A Hoosier in the Foreign Legion #3- West Lafayette, IN, Chicago, and France
Bored with corporate America, Tony abandoned his yuppie lifestyle to enlist in the French Foreign Legion.
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need, and the things you own, end up owning you. We're the middle children of history—no purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives."-- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
March 1999- Aubagne, France
The Képi Blanc
In March 1999, I was munching on a rubbery baguette in the Marseilles train station when I walked past a lean, uniformed man sporting a képi blanc. Everyone who's ever seen the movie Beau Geste knows the funny-looking drum-shaped white cap called the képi blanc that marks the wearer as a French Foreign Legionnaire.
The fabled Legion had always fascinated me. At this point in my life, I was 29 years old, a refugee from corporate America, trying to discover the meaning of life by vacationing in Europe. I perked up and followed the man by train to nearby Aubagne, where the legendary fighting force was headquartered.
I visited the Legion's museum, gazing at the regimental flags, battle memorials, and other war memorabilia on display. The museum was a memorial to the bravery and sacrifice of nearly 40,000 foreigners who lost their lives on almost every continent on earth fighting for France. In the last century alone, over 30,000 Legionnaires have died in combat. That is a casualty rate of one in ten. The fatalistic attitude the Legion spawns is the result of this grim legacy. I peered down into the Crypte and read the names of the 903 Legion officers killed in action.
At a bistro (small restaurant), I struck up a conversation with a Canadian Legionnaire.
"I might like to join the Legion," I said.
"You would?" asked the Canadian. "My friend, I would think long and hard about that. Believe me. It's not what you think."
Martial fantasies swirled in my head. Over the following weeks, I discussed joining the Legion with a Franciscan priest I met on the Paris Metro. A sordid romance with a beautiful Québécoise diverted my attention briefly, but she left me to return to college before I knew it. I was heartbroken and almost out of money.
Romantic Ideas
In the spring of 1999, I was a child of the American Midwest, a college graduate who had never seen military service except for a brief stint in Army ROTC in college. I found myself in a rundown suburb of Paris, questioning what to do with my life.
At this point, I thought I wanted to be a monk. Joining the Legion seemed like the closest thing you could do to become a warrior monk like the crusading fighters of the Knights Templar. There was something extraordinary about giving up everything I knew in my life to be a part of a special unit that appealed to me. I wanted to start fresh, so I joined the French Foreign Legion.
Beginnings
Little about my early life predicted a future packing a rifle and a heavy backpack for a foreign power. I was a native Hoosier, born and raised in West Lafayette, Indiana. Watch the Gene Hackman movie Hoosiers, about a big-city coach taking over a fledging basketball program at a high school in a small Indiana town surrounded by cornfields, and you have an idea of where I grew up. I was the second oldest of three children born to hard-working, blue-collar parents who were Mexican immigrants. Though I never went hungry, I grew up without many material things, becoming an overachiever at a young age. As a young kid, I dreamed about becoming a doctor or lawyer.
I attended Purdue University, intending to go to medical school. Failing a chemistry class inspired me to get serious about my future. I majored in history and English literature for a year, giving in to my romantic side. Operation Desert Shield was going on when the idea of joining the military first popped into my head. By the late winter of 1990, I signed up for the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program.
ROTC is an Army college-based program for training officers. Students worked out, took military science courses, and wore military uniforms to class once a week. My goal wasn't to become an officer or join the Army. I just wanted to be involved in something military. I liked wearing the uniform; it gave me a sense of purpose and pride. I've always been a dreamer, a guy who thought the grass was greener elsewhere. I always felt like a man born too late. I would have ridden a steamship up the Congo a la Joseph Conrad a hundred years before. I yearned for a life of meaning and adventure.
My military dreams ended halfway through the second semester of my sophomore year when I got caught driving under the influence (DUI) and received six months of probation. With a DUI conviction, I wasn't eligible for a security clearance, so I got kicked out of ROTC. But the then leaden hand of practicality settled heavily on my shoulder. If I couldn't be a warrior, I would chase the American Dream and make lots of money. So, I changed my major to business with a minor in accounting.
A Bleak Future
By the summer of 1992, some classmates signed six-figure contracts as investment bankers and consultants. I didn't understand what college graduates, at age twenty-two or three and fresh from the classroom, could possibly be consulted about except college. Others headed off to law school or graduate school for a few more years of reading instead of living.
At first, the career path seemed like a good thing. Just after graduation, I got snapped up by Caterpillar, an American Fortune 100 corporation that manufactured and sold farm machinery. My new bosses plugged me into a fast-track executive sales job. I moved to Chicago, leased a big apartment and a souped-up BMW, and embraced yuppiedom.
