For the past decade, Men’s Journal has set the standard for travel and adventure writing by publishing the work of America’s finest authors and literary journalists. Wild Stories collects thirty-two of the best pieces to appear in the magazine, written by its most esteemed contributors, including Jim Harrison, Sebastian Junger, P. J. O’Rourke, Rick Bass, Thomas McGuane, George Plimpton, Hampton Sides, Doug Stanton, Tim Cahill, and Mark Bowden. Each of the four chapters in Wild Stories showcases Men’s Journal’s diversity and taut storytelling power. “The Adventures” is a series of razor-sharp travel narratives, from a road trip across India on the perilous Grand Trunk Road to a search for grizzlies in Romania. “The Sporting Life” is a look into obscure corners of the sports world, where golf’s bush-league wannabes try to make it to the PGA and a group of cyclists out-suffer one another in pursuit of the mythic Hour Record. “Men’s Lives” includes profiles of singular adventurers such as Yvon Chouinard and Ned Gillette, and captures the rewards of such quintessentially male traditions as building a cabin on your own plot of land. And “The Reporting” collects definitive accounts of the most newsworthy disasters, as well as riveting dispatches from war zones in Somalia, Sudan, and Colombia, and from environmental hot spots in Alaska and Montana. Commemorating Men’s Journal’s tenth anniversary, Wild Stories is a diverse and entertaining anthology that explores the magazine’s basic creed: Life is an adventure. From the first page to the last, these are stories you’ll never forget. decade, Men s Journal has set the standard for travel and adventure writing by publishing the work of America s finest authors and literary journalists. Wild Stories collects thirty-two of the best pieces to appear in the magazine, written by its most esteemed contributors, including Jim Harrison, Sebastian Junger, P. J. O Rourke, Rick Bass, Thomas McGuane, George Plimpton, Hampton Sides, Doug Stanton, Tim Cahill, and Mark Bowden. Each of the four chapters in Wild Stories showcases Men s Journal s diversity and taut storytelling power. The Adventures is a series of razor-sharp travel narratives, from a road trip across India on the perilous Grand Trunk Road to a search for grizzlies in Romania. The Sporting Life is a look into obscure corners of the sports world, where golf s bush-league wannabes try to make it to the PGA and a group of cyclists out-suffer one Since 1992, the monthly  Men’s Journal  has written extensively on the subjects of outdoor recreation, health and fitness, and men’s fashion, with the goal of supporting an adventurous, active lifestyle in its readership. AS LONG AS WE WERE TOGETHER, NOTHING BAD COULD HAPPEN TO US Scott Anderson Jon saw the stack of articles about the war in Chechnya on my coffee table and looked up at me appraisingly. "You thinking of going back?" "Oh, I don't know," I said, glancing around my living room, "not really." But my older brother knew me too well to believe that. "I guess so." As journalists who always seemed to cover dangerous places, Jon and I had both had some close calls over the years, but a high percentage of mine had come during a single three-week period in Chechnya in 1995, and I'd returned from there quite rattled. Now, in February 2000, the Russians and Chechens were at war again, it was at least as vicious as before, and for reasons that weren't clear even to me, I wanted to return. "You think it's a bad idea?" I asked. Jon pondered this. "Remember Sarajevo?" He saw the puzzled look on my face. "The land mine?" I laughed. In the summer of 1996, I'd done an astonishingly stupid thing in Bosnia. The war had ended six months earlier, but there were still mines everywhere, and one day I'd gone hiking in the hills above Sarajevo. Walking down a dirt trail I didn't know, I'd nearly stepped on a partially exposed mine in the path. On trembling legs, I'd spent the next two hours gingerly making my way back up the trail. I'd told Jon about it as a kind of humorous, embarrassing anecdote. "But that was just idiotic," I said. "I got careless." "Yeah, but you almost got yourself killed in peacetime. Don't you think that's kind of an omen?" By the time of that conversation in my living room, Jon and I had spent most of our adult lives writing about the worst people and places in the world. That month, I had recently returned from northern Albania, where I'd reported a story on blood vendettas, while Jon was about to head off for war-ruined Angola. When we got together–which, given our schedules, was only about every six months–we talked of where we had just been, where we were thinking of going next. What we did not talk about–at least not directly–was how any of this affected us. Instead, we had developed a kind of verbal shorthand with each other, the sharing of anecdotes, like mine about the ill-advised hike in Bosnia, that had no real punch lines: