Once Upon A Time In Argentina

Born too late to tame the West, born too early to conquer the stars, born just in time to terrorize illegal Chinese fishing operations.

A few years ago a photograph taken by a pilot over the Pacific went viral. It showed a mysterious red glow spreading ominously out over the water.

Initially people thought it was aliens, and to be fair, they weren’t far off. The glow belonged to the closest thing humanity has yet invented to a Tyranid hive fleet: a Chinese fishing fleet raping the seas in search of seafood. The glow is from huge banks of LEDs, which the ships use to draw marine life to the surface, where they trawl it up with nets. Much, maybe even most of the indiscriminate catch is discarded.

China has over half a million fishing vessels. Their vast fleets comprise thousands of ships, and can often be seen from orbit.

The triangular lights inside the red circle are a Chinese fishing fleet.

China has long since eaten its way through its own territorial waters, and therefore sends its fleets out into the rest of the world’s oceans. As a rule marine life is much more abundant close to the shore, since this is where most of the nutrients are. Fishing in another country’s territorial waters is illegal under international law. The Chinese do not care. Their fleets park just on the edge of a country’s Economic Exclusion Zone, and then turn off their Automatic Identification System transponders so that they can sneak inside and poach. Turning off an AIS transponder is also illegal: maritime law requires these to be activated at all times, for collision avoidance and search and rescue. Organizations which track this regularly observe Chinese ships on EEZ borders disappearing from the AIS network, and reappearing a few hours later on the right side of the border.

Here we see the scum pillaging the ocean around the Galapagos. Yeah. I know. Billions must die.

The consequences for local fishermen are disastrous: the Chinese scoop up all the fish, and lead the local fisheries towards ecosystem collapse. When they’re done pillaging they just move on, leaving an oceanic wasteland in their wake.

Environmental groups generally don’t seem very bothered about this, perhaps because the ocean is a CO2 sink whether or not there are fish in it, and the only thing that matters about the environment is how much carbon is in the air. National governments are reluctant to take action, because they are often dependent upon Chinese investment for their economic growth. The only people who really seem to care are fishermen and Internet racists.

This is the set-up for Frank Kidd’s immensely satisfying debut mercenary novel, Once Upon A Time In Argentina.

The novel’s basic concept is that the Argentinian government is caught between the economic necessity of appeasing Beijing, and the growing domestic political problem of its own outraged fishing industry. The obvious thing to do would be to send out the Argentinian Navy – the Royal Canadian Navy did just that to Spanish fishermen back in the 90s, even going so far as to fire a shot across their bow – but with Argentina’s economy in a permanent state of near-collapse, the government can’t afford to alienate Chinese investment capital. Instead, the Argentinian president decide to hire a small team of mercenaries to run a fully deniable, off the books black op in Tierra Del Fuego, terrorizing Chinese fishing vessels in order to spook them into avoiding Argentinian waters.

The novel opens with a quote by Nietzsche: “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night,” which is something that’s resonated with me since I first read it as an angsty teenager. This sets the stage for our introduction to the protagonist, Ryan “Cowboy” McGowan, as he is actively contemplating pulling the plug on a life that has become intolerable.

McGowan hasn’t hit rock bottom materially. Most people would consider him reasonably successful. He’s got a good job with benefits and a decent salary at a tech company in LA, a live-in girlfriend, an apartment he doesn’t struggle to pay rent on, and a Ford F-150. Of course, the job requires him to sit through DEI workshops, his boss is a literal cuck, and his girlfriend is a cheating whore, but, again, this is more or less the American dream at its best in the twenty-first century. There are many despairing zoomers who would kill to have it this good.

McGowan’s problem isn’t that he isn’t successful, it’s that he feels dead inside. Before becoming an office drone, he was a special forces operator, and he’d still be in the game if he hadn’t been drummed out of the service (for reasons that, it turns out later, reflect rather well on him). When we meet McGowan he’s hitting his late thirties, getting flabby, worried about his testosterone levels, paranoid about touching receipts due to the xenoestrogen cooties they’re coated with, and wondering if this is all there is to life, and if so whether it might not be better to leave the show early.

