[1] He has been identified as the once-secret identity behind the pseudonym Gary Brecher, fictional author of the War Nerd column for the newspaper the eXile which has ceased publication.
[1] Dolan taught and studied at UC Berkeley, where he completed a PhD thesis on the literary works of the Marquis de Sade.
[9] In 2001, Dolan resigned his academic post, and moved to Moscow to become co-editor of the eXile, a bi-weekly English-language publication based in the Russian city.
[15] The fictional version of Brecher's identity, referenced from his first column,[16] was that he was employed as a data entry clerk in Fresno, California and deeply unsatisfied with his job.
"[18] The columns were the only source of information on Brecher until an email interview with him conducted by Steve Sailer was published by United Press International.
In the memoir, Dolan writes of obsessively studying military history and Jane's manuals while binging on junk food in the basement of a UC Berkeley library building in the mid-seventies.
Brecher is the creation of John Dolan, a poet, novelist, lecturer in English at the University of Victoria, and The eXile co-editor.
That's very exciting news for the War Nerd's regular readers: The columns you've been dissecting and debating for the last six years were written by an English professor who writes poetry!
"[26] On November 2, 2010, in an interview with Scott Horton for Antiwar Radio,[15] John Dolan spoke for the first time about his Gary Brecher alter-ego which he described as being strongly based on his younger self.
Another similarly themed Brecher article, "It's All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson", appeared in the December 19, 2005 issue of The American Conservative.
[28] Brecher has summarized his view of modern warfare as follows: Dolan is currently the co-host of the popular podcast Radio War Nerd with Mark Ames, which has more than 4,800 subscribers on Patreon.