| Page 2 of 3 < > |
Legendary Force Updates Its Image
Foreign Legion recruits train in Castelnaudary, France. Legionnaires are now required to be proficient with computers and high-tech gear as well as be fit.
(By Molly Moore -- The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
"Une fourchette!" repeated 49 recruits representing 21 nationalities.
Once an almost exclusively European force, the Legion now counts Asians and Latin Americans among its fastest-growing cadres of soldiers. Although French law forbids the Legion to actively recruit beyond French borders, the Internet has rendered the law almost meaningless.
Commanders say it is even more difficult now to meld dozens of cultures into a single military force. Recruits say the isolation entailed in adapting to a new life in a new language is compounded when none of your bunkmates shares a common language or culture.
"There's a lot of tension between everybody," said Samual, who said he used sign language in the first weeks to communicate with fellow recruits from Nepal, Iraq, Romania and Ukraine.
After four months, recruits are expected to have learned 400 to 600 French words -- enough to get by on the battlefield, in the barracks and at the dinner table. And in the end, said commanders, it is the French language that binds the Legionnaires together as a family of foreigners serving under the French tricolor.
Champfleury, a graduate of France's elite Saint-Cyr military academy, has headed the Foreign Legion since last July. Like 90 percent of Legion officers, he is a member of the regular military.
He is quick to smile and crack a joke. He keeps a souvenir pistol from U.S. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in a glass case in his spacious office at the Legion's Aubagne headquarters, a 3 1/2 -hour drive east of here. Legionnaires served under Schwarzkopf during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, made him an honorary private and presented him with cases of wine from the Legion's vineyard in Provence.
Legionnaires now work side-by-side with French police and army troops patrolling train stations and airports as part of counterterrorism efforts. Before a NATO meeting in the southern coastal city of Nice in 2004, Legion divers were ordered into the city's subterranean sewers to help provide security.
Legionnaires serve in Afghanistan, Chad and Ivory Coast with regular French military forces. They were deployed with U.S. military forces in Somalia in 1992 and have been part of peacekeeping missions in Kosovo, Rwanda and Cambodia. They also took part in relief efforts in South Asia after the December 2004 tsunami.
When President Jacques Chirac volunteered to send French troops to help rebuild Lebanon last summer after the war between Israel and Hezbollah, Legion engineers were the first to reconstruct destroyed bridges.
Created in 1831 as a way of absorbing European refugees who had flooded the country after the revolutions of 1830, the Legion has long prided itself on being the first French unit into conflict zones. "Having a force with a lot of single men and a lot of foreign people makes it easier to deal with politically," Champfleury said. "You don't have the widows and orphans."
In the course of its history, 35,000 Legionnaires have been killed in battle or during service to the organization.