I embodied the ideal that selling may not be the "oldest profession in the world," but it was close. I learned quickly that selling well was one of the best ways to make money. I worked 14 to 18-hour days, six days a week. Over the next five years, I worked my way up the corporate ladder and lived in four states. Each year, the button-down business world became less and less appealing.
MBA
At 27 years old, unhappy, and unfulfilled, I decided to get a Master of Business Administration (MBA). I wanted to learn more about business to gain control of my financial fate and, more importantly, my time. I was tired of living on a phone, chained to a computer, and prey to an employer's demands. An MBA would be my path to greater knowledge about the world's workings and broader choices about the life I might lead. Again, I was wrong.
I completed the first year of my MBA, but now, none of the curricula about making and managing money appealed to me. I wanted to go on an incredible odyssey or big adventure.
A Unfilled Desire
I yearned to prove myself in some unbelievably hard task. I wanted to do something so tough that no one could ever talk shit to me. In ancient Sparta or Rome, my decision would have been easy; I would have become a warrior. I often felt as if I had been born a century too late. There seemed no longer to be a place in the world for a young man who wanted to don armor, grab a shield and sword, and slay dragons.
A year into my MBA program, I realized that despite my substantial success, I still yearned for a life of meaning and adventure. Selling widgets and filling out more paperwork for corporate America promised neither.
Headed to Europe
I chucked my Chicago job and boarded a plane for London. Again, the idea of joining the military tickled the back of my mind. I knew something about the Legion but still had no plans to enlist. In fact, I had no clue what I'd even do in Europe. I wandered about England for a few weeks, then Italy. I got drunk in all kinds of places and had the opportunity to learn a little about European women and their famously liberal sexual mores.
By October, I was back in England, and I planned to winter somewhere warm, then go back to Indiana and maybe rejoin my MBA class and slog my way through the rest of the program. Through the youth hostel grapevine, I'd heard that Marseilles in the south of France might be a practical and warm choice. I heard that visiting tourists could work in the fields or factories in exchange for room and board. I didn't know much about it, but it sounded like fun. Then I saw the Legionnaire in the képi blanc.
Enlisting
Why would a college-educated American with a bristling 401K want to join that fabled group? Call it a quarter-life crisis. This challenge is what I wanted: to find a way in the comfortable world, a chance to live a heroic adventure. Growing up in suburbia, I knew nothing but security and comfort. I hungered for challenges, violence, and danger, the kind of stuff that Ernest Hemingway wrote about that would turn me into a rugged man able to handle anything.
I had no clear idea how to fulfill this peculiar ambition until I saw that Legionnaire wearing his képi blanc in Marseilles. The Legion was on a talent hunt for soldier material.
At the Legion museum, I saw a poster of a trim Legionnaire with several rows of campaign ribbons, adding color to his tailored tropical khaki shirt. He had one of those lean, athletic, slightly cruel-looking faces, considered handsome in the military with blond hair and a square jaw. The fierce-looking soldier was straight out of central casting, like a cross between a muscular actor and an Aryan Nazi tank commander. His striking blue eyes, clear and resolute, seemed to stare at me with a challenge. REJOIGNEZ LA LÉGION ÉTRANGÈRE (JOIN THE FOREIGN LEGION), read the blazing red slogan above his képi blanc. ÊTRE LEADER DES HOMMES (BE A LEADER OF MEN).
The Salle d’Honneur ((“Hall of Honor”) contains memorabilia of the 35,000 foreign legionnaires who have laid down their lives for France over the years. The most moving exhibits for me were the Croix de Guerre (Cross of War) and Medaille Militaire (Military Medal) awarded posthumously to my hero, the American poet Alan Seeger, who died fighting the Great War.
Born in New York in 1888, he studied Italian at Harvard and later moved to Paris to live and write among the American expatriates in the Quartier Latin (Latin Quarter). As the bright sunshine of la belle epoque became overcast by ominous warnings of war, Seeger joined dozens of other American nobles who answered La Republic’s call to arms by becoming Legionnaires. The Legion was not particularly impressed. He wrote that the NCOs were as heavy-handed with gentlemen volunteers as they were with “refugees from justice and roughs.” Plus ça change, plus ça reste pareil (The more it changes, the more it stays the same), I was soon to discover.
During the battle of the Somme, Seeger’s company was ordered to retake the occupied village of Belloy-en-Santerre. As they advanced, the enemy caught Seeger's unit in the crossfire of German machine guns. Seeger was cut down as he waved his comrades on and fell screaming into a bomb crater. Before dying, he cried out for water and his mother. He wrote to her in one of his letters: “If it must be, let it come in the heat of action. Why flinch? It is by far the noblest form in which death can come.”
