could do that, too. Unless he was a member of the one of the Chinese teams, in which case it would be a violation of the U.S. State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations.
Brian wanted to try the shotgun. “Let’s go shoot that shotty!” he said. He squeezed off five rounds and grinned. “That’d be hell on a whitetail.”
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That night, everyone loaded onto buses for a team mixer at the Intercontinental Hotel. “I hope they have karaoke,” Carey said. He turned to A. in the seat behind him.
“How do you say ‘Call Me Maybe’ in Arabic?”
“Ismeh robbama?” A. said. It meant, literally, “My name is Maybe.”
When they arrived, the reception was in full swing. The Malaysians were on the patio, drinking juice. The Russians were at the bar, definitely not drinking juice. There was tuna carpaccio and crudités and little ceramic bowls of gourmet potato chips. Outside, Sgt. Shkendije Demiri and Capt. Brittney Ray stood chatting in their uniforms. Demiri and Ray, both in the U.S. Army, are the first two women in the history of the competition. The Arab teams, in particular, seemed to love them. “They all want to take photos with us,” Ray said. “It’s like seeing a unicorn.”
Ray was an M.P. and platoon leader who graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and qualified for one of the Army teams by being a top pistol shot. She had also trained as a sniper and spent the previous afternoon teaching several Jordanians how to shoot. Demiri was a reservist who worked as a firefighter in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. She had been in the country a few months, doing joint training with the Jordanians, and said she had an enjoyable conversation with the Palestinians. “I’m trying to get them to bring a woman next year,” she said.
Back inside, Team America was talking hockey with the Russian Spetsnaz members. A. finished his second glass of red wine and looked across the room. “I’ll see you later,” he said. “I’m gonna go talk some Arabic with my Iraqi brothers.”
A. never called his unit by name. They were “the program” or “the community.” You would not have picked him out of a lineup. About 5-foot-10 and a little thick in the middle, he had a permanent look of pensive amusement. If you didn’t know better, you would think he was just Fred’s buddy who tagged along — which, in a way, he was.
A. grew up on the East Coast — “upper-middle-class, white, Mayberry.” He went to college and got a white-collar job, but after Sept. 11 he was compelled to enlist. “I didn’t want my grandkids to learn about 9/11 in history class and come home and say, ‘Hey, Granddad, what did you do when those savages flew planes into our buildings?’ and be like, ‘Nothing,’ ” he said. “I wanted to get my jihad on.”
A. served two tours in Iraq. The first was at the time of the surge, and there was a lot to do. He would go on two or three raids a night, targeting bomb makers, I.E.D. experts and money men. A. was an assaulter: he and his teammates would blow open a door with a strip of C4 then cover one another while they cleared the room. The missions were always capture or kill, he said. It was a tossup which way it would go. A. enjoyed his first tour in Iraq. He learned Arabic, fell in love with the people and the food. But by the second, he grew frustrated. “We used to hit a house like, boom,” he said. “Get the dude, grab anything that looks important and we’re out.” But now, he said, there were so many regulations that they couldn’t do their jobs. Sometimes he couldn’t even use his sledgehammer. “We actually had to do a soft knock on the door, instead of assaulting it,” he said incredulously.
A. left his unit when his commitment was up the following year, then spent some time in Afghanistan as an unarmed contractor before coming home. He said he didn’t miss it much. Granted, the nighttime raids were “pretty awesome.” “But you gotta remember,” he said, “your opportunity to do that is really small. Everyone got spoiled, because we had an unprecedented decade of two wars.” A. said he had a hard time relating to the average American, especially armchair patriots who didn’t join the fight when they had the chance. He said he felt more kinship with the Iraqis. He also drew a distinction between Special Ops guys who joined up when he did and those who enlisted during peacetime. “Pre-9/11, there were probably guys who didn’t even want to go to war — they just wanted to go on cool trips,” he said. “It’s just a different mind-set when you join up knowing you’re gonna get it on.”
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A. was the kind of soldier even soldiers looked up to. Fred called him “the ghost” and “the invisible man” and their “special friend.” Sometimes A. played along, telling tales about blood-splattered Iraqi swimming pools and war-zone pranks that inevitably began, “So there I was. . . .” But more often than not, he seemed uncomfortable with the attention. “These are just competition teams,” Brian sniffed one afternoon. “A.'s not a competitor — he’s a killer.” A. gave a halfhearted smile and looked away.
