Word: paratroopers
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From a Kafka Hell. The mystique of the paratrooper, says Author Lartèguy, was born in the Kafka-like hell of Communist prison camps in Viet Nam after the fall of Dienbienphu. Like U.S. soldiers captured in the Korean war, the French were subjected to intensive brainwashing-but with vastly different results. The paratroop officers made a calculated decision to embrace the "political fiction" of the camp. They signed petitions condemning capitalism, accused themselves of monstrous crimes, made a noisy show of repentance, and even wrote a "progressive" hymn in which each word had a double meaning. They answered...
Bidet Civilization. Back in France after the Indo-China war, the paratroop officers are sickened by the "civilization of the Frigidaire and the bidet." They welcome the Algerian rebellion, and. under Colonel Raspèguy. take over the misfits and mutineers of the 10th Paratroop Regiment, determined to turn them into "Communists" who are antiCommunist. For two months, the regiment is molded by forced marches and the blare of loudspeakers that ceaselessly extol "us" and denounce "them," i.e.. anyone who is not a paratrooper...
...novel's end, the paratroop officers are subpoenaed in connection with charges that some of them had tortured prisoners. The officers are outraged. Colonel Raspèguy defiantly tells his staff that whenever Cabinet ministers or Deputies visited his headquarters, he had flatly told them: "'We're doing this job because your government has ordered us to, but it repels and disgusts us.' And now these same bastards are trying to haul us into court! Hold tight to your guns, then no one will come to bother...
...S.A.O. last week finally located the secret barbouze headquarters. It was a modern villa called Bel Air, set among the olive and palm trees on the heights of Algiers. The head barbouze was identified as Colonel Jean Leroy, 50, a veteran paratroop officer and guerrilla leader who is half French, half Vietnamese. In Paris last fall, Leroy accepted a commission from De Gaulle's government to form a 100-man underground police force to fight the S.A.O. with its own terror tactics...
...Minh Duc, inflicting "heavy" losses on the defenders. Only 18 miles from President Ngo Dinh Diem's capital of Saigon, a U.S. military adviser on a training patrol with Vietnamese Rangers was wounded by a Viet Cong sniper. In the jungle north of the capital, a 500-man paratroop battalion was ambushed at the end of a three-hour forced march by 1,000 Communists armed with Soviet weapons. At a cost of 20 dead and "numerous" wounded, the paratroopers fought their way out of the trap, and claimed to have killed 100 of the attackers...