Beyond the Salle d’Honneur is the Foreign Legion’s Holy of Holies, the Crypte, off limits even to Legionnaires except in the presence of an officer. I leaned in over the velvet rope to read the names inscribed on the wall panels of the 903 officers killed in action.
Among them is Lieutenant-Colonel Amilakvari, an exiled Georgian prince and commander of a Legion unit attached to Britain’s Eighth Army in North Africa. Blown away by German shellfire in 1942 during the battle of El Alamein, he is remembered for his words: “We, foreigners, have but one way to prove to France our gratitude for the welcome she has given us: to die for her.” Also encased in a glass reliquary lies the Legion’s most sacred relic, the wooden hand of Capitaine Danjou, killed in 1863 at the legendary battle of Camerone in Mexico.
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The museum reeked of heroic death. I loved it.
The Legendary Legion
I rummaged through the propaganda material at the museum's entrance, picking out one pamphlet in English whose cover listed every battle the Legion had fought in. I learned that France had created its foreign Legion in 1831, principally to defend its colonial possessions—dirty work assigned to foreigners, criminals, and romantic swashbucklers looking for adventure abroad.
In the Legion's almost 200-year existence, there have never been two consecutive years of peace, and its percentage of casualties have been higher than virtually any other unit of its size in history. Since 1831, the Legion has become a worldwide symbol of discipline and action. At the same time, its pay is the lowest, but its chance for adventure and combat is the highest. Despite all this, its glorious tradition still brings recruits from all over the world, made up of volunteers from 140 countries; the Legion gives men a second lease on life--all it asks in return is absolute obedience and maybe their lives.
More than 10,000 foreign volunteers died in France's futile decade-long war to hold on to Vietnam after World War II. in 1953, at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu, Col. Andre Lalande famously led 2,000 Legionnaires in a desperate bid to defend an isolated outpost. British Military Richard Holmes described their "baroud d' honneur" (last stand), walking out to meet their certain death with fixed bayonets on the ends of their rifles under the pale yellow and orange light of parachute flares."
In 1961, a group of disgruntled French generals and the Legion's 1st Parachute Regiment tried to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle and derail his plans to grant Algeria independence. In retaliation, the regiment was disbanded. The men sang Edith Piaf's "Non! Je ne regrette rien"- No! I regret nothing- as they marched to their barracks for the last time. After that, the Legion downsized to roughly 8,000 men and moved its headquarters from Algeria to Aubagne. In recent years, it fought in the Gulf War, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa.
A Yearning for More
Reading down that list of battles, I had a rare flash of insight: the heroic experience I sought was war. War was the ultimate adventure I craved. Combat was the one way an average man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary. France was at peace then, but the late nineties were years of almost constant crises and tension throughout the world; if a conflict did break out, the Foreign Legion would be sure to fight in any future wars, and I could be there with them, fulfilling my destiny.
Actually, there. Not watching it on a TV screen or a movie, or reading about it in a book, but there, living out the fantasy in full technicolor. Already, I saw myself defending some remote desert outpost in some distant foreign land vastly outnumbered by hordes of enemy insurgents, like Gary Cooper in Beau Geste or John Wayne in The Green Berets or Sands of Iwo Jima, and then coming home to America, a suntanned warrior with medals on my chest having done something heroic and difficult. There were no recruiters to give me the usual sales pitch, but I hardly needed to be persuaded. I decided to enlist in the French Foreign Legion.
I had another motive for volunteering to serve, which has pushed young men into armies ever since they were first invented: I needed to prove something—my courage, toughness, or manhood—call it whatever you like. I had spent a year working on my MBA before fleeing to Europe, freed from academia's confinements and the grind of my old job at Caterpillar, and I felt freer than I had in my entire life.
The last three months of gallivanting over Europe had depleted my savings, but I knew I couldn't return to my old, comfortable life. As a result, at the age of twenty-nine, I found myself desperate and possibly having to return to America to live with my parents.
The Legion promised nothing except hardship, only asking, "Do you have what it takes?" If I were going to serve in the military, I would be a Legionnaire. So, on the eve of my 30th birthday, I knocked on Le Fort de Nogent's door, one of many recruiting posts across France.
I carried a rucksack full of illusions through the gates of Le Fort de Nogent. I saw myself as a gentleman-soldier on the model of, say, Alan Seeger, the American Harvard-educated poet who died at the Battle of the Somme and whose medals of heroism I saw at the Aubagne museum. I had read Christian Jennings' Mouthful of Rocks, a disillusioned Brit's 1990 memoir of his experiences in the Legion. Like Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in Fight Club, I wanted the Legion to punch me in the face as hard as it could to change my life. I thought I knew what I was getting into by enlisting in the Legion. I quickly found out I was very wrong.