Now They’re Soldiers of Misfortune : Mercenaries: World events have made job hunting tougher for them. But their annual convention in Las Vegas continues to draw thousands, lured by the ‘Uzis, floozies and Jacuzzis.’

Operation Desert Storm lasted little longer than an extra-inning game at Dodger Stadium. The “Evil Empire” has shattered into more pieces than a vodka tumbler flung from the top of the Washington Monument. And back in the Middle East, despite lingering acrimony, Arab-Israeli peace talks are scheduled to open next month.

As a new world order takes shape, what’s a mercenary to do?

“The risk of high-intensity wars has diminished, but on the low end, in the Third World, the chances are just as strong as ever,” said San Diego resident Skip Crane, a recently retired Navy Seal who served as a U.S. military adviser to the late Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. “There’s no room out there for hockey pucks, yo-yos and slipknots. But there is still room for professionals.”

There is also time to kick back, as Crane has, with more than 600 Vietnam vets, police officers, arms dealers and camouflage-clad Walter Mittys at the 12th annual Soldier of Fortune Convention and Expo at the Sahara Hotel this weekend.

The five-day program features marksmanship competitions, knife-fighting workshops, evasive driving training, and lectures on such topics as “Narco-Guerrilla Warfare Into the Year 2000.” It is also high on camaraderie, a chance to catch up with old friends at the pool, bar and firing range.

“Some of us come for God, guns and guts,” said one long-time attendee, Steve Barkley of Pebble Beach, who never served in the military. “And some come for Uzis, floozies and Jacuzzis.”

Whichever the case, the conference, the first since the Persian Gulf War and the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, also provides an intriguing window on our changing times. For one thing, despite the swift advances toward world peace, it is abundantly clear that a strong fascination continues to exist for military firepower. As does the market for it.

Indeed, before the convention concludes this afternoon, attendees are expected to be joined by more than 6,000 residents and tourists, flocking to a jampacked exhibition hall. There, vendors have stocked enough weaponry, it seems, to take control of the Inland Empire, if not the Evil one.

The cornucopia of combat items the public can spend its potential peace dividend on includes machine guns, plastic pistols and exploding bullets--not all of them legal in California and other states. Also available are videos of Desert Storm operations, as well as how-to explosives manuals, posters of Adolf Hitler and John Wayne, and a dizzying array of fake passports, police badges and press cards.

By now, the annual convention, sponsored by the 90,000-circulation Soldier of Fortune magazine, has become nearly as much a fixture on The Strip as Wayne, Frank or Liza.

No longer do poker players do double-takes as cadres of middle-aged men in Vietnam-era fatigues, and an occasional Rhodesian Army uniform, saunter through the Sahara casino. Even the rifle cases that attendees tote past the roulette wheels and slot machines fail to raise many eyebrows.

“They’re well-natured people,” said Sahara Hotel sales director Clyde Brown. “A neat bunch.”

Yet there is no question that the times are indeed a-changing.

During a seminar on “Communist Insurgent Infrastructure,” the Soviet Union, long reviled by this conservative crowd as the chief financier to revolutionary movements, was not even mentioned. The most sparsely attended lecture of the weekend, drawing fewer than 50 hard-core attendees, was the one entitled “Soviet Force Today.”

And how about those T-shirts that were hawked in previous years? The ones that read “Eat Lead, You Lousy Reds” or “Kill a Commie for Mommy?”

“There’s got to be 10,000 of them lying in a warehouse somewhere,” laughed exhibitor Peter Morgan. “They’re just passe.”

More chic these days are “happy face” T-shirts with blood spurting from a bullet hole between the eyes, and an exit wound on the back. Not to mention this season’s mercenary fashion “must,” Eastern European military outfits and paraphernalia.

Morgan was offering a complete East German secret police uniform for $1,000. “The East Bloc is very popular this year,” he said. “They’ve dropped their uniforms like hot rocks. . . . In this case, we have everything but the shoes, socks and underwear.”

Not surprisingly, this year’s convention has been billed as a salute to the U.S. servicemen of the Persian Gulf War. Featured speakers included two Air Force pilots who destroyed more than 20 Iraqi tanks, and the top officer of the Army’s special operations ground forces.

Yet, bubbling to the surface in this largely ex-military crowd has been a distinct sense of anger and frustration over President Bush’s decision not to press on to Baghdad and take out Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Wheelchair-bound Mel Tatrow, 41, was adamant on that point. Out by the Sahara’s pool, the Michigan man was sipping a beer with two other convention veterans--cops from rural Pennsylvania and Oregon.

“Desert Storm is not over, it didn’t end,” declared Tatrow. Like the Vietnam War, where he lost both legs in a firefight, Iraq was “another deal they started and didn’t finish.”

Soldier of Fortune’s publisher Robert K. Brown, dressed in a full camouflage suit, also failed to mince words as he addressed a seminar audience Friday evening.

“I am dismayed, disgruntled and pissed off we didn’t go in and finish the job,” Brown said. “I hold the Bush Administration responsible for a gross error in judgment.”

While the convention’s name is something of a misnomer--only a handful of participants have any traditional mercenary experience--a growing number have provided technical advice or fund-raising assistance to foreign governments and their armed forces.

Don Feeney, an ex-Delta Force commando, heads a North Carolina firm that advises corporations and foreign nations on security issues. Recently, he said, he trained protection squads for top government officials in Colombia.

“We hate the word mercenary, but it’s true,” said Feeney, who runs the convention’s evasive driving program. “The problem with the word is that it means a person would fight for the highest bidder. It’s not that way anymore. He picks a side and he doesn’t change sides.”

That side, the way conventioneers see it, is invariably the “right” side, one that retired Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub has been long identified with. Here to autograph copies of his autobiography, Singlaub, a figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, once funneled private funds to the right-wing Contras who fought to topple Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime.

Singlaub said that foreign advice is often more important than foreign firepower.

“That was our case in the Nicaraguan resistance. We didn’t need any mercenaries to go down and act as grunts. What we were interested in were people who had military skills and had the ability to teach those skills, preferably in the Spanish language.”

When Congress put a tight cap on the number of military advisers sent to El Salvador, the retired general said he recruited U.S. civilians to teach such skills as parachute rigging and demolitions storage.

Despite the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Soldier of Fortune managing editor John Coleman, a Vietnam vet who later served as a mercenary for the Rhodesian Army, said there will continue to be work for what he prefers to term the “professional” soldier.

British and Australians have been hired to provide security and carry out contract killings for Colombian drug cartels, Coleman said. Pilots and other technical experts will be hired in coming months, he predicted, to fight in Africa and Eastern Europe.

“There are a proliferating number of brush-fire wars around the world, Yugoslavia being a good example,” said Coleman. “There’s always some place to go fight. The job market is getting better, unfortunately.”