On the third day, the Warrior Competition staged a pair of night events. A full moon hung low over the mountains, and the parade ground was illuminated by spotlights. Team America waited its turn at an event called Hostage Rescue, outside a big, Abbottabad-like compound in the center of the base. The objective was to blow a door with an explosive charge, rush inside, shoot some targets and escape with the hostage; basically what A. had done in Iraq.
A. was lying in the dirt with his eyes closed, using his helmet as a pillow. I asked if being here felt surreal — the desert compound, the moonlight, all the shooting. “Nah,” he said. “This is theater. It’s totally contrived.” Then he told a story from his time in Iraq. Members of his unit were hunting one of Saddam’s executioners, and an Iraqi civilian they were working with offered to help. A. said the Iraqi told him: “I know this guy. Give me a gun and a car, and I will kill him!” A. said he responded: “Dude, I hear you. And it sounds like a good idea to me on so many levels. But my government will put me in jail.”
As the men checked their helmets and body armor and loaded magazines into their M4s, Fred called them together to outline a battle plan. Moments later, Eric shouted, “Fire in the hole!” and blew the door. They moved through the building, clearing each room by firing two rounds into 3-inch-by-5-inch paper targets. From outside, you could track their progress up to the second floor by the steady pop of rifle fire.
A. grabbed the hostage — a 180-pound dummy — and the team raced back downstairs. Outside, in the glow of the spotlights, they whooped and high-fived over their score: zero misses in just over three minutes, the fastest time so far. Someone joked that they should change their name to the International Death Squad. Their daring night raid had been a success; all that was missing was the film crew.
In the van on the way back to the armory, A. struck up a conversation with the Jordanian driver. It turned out that he had worked with the Americans in Iraq. A. asked where.
“Ramadi,” he said. “2003 to 2006.”
“Oh, man,” A. said. “You were getting it on! Did you go out with them?”
“Sometimes,” the driver said. He didn’t elaborate, and A. didn’t ask.
For the first few days of the competition, friendships formed along geopolitical lines. The Americans hung out with the Canadians. The Russians hung out with the Kazakhs. The French kept to themselves, and the Chinese really kept to themselves. But as the days went on, people started to loosen up. The Greeks and the Palestinians played soccer together. The Americans and the Iraqis talked about Tupac. The Arab teams started rooting for each other, cheering, “Yalla, yalla!” — Let’s go, let’s go! The Canadians, inspired, added their own twist: “Yolo! Yolo!” (which is slang for “you only live once”).
One afternoon, the Swiss Skorpions were basking in the sun, sipping hot chocolate from a paper cup. “Not bad,” one said. He checked the back of the packet and smiled. “Nestlé. It’s Swiss.”
A few tables over, Brian swapped his American flag patch for a Canadian one. “We’re gonna need ‘em when the North Koreans come,” he said. Next to him, Carey was showing off pictures on his iPad: there he was with his Marine unit in Nairobi after the 1998 embassy bombing (“We were hunting Bin Laden before he was Bin Laden”), and there were his three kids dressed up for Halloween (one as a soldier). “Hey, want to see a picture of me and the president?” he asked. He swiped to a photo of President Obama and the first lady at an event in Virginia. “So there’s the president,” he said, then zoomed in on a tiny black dot standing on a rooftop, “and there’s me!”
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Sitting nearby was an officer named Mohammed, who described himself as a commander in the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Force. He was bald underneath his black beret, and his eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. On his arm was a patch bearing the unit’s symbol: an eagle perched on a skull. He joined Saddam’s army as an M.P. when he was 17 and stayed until the second Iraq war. He enlisted again in 2004, after the regime’s collapse and now was fighting groups hostile to the Americans and to the new Iraqi government.
The I.C.T.F. is based in Baghdad, where there were more than a dozen bombings in the previous month alone. A wave of attacks on the 10th anniversary of the American invasion had left 60 people dead in the week before the I.C.T.F. team came to Kasotc. “It’s a dangerous job,” Mohammed said. “But the pay is very good. And what we have faced before is much more difficult.” He said they wanted to win the competition like everyone else. But mostly they were here to learn new tactics. “This is not a vacation for us, like it is for some of the other teams,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the Swiss.
Mohammed said he had seen friends die, but he stayed in the army to provide his wife and children with a good life. He had four children; the oldest, a boy, was 15. I asked if he hoped his son would join the army someday. “No,” he said. “I lived the life of a soldier. I know how hard it is.” Instead he hoped his son would grow up to be a pharmacist or an engineer.
