Fighting for the French Foreign Legion Page 8

  In February 1985, the whole Regiment left for the Republic of Central Africa. We were stationed in the north-west of the country at a town called Bouar, about 300 miles from the capital, Bangui. This was equitorial Africa and a complete contrast to the deserts of Tchad.

  After a couple of weeks acclimatizing to the heat and humidity, our section was given the task of building a road bridge across a river in the north-west of the country. There had never been a bridge at this particular part of the river and it was only possible to cross it by a ford at certain times of the year. The building of this bridge would open up the economy of the region and had been talked about for years. It was a huge task for us and would take the best part of a month to complete. The site had been surveyed and the plans drawn up by civil engineers, but no one until now had been prepared to take on the job. The location was remote, the climate hostile and the cost of a civilian firm doing the job would have been prohibitive. So here we were – the Legion to the rescue. After all, we could do anything, couldn’t we, or so we were told.

  Our first task on arriving at the site was to build ourselves a camp. If you are going to be in a fixed location for any length of time you may as well make yourself as comfortable as possible. Life in a hostile environment such as this is a lot easier if you can look forward to good meals and basic home comforts. To this end, we built ourselves a first-class field kitchen, with a wood-fired oven to bake fresh bread in. There was no shortage of fresh meat which we hunted ourselves. The local village had plenty of vegetables in the market and there was a remarkable range of fish in the river – some of them called Captain fish were so large that one fish could feed the whole section.

  Our big problem was fresh water. The river itself was the problem as it carried one particular parasite which, if it got under your skin, caused severe sickness and diarrhoea. There was even a ban on washing clothes in the river. As a result, we had to have fresh water brought to us by road tanker. We also set up a water purification system which we would leave behind when we left, to be used by the villagers.

  We had our own medical team with us and they set up a clinic which was used by the locals. Word soon got out and they arrived in droves, some walking days to get to the clinic for treatment. This was a ‘hearts and minds’ operation as was building the bridge. Every morning there was a line of villagers waiting to be seen but when the queue got longer by the day, it became necessary to have the village elders install some kind of order. Some of the ailments we saw were of such a serious nature that they would normally have required hospital treatment. Our doctors did the best they could under the circumstances, but the nearest hospital facilities were in the capital which was over 700 miles away, and there was no real public transport system. As far as we could gather, a doctor visited the area for a few days twice a year, and that was it.

  Each village had its own ‘medicine man’ who made his own potions, which had been used with some success, it must be said, over the centuries. They were not to be mocked and some of the potions worked, but not a lot.

  The fame of our cuisine was also spreading and every French military patrol in the area seemed to call in on us at meal times. Our English chef was turning out fresh ‘Cornish pasties’ and steak pies baked in our bread oven, which had been made out of a large biscuit tin covered in baked earth. He had learned how to get the temperature just right and the results were simply fantastic.

  The section worked well together and the central supports of the bridge were quickly built. The concrete set almost as fast as we mixed it and we were soon ready to install the huge steel support beams. There were eight of them and they had to be brought up to us on military tank transporters, each beam weighing in at almost 20 tons. They had also brought a mobile crane to lift them off the transporters, but it couldn’t lift them into place. Big problem.

  It was now that the weeks of medical co-operation with the local villages were to bear fruit. With the help of the local chiefs we assembled two teams, each of one hundred natives. The beams would have to be carried into place. Getting them to the river’s edge meant passing a hundred lengths of rope under them, then, with a hundred men on each side, the natives took the strain on the ropes and lifted the beams off the ground. They started chanting with deep voices as they shuffled forward, directed by their own leaders. This was not slave labour, these men knew that they were helping themselves and were proud to be doing so. As their voices boomed out the first beam was slowly lifted, carried forward and lined up ready to be moved into position. It was a wonderful experience and one that will stay for ever engraved on my memory.

  A wooden frame had been constructed to enable the beams to be carried to their final resting places. This was slow, tiring work and it took three days for the eight beams to be carried into place. We then had to lay cross timbers to form the road surface and erect side barriers. This took another three weeks to complete and by the time we had finished the work we felt as if we had constructed the Forth Road Bridge.

