You should go to Morocco, sleep under a bridge, do anything, and wait for spring. Men who have been through winters on the farms insist as a result that you should never join the Legion then. In the winter they might have been less indifferent. In the dirt yard a slim, bullying corporal barked them into a disciplined formation in a parade-rest stance: feet apart, eyes fixed forward, hands clasped behind their backs. Seven actually came from France, but had been given new identities as “French Canadian.” After the recruits returned to the compound they had a while to wait before dinner. They came from Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, and Ukraine. They had been on the farm for three weeks. “He is the walking wounded of life when he arrives,” an officer said After one of the imagined helicopter landings, when a clumsy recruit dropped his rifle, the sergeant walked up to him and simply held out his fist, against which the recruit proceeded to bang his head. He was a former Russian Army officer, a quiet observer who gave the impression of depth and calm, partly because he spoke no more than a few sentences a day. The sergeant supervising the helicopter exercise had mastered the art of disciplining men without wasting words.
It would be hard to find a more laconic group. The language problem was compounded by the fact that most of the drill instructors were foreigners, too. Only a third of them spoke some form of French. Altogether there were 43, ranging in age from 19 to 32. That went for every recruit I met on the farm. People are driven to join the Legion as much as they are drawn to it. A significant number of the men are fugitives from the law, living under assumed names, with their actual identities closely protected by the Legion. There is no other force in the world today that has known so much war for so long. Recently they have fought in Afghanistan, as members of the French contingent. Over just the past two decades they have been deployed to Bosnia, Cambodia, Chad, both Congos, Djibouti, French Guiana, Gabon, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Kuwait, Rwanda, and Somalia. Currently it employs 7,286 enlisted men, including non-commissioned officers. What man has not considered climbing onto a motorcycle and heading south? The Legion can be like that for some. Service to the Legion is about simplifying men’s lives. The motto of the Legion is Legio Patria Nostra. It does not require your allegiance to France. For you the fighting does not require a purpose. It was about do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that.
The real lesson here was not about combat tactics. Eventually the recruits would stage a phased retreat back to their chairs, then take off, fly around for a while, and come in for another dangerous landing. If they ran out of vocabulary, they would have to start again. Those who charged into the imaginary tail rotor or committed some other blunder would have push-ups to do immediately, counting them off in phonetic French- uh, du, tra, katra, sank. The job of the others was to wait for the imaginary touchdown, then disembark from the imaginary helicopter and pretend to secure the imaginary landing zone. Two recruits who had been injured while running sat facing forward holding crutches. The chairs were meant to represent the benches in a helicopter flying into action-say, somewhere in Africa in the next few years to come. They wore camouflage fatigues and face paint, and held French assault rifles. They were new recruits sitting back-to-back on two rows of steel chairs. Last summer I came upon 20 of them on a grassy knoll on a farm in France near the Pyrenees. It refers to the Legion itself, which is a branch of the French Army commanded by French officers but built of volunteers from around the world. The word “foreign” in the name French Foreign Legion does not refer to faraway battlegrounds.