The last morning of the competition dawned cloudy and cool. As a few teams were finishing up the final event, word began to circulate that King Abdullah was on his way. Abdullah commanded the Royal Jordanian Special Forces before he was king, and the military is still close to his heart. A certified pilot, diver and parachutist, he frequently travels the country in a helicopter he pilots himself. He often visits his namesake base. “This is his baby,” Patterson said of Kasotc. “I’m not gonna say he’s just like George Bush, because some people would be offended — but he’s very proud of his country, and he loves his men.”
Two camouflaged Black Hawk helicopters circled overhead, followed by the arrival of the royal motorcade, six black Lexus S.U.V.'s with identical license plates. The king popped out and shook hands for a few minutes, a Jordanian TV crew trailing him. He tried his hand at the pistol range and hit every target.
That afternoon, A. went to say goodbye to the Iraqis. They were staying in a dorm at the end of a dusty gravel road. Issa, the sniper, greeted him at the door with a big hug: “Welcome, welcome.” The Iraqis had just finished showering, and they were in various states of undress: briefs and towels and shower shoes. The room smelled of sweat and cologne.
Issa sat down on a bunk next to A. and gave him some gifts: an Iraqi Army watch and a small I.C.T.F. flag. “Thank you,” A. said, bowing. “Shukran.” Then he opened his backpack and passed out his gifts: a combat knife for everyone, along with his extra shirts, pants and other gear.
“It’s too much!” Issa told him. “It’s too much, man.”
A. shook his head. “I don’t need it anymore,” he said. “I’d rather see you have it.”
A. and the Iraqis traded Facebook info and promised to keep in touch. Back at Team America’s barracks, the guys were playing spades and drinking screwdrivers. “Where you been?” Carey asked. A. told them, and they said they wanted to donate their gear, too. Only Brandon seemed unsure: “They’re not going to use it on Americans, are they?”
A. said these were the good guys. Brandon nodded. “If you’re good with it, then so am I.”
At 6 p.m. sharp, the teams boarded buses to go to the Four Seasons for the awards banquet. While they waited, some of the U.S. Army personnel were pushing tires around the soccer field. “Look at these ding-dongs,” Brian said. “What are they doing, Jazzercise?”
“Army guys are so weird,” Eric said.
On the way into the city was a slaughterhouse, which was reputed to have some of the freshest shawarma in town. Just as the bus drove by, one of the slaughterhouse employees walked over and shot a sheep in the head. “Did you see that?” Carey asked, his eyes wide.
A. smiled. “That was awesome.”
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On stage at the hotel’s grand ballroom, two dozen trophies were laid out: 500 pounds of custom bronze, cast in the shape of Spartan helmets, crests and all. “Pretty pimp, huh?” Bill Patterson said to Fred.
“Really pimp,” Fred said. First there was an all-you-could-eat buffet, and then a slide show with a soundtrack by Linkin Park. When the awards started, the Snow Leopards were the big winners: they had taken first in 5 of the 12 events. They spent almost as much time on the stage as the master of ceremonies. When Team America finally broke the Chinese winning streak and collected a trophy for Hostage Rescue, the other teams let out a relieved cheer: “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
When the Snow Leopards got back up to accept their award as the overall winners, the room went quiet. Gracious in victory, the Chinese team handed out gifts: T-shirts and gym shorts stamped with the logo of the People’s Armed Police Force. In the lobby, Brian checked the tags. “Ha,” he said. " ‘Made in China."’
After the banquet, the Canadians, an Army team and Team America headed across town for a nightcap. In the taxi, A. tipped $5 on a $5 fare. (“That’s why they love us,” he said.) There was a bar in the basement of the Grand Hyatt, called JJs, that was supposedly pretty nice. Inside, everyone had to pass through a metal detector — the legacy of a 2005 suicide bombing in which a terrorist under the direction of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi blew himself up in the Hyatt’s lobby, part of a synchronized assault on three Amman hotels that killed 57 people.
A Gathering of Warriors in the Desert
Rounds were bought, stories were swapped. As the party wound down, one of the Army men came up to A. He was 38, a major; he had never seen combat. The front of his blue shirt was dark and wet where someone had spilled a whiskey and Coke. The major asked A. which branch he was in, and A. said had been in the Navy. They chatted for a few minutes about the week, about the competition. The major said he had the time of his life. “I gotta tell you,” he said. “I’ve been in the Army for 14 years, and I think this may be the highlight of my career.”
If A. had any thoughts about armchair warriors or guys who just wanted to go to cool places, he kept them to himself. Instead, he raised his glass of Amstel and smiled. “That’s awesome, man.”
Josh Eells is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. He last wrote for the magazine about Jack White.