Instead of checking out, McGowan drops out. He quits his job, cancels the lease on his apartment, picks up a part-time bartending shift at the dive bar he frequents, moves into the bartender’s houseboat, and starts banging the waitress. He wakes up with the Sun, bathes in the ocean, lives on burgers and fish, and spends his evenings at a rat-trap boxing gym run by a sketchy Arab who will occasionally take payment in blood and sweat when his clients can’t make their monthly membership dues. It’s a nihilistic existence that leads nowhere, but it’s a step up from the drab nihilism of the office, because at least McGowan isn’t rotting away under fluorescent lights as he watches his life ending one minute at a time.

All of this is just the setup in the first couple chapters, allowing us to settle into the narrator’s interior life. The story gets moving six months after McGowan abandons normieworld, when a sketchy private military contractor, Mike Hudson, approaches him at the gym. Hudson offers McGowan a lot of money if he’ll come along for a job whose details he refuses to discuss, but more importantly, he offers McGowan adventure. He knows McGowan wants back in the game, whether McGowan understands this or not.

A few days later, McGowan finds himself living in a camp built of Quonset huts and lawn chairs on a beach in Tierra Del Fuego, alongside several dodgy characters he’s only just met, but who he now has to trust with his life. All of them are former operators – Marine Recon, Navy SEALs, Green Berets – who were released from the service due to minor disciplinary infractions such as pissing hot for weed. The only exception is a shifty Pashtun known only as Psycho that Hudson brought back from Afghanistan, who doesn’t speak English, and who is there to spy on them.

The rest of the novel is a mixture of military adventure story, Western, techno-thriller, wilderness survival, and bro hangout. The team takes their Barracudas out in the middle of the night to terrorize Chinese fishing vessels that have slipped into Argentina’s territorial waters; they get drunk on the beach; they brawl when they have arguments over ethical dilemmas; they shoot the shit while fishing; they lift weights; they slip away to play hookie in a nearby town when Hudson disappears for a few days for a briefing in Buenos Aires.

The team spends more time hanging out on the beach than they do on mission, but this doesn’t make the story drag. To the contrary, Kidd deftly uses these scenes to develop the characters, who behave exactly as you’d expect bored soldiers at the edge of the world to behave when the devil holds their idle hands. These scenes aren’t side quests, either: the decisions the characters make in them, the specific shenanigans they get up to, have important consequences for the later parts of the story. Kidd skilfully weaves everything together in the end, often in unexpected ways. Several times he uses the ‘rule of three’ to casually introduce a story element, seemingly as an aside; revisit it to develop the theme from another angle; and then finally return to it in the story’s resolution, often to excellent effect. My favourite example of this was his use of the Burroughs novel, A Princess of Mars.

The quiet moments give McGowan time to pay attention to his surroundings, and at times Kidd’s descriptions are downright lyrical. McGowan isn’t just some soulless killer: while he thrives on the hunt, feels himself come alive during the electric thrill of combat when the life and death stakes illuminate life with its sharpest possible meaning, he is equally capable of seeing the world through what the Navajo call ‘soft eyes’, simply relaxing and letting everything wash over him in all its animate beauty. This gives occasion for the novel’s more philosophical passages. Once Upon A Time In Argentina is not a didactic political tract, Kidd is not preaching, but he lets his characters voice just the kind of sentiments that you’d expect from a group of hard-bitten, hard-used men, who have strong opinions on everything from the best way to handle women to who was really responsible for 9/11.

