BY DOMINICK TAO
Like many of the 3-million U.S. military veterans of the Global War on Terrorism, Paul Szoldra left the Marine Corps with no clue what he wanted to do.
It was 2010. Szoldra was 26. The war had just turned 9.
“I really enjoy the news,” he thought. “I’d enjoy doing that.”
So why not, he decided. He’d use his G.I. Bill benefits to go to college and become a journalist.
As he would later tell the world in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” thread, he’d go “to an actual school, fuck the online stuff.”
But along the way—before his name would appear in places like the Wall Street Journal or atop the masthead of Task & Purpose—Szoldra became one of the most influential arbiters of military humor for a generation.
It happened because Szoldra, like many U.S. veterans these days, saw vast differences between military and civilian life, with few avenues to connect tales from war with tales from home.
Especially on topics either comedic, or critical.
“We don’t have comedy movies with just a bumbling military guy,” Szoldra said. “Unfortunately, there’s not really a bridge.”
While Szoldra avoided the scam online University of Phoenixes of the world — a trap many veterans, unwise to the hierarchy of higher education, have fallen into — Szoldra struggled to adjust to life as a civilian student.
There was the civilian-military language barrier. There were his classmates’ silly veteran stereotypes. And like many of his colleagues fresh out of service, there was the dislocating adjustment of having to learn to do nearly everything, from greeting people to addressing emails, in strange new ways.
As a Marine, Szoldra had been trained to destroy the enemy. Now his enemy was simply everyday life.
He devoted a class project at The University of Tampa to building a program that helped veterans transition into the civilian world.
Nothing much came from the project (though he recalls with amusement that it did get an “A”) — except for one section that used tongue-in-cheek, satirical articles as a sort of therapy.
“I was just kind of like, writing stories from my own personal anecdotes, that I’ve made into satire from my own experiences,” Szoldra said.
One of his first stories seemingly made fun of “a Marine in formation, running, really upset because his girlfriend is a brain dead amputee.”
He published it on his own newly-launched website — The Duffel Blog — a play on “duffel bag,” the typically olive drab item issued to nearly all U.S. service members since World War II. The article’s headline: “Marine With Brain-Dead Quadruple Amputee Wife Upset Over ‘My Girl’s A Vegetable’ Cadence,”
A sad, borderline sordid topic — to the uninitiated.
To the millions of Marines and Army soldiers who have gone on grueling pre-dawn runs, regardless of the weather, and have sung the crude, irreverent, decades-old running cadence “My Girl’s a Vegetable,” the subject of the story tends to bring out knowing smiles.
“It’s like a surgeon cracking a joke during open heart surgery. It highlights a difference in opinion over what’s funny or what’s not [between cultures],” Szoldra said in an interview.
When the “Marine With Brain-Dead Quadruple Amputee Wife” story hit Facebook, reactions followed.
“Holy shit…..,” was the first comment.
“Ho-ly shit” was the second.
The commenters, it seemed, were in disbelief. The inside jokes of their generation, for the first time, were being cracked in the public domain.
“This is some Pulitzer Prize winning shit right here,” another commenter posted.
For some, the Duffel Blog was too good to be true.
Wrote one reader: “This is soooo not going to end well. 😉 it’s *almost* like yer writing his stuff simply to draw fire from the idiots of the world.”
“People enjoyed it, so I kept going,” he said.
And the “fire from the idiots of the world” never did come.
“I rarely get hate mail,” he said.
In helping himself, and others like him, Szoldra had found an untapped market.
In the perception of the wider public, Szoldra said, “Veterans are either A, completely damaged, or B, they are absolute heroes and can do no wrong.” (A perception, incidentally, backed up by media research).
In addition to laughs, Szoldra founded Duffel Blog to help bridge that gap and give himself and others the creative outlet he sought.
If The Onion is the satire news equivalent of The New York Times, Szoldra had invented the parody analogue to Stars and Stripes. It would focus on military-relevant tropes, failures, stupidities, and frustrations that are funny because they are, at least a little, true.
As Szoldra was pursuing a journalism career after graduating from UT, first at Business Insider in California, his creation began to resonate far beyond its humble beginning as an obscure blog about military humor.
Retired Gen. James Mattis (after his stint as the commander of U.S. Central Command, but before his tour as Donald Trump’s chief-of-staff) would tell the Washington Post in 2013: “Duffel Blog is a beautifully crafted response to an increasingly stuffy environment in today’s America.”
Mattis would go onto be lampooned by no fewer than three-dozen bits on the site.
In a nod to who, when, and where it’s ok to make fun of U.S. prisoners of war, Senator John McCain tweeted in 2017, “Hilarious,” when Szoldra’s outlet ran the headline: “John McCain Angered Over Loss Of Hanoi Hilton Honors Points.”
Many on the outside, though, sometimes failed to get the jokes. After apparently mistaking a Duffel Blog satire for a real investigative news report, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would be duped into asking military leaders whether detainees in Guantanamo were receiving G.I. Bill benefits.
While Duffel Blog’s audience has extended to the highest halls of power (the site receives more than 2-million unique visitors per month), its core audience remains the servicemembers on the front lines — and also in office cubicles and motor pools (even fobbits can get in on the jokes) — around the world.
“I’ve had writers that say, ‘hey, this is the one thing that has helped me getting out, dealing with stress,” Szoldra said. “I’ve had messages from readers — they have PTSD — they tell me, ‘I go through life, I struggle, I hardly get to laugh — it’s a huge relief to laugh.’”
Like his undergraduate project at UT, which started “without any idea where it would go or plan or direction,” Szoldra’s post-military non-satire journalism work has benefited from his military experience.
He became a full-time reporter for Business Insider. He has gone on to write for publications including The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. And in November, he became the editor-in-chief of Task & Purpose, a respected news and commentary website that covers national security. All the while, he has continued with Duffel Blog on his own time.
Despite its at-times irreverent tone, however, Szoldra said as Duffel Blog evolved, it became a platform for highlighting truths not covered his more straight-laced reporting.
“The military, national security — we’re taking a satirical standpoint to effect change. If we write about issues like the U.S. being in Afghanistan, there is a target in our writing, who will get what we’re going to say,” Szoldra said.
He’s found himself at the helm of two media outlets that give a voice to a generation of veterans who are still coming home from war and military life like he did back in 2010.
“That’s what you do as a satirical production — make fun of people in power without fear or favor,” he said.