Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [82]
Brown advised Lund not to get involved. The plan stalled of its own accord.
In July 1964, Lund joined the Army and in December 1966 went to Vietnam, where he served as a second lieutenant and company commander. He joined the Special Forces in July 1967. He fought in the Central Highlands until July 1968 when the Army tried to transfer him to the U.S. to run a training company. “It was a waste of talent,” he said. He quit the service, did odd jobs, until he and Brown founded Paladin in 1970, taking the name Paladin not from the lead character in the old TV series “Have Gun Will Travel,” but from a class of medieval knight that rode about the countryside correcting injustice.
Paladin Press had no particular interest in righting wrongs, however. “The point,” Lund told me, “was pure profit.”
Initially Paladin concentrated on subjects in which Lund and Brown felt they had some professional expertise, such as guerrilla warfare and firearms. Paladin’s first title was Silencers, Snipers and Assassins by J. David Truby, a book Paladin still sells.
Brown left Paladin in 1974 to found Soldier of Fortune magazine, also based in Boulder. Paladin branched into other topics. Lund had noticed an increasing interest in survivalism during the last days of Jimmy Carter’s administration. Lund moved to capitalize on the trend and published Life After Doomsday, a guide intended to help individuals, families, and small groups survive after a nuclear holocaust. Lund also published The Great Survival Resource Book, a consumer’s guide to the tools of survival. The book evaluated weapons, water-filtration systems, and other products.
In 1980, Paladin expanded beyond the survival movement with Get Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks, a half-serious primer on nonlethal revenge by an author using the name George Hayduke, a name more widely recognized as that of the maverick environmentalist in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Lund approached Hayduke with the idea, he said, “because I realized there was a great deal of frustration among people against institutions that screwed them.” Get Even remains a Paladin staple, its top seller as recently as the autumn of 1992; Hayduke became one of its star authors, identified in Paladin’s catalog as the “Master of Malice.”
Nicholas Elliot might have produced a better silencer if he had read Paladin’s catalog and ordered Hayduke’s The Hayduke Silencer Book: Quick and Dirty Homemade Silencers. “These simple, effective silencer designs are your passport into the world of muffled mayhem,” the catalog says of the Hayduke classic. “And best of all, they can be made right at your kitchen table with common items found around the house.” Or, Nicholas could have picked any of seven other books advertised on the same page, including several more how- to primers on silencers and books on the history and fundamental design requirements of effective sound suppression.
Lund declined to tell me his company’s profit or revenue, other than to say that over the previous decade revenue had doubled. The company, which employed fifteen people full-time, seemed to provide him a comfortable living. He owned a $45,000 Range-Rover free and clear and said he customarily spent up to five months of every year at a cottage Paladin owns in Britain’s Cotswolds. For the rest of the year, he lived in a house in Boulder Canyon with a skeet and rifle range off one of its several decks and a one-story indoor waterfall.
Paladin’s books have exposed the company to business trials not typically faced by small companies. Printers have refused to print its books. Magazines have declined to accept its ads. Two different banks asked Paladin to take its business elsewhere.
Even Paladin betrays a certain lawyerly squeamishness about its books. The first page of Kill Without Joy, for example, disavows any responsibility for “the use or misuse of the information herein.” Most of Paladin’s books and catalog blurbs include the caveat “For Information Purposes