Word: paratroops
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rebel General Raoul Salan escaped arrest to become the leader of the terrorist Se cret Army Organization, and his staff is made up of such tough ex-paratroop officers as Colonel Yves Godard and Pierre Lagaillarde...
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...
Author Lartèguy's book was published in Paris in 1960. Since then, history has proved him correct in his assessment of the reckless desperation of the paratroops: when the rebel generals revolted in Algiers last April, three paratroop regiments stuck with them to the bitter...