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Gary Brecher

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John Carroll Dolan is an American poet, author, and essayist. He has been identified as the once-secret identity behind the pseudonym Gary Brecher, the fictional author of the War Nerd column for the newspaper the eXile, which has ceased publication. John Dolan writes as the War Nerd but no longer "in full character" as Brecher. Instead, the two identities have merged.

Dolan formerly also wrote for and co-edited the eXile under his name. After the newspaper's demise, he was a regular contributor to NSFWCorp and then from 2013 to 2015 to PandoDaily, both as Dolan and Brecher. In addition, he appears on a regular podcast, "Radio War Nerd," which he co-hosts with Mark Ames. He also writes the podcast's subscriber newsletter and contributes to the eXiled Online.

Gary Brecher is a character invented by Dolan to be the pseudonymous author of The War Nerd column, which first appeared in The eXile, discussing current wars and other military conflicts from the perspective of a "war fan" and later for NSFWCorp, and PandoDaily. "Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed," he analyzes military strategy, tactics, and contexts of ongoing and past conflicts. Soft Skull Press published a collection of his columns in June 2008.

Brecher's identity was primarily secret throughout The eXile from 1997 to 2008. However, he was suspected to be Dolan as early as 2005, and by 2010 Dolan was openly discussing his alter ego. Brecher published his War Nerd column every two to five weeks in The eXile. In each installment, Brecher offered his idiosyncratic analyses of armed conflict from a military, political, or (rarely) social standpoint. In his first eXile column, Brecher declared that The War Nerd was to be "a column on how all the wars are going, kind of a war reviewer." He has since migrated to the subscription-only Radio War Nerd podcast.

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War Nerd

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