The result of this psychologically observant, somewhat indirect approach is that Once Upon A Time In Argentina feels more like Sicario than a Tom Clancy novel. It manages to hit a wide variety of emotional notes: sometimes fast and brutal, sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, sometimes poignant. Kidd’s characters are not one-dimensional murder machines, but living men with their own pasts, wounds, regrets, and obsessions. It’s an action-adventure which asks whether adventure is even possible in a world where everything is fenced off, tamed, and surveilled. Or, perhaps more accurately, whether heroism is possible in a world that has wholly lost touch with any sense of the sacred, and in which every moving part is a component of the impersonal mechanics of capital and power. God is dead, the frontier is closed, and the only escape from the dreary saftetyism of the longhouse is the criminal nihilism of the underworld. The spirit of a man who remains in the longhouse is slowly smothered, but the soul of the man who escapes is easily broken.

Once Upon A Time In Argentina is not without its flaws, chief among which is Kidd’s spotty editing¹. While at its best his prose is quite simply beautiful, there are also passages in which his phrasing comes off as a bit clunky. The punctuation is occasionally misplaced, words are sometimes randomly capitalized, and he has a tendency to throw around acronyms without defining them; for instance, I had to look up RIB, which is used repeatedly throughout the novel (Rigid Inflatable Boat, for the record). When the protagonist’s equipment is first described, Kidd just lists a series of model numbers for the weapons and their accessories. The author’s a vet and, but for the rest of us who don’t live and breathe the finer points of American gun culture a bit more detail would have been nice. We don’t all know what American military kit looks like, or even what it’s used for. It’s worth noting that Kidd doesn’t always do this: when I looked up the Barracuda, it matched the picture he’d painted in my mind’s eye quite precisely.

At least I’m pretty sure this is the boat.

All of these flaws are rough edges that a competent editor – or even a decent proof-reader – could easily have polished off, but their services don’t come cheap and as a self-published author I doubt Kidd had the money to retain one. This is one of the ongoing problems with the indie scene, in which writers are expected to be their own editors, proof-readers, typesetters, and publicists. Hopefully Kidd picks up a book deal, maybe with Passage’s new Ark imprint, which would give him access to precisely those professional services².

The editorial flaws were minor annoyances that occasionally took me out of the story, which was unfortunate because it’s a great story. Once Upon A Time In Argentina is a genuinely fun book, which I devoured very easily over a couple of days. It’s wonderful escapist literature, particularly as it isn’t set on some distant planet in the far future or in a lost historical era, but in the here and now, and thereby suggests to the reader that, yes, adventure is still possible, if you know where to look.

The novel’s ending strongly implies that Once Upon A Time In Argentina will be the first of several novels in a coming series, and if so I’m looking forward to them. I think Kidd has really hit on something here. The mercenary novel has the potential to be the Western of the early twenty-first century: violent adventure stories set in all the worst parts of the planet, exploring the ugly interstices of organized crime, state intelligence, black ops, and corporate power. The possibilities of narrative and setting are almost unlimited. Moreover, private military contractors have already emerged as one of the only contemporary professions to which a certain romance still attaches, at least on our side of the great divide; PMCs fill the same morally ambiguous, antiheroic niche that gunslingers, spies, and mafias filled in earlier times.

Once Upon A Time In Argentina is, of course, available on Amazon, in both Kindle and paperback. You might also consider heading over to Pulp West to subscribe to Frank’s chudstack.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoyed the review, and if it motivated you to pick up the book, I hope you enjoy that, too. As always, I’d like to express my gratitude to my supporters, without whom I’d have to get a real job instead of spending my afternoons reading mercenary pulp novels and pecking away at a keyboard about them. By the way, I’m not getting any kickbacks from the author: if you buy the book, the only people getting paid are him and Amazog (sadly, mostly Amazog). If you’d like to support Postcards From Barsoom so that they keep coming, there’s only one way to do it:

1. Someone in the comments is going to point out a typo I’ve made somewhere, I just know it.

2. As an aside, I just picked up Travis Corcoran’s Red State Mars, the first Ark novel to see press, and it is a genuinely beautiful artifact.