Word: legion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...city of the dead. Almost as swiftly as it had begun, the seven-day battle for control of the industrial heart of Zaïre's copper-rich Shaba province ended last week. Driven from the city by the hard-fighting paratroopers of France's Foreign Legion (see box), an estimated 2,000 Katangese rebels faded back into the bush, retreating toward their home bases in eastern Angola. The paratroopers took up new positions at Lubumbashi, 160 miles away, turning over their guard duty to Zaïrian troops loyal to President Mobutu Sese Seko...
...done by 600 legionnaires, who encircled Kolwezi, took up positions on the main roads, and then launched foot patrols inside the city. The French troops encountered an ephemeral enemy that drifted away rather than risk a pitched battle. There were, however, a few fierce skirmishes, in which the legion lost four...
...Camp Raffali in Corsica, officers and men of the Deuxèeme REP (Second Foreign Parachute Regiment) listened in silence to radio newscasts from Zaire. There was no sign of mourning when Foreign Legion casualties from their unit were announced, even though punishment squads of delinquent recruits were already digging graves in a military cemetery near the legion's paratroop base. "If they get you, they get you," said a veteran. "One legionnaire is worth 20 of the opposition...
...invasion was not only bigger and better planned; it was also, according to Washington, actively supported by Cuban troops who have been training the F.L.N.C. guerrillas in Angola. Responding to an urgent telephone plea from Mobutu, French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing dispatched 1,200 Foreign Legion paratroopers to Shaba. Belgian Premier Léo Tindemans sent another contingent of paras to help airlift 3,000 Europeans from Kolwezi. Units of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., were placed on alert, and the White House announced that 18 Air Force C-141 transports, based...
...there was a generals' putsch that failed ignominiously. At its end, the battle-tested "green berets" of the proud First Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, who had backed the coup, were trucked off to Zéralda for the disbanding of their disgraced unit. The watching pieds noirs wept; the Legionnaires roared out the words of Edith Piaf's plaintive song, "Je ne regrette rien. " The Algerian war has elements of epic grandeur and terror that cry out for a Thucydides, if not a Gibbon to describe them. British Historian Horne, whose previous books include three studies of Franco...