  To formally open the bridge, our Colonel in Chief flew in by helicopter to cut the ceremonial ribbon. He called the chiefs from the villages nearest to the crossing which had provided most of the labour to join him in performing the opening ceremony. There was much singing and dancing by the villagers as they celebrated an event which would change their lives for ever.

  But all good things come to an end, and we had to dismantle our base and our celebrated oven. Within weeks the vegetation would claim back our camp site and there would be no trace of our passage – except for the bridge, of course.

  The rest of the Regiment had been busy in our absence and had been building accommodation huts to replace the tents which had been in place when we first arrived in Bouar. They had built shower blocks and a mess area, with recreational facilities such as a large video room, table tennis and an indoor gymnasium. The wet season was approaching which would keep everyone indoors when off duty. The icing on the cake was the magnificent entrance gate which carried the regimental badge and name. There were two other French Regular Army units stationed in the town and they were living under canvas in very basic conditions.

  After a couple of weeks of normal duties, we headed south-west into the tropical rainforest close to the frontier with the Congo. Our mission was to escort a routine Gendarmerie border patrol.

  For over a hundred miles we drove along a huge tarmac road with no traffic except for the occasional timber lorry. This super highway had started life as the Trans African Highway, paid for by loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Like most of these giant projects, once the initial publicity was over and the politicians had had their moment of fame, the money found its way elsewhere, such as their own pockets, and the projects came to a halt.

  As the trees got as tall as the road was wide, we came across a road sign for ‘road narrows’ – and it did. Our six-lane highway dead-ended into a forest track barely wide enough to take our vehicles. From brilliant sunshine we went in to almost total darkness as the tree canopy blocked out the sun. It was hot and the humidity had gone up to 90 per cent. Everything was dripping wet and there was a powerful smell of decaying vegetation. Now and again we would burst into a clearing which was completely carpeted with wild orchids. We had no option but to drive over them as there was no other way to go - an orchid grower would have cried, but there was nothing else we could do.

  The highlight of the patrol was meeting the wonderful pygmy people. They came out to greet us and ran alongside singing their strange songs and waving. These people have nothing, but everything. They ask for nothing and are content to live their primitive lives the way their ancestors have lived for hundreds of years. Thank God that the road had run out of money as it would have cut right through their lands and opened up the forest to intensive logging, which would have decimated the tribes.

  Fortunately these are remote, inhospitable areas that are not conducive to the tourist industry. The pygmies made us welcome in their community, which
was made up of individual dwellings built by bending branches and then covering them with leaves. The children were naked and the adults wore loin clothes made from animal skins. They cooked in the open and appeared to have no possessions other than the basic necessities they required to exist. They were not poor as they had everything that they needed. The patrol lasted two weeks and I was amazed at how many people lived in and off the forest.

  One of the great things about these overseas postings was that we were never doing the same thing two days in a row. Our next assignment was in the capital Bangui, to guard key military installations at the airport, which also shared the runway with civilian traffic.

  While we were there, we had an unexpected VIP to guard – the Pope. He was on a tour of African states and landed at Bangui airport. Being a sniper, I was positioned on top of a floodlight pylon and had a bird’s-eye view of the proceedings. As he descended from the aircraft I couldn’t help having a look at him through my telescopic sight and watched him in close-up as he made his now famous gesture of kissing the ground. Perhaps he hated flying.

  He held a huge outdoor Mass in the local football stadium before he came back to the airport to continue his tour. After his departure, another sniper from one of the other groups said to me, ‘Never tell any of my mates back home that I had the Pope in my sights.’ He was a Protestant from Belfast and had left Northern Ireland to get away from the Troubles.

  At the end of our third month we went back to Bouar to prepare for our return to Calvi. I had been told that I would be given the opportunity to go on a Caporals’ course and started studying in preparation. The final weeks passed quickly and before we knew it we were on the plane heading back to France.

  CHAPTER 8

  Collective Power

  Due to the increased intake over the past two years, there was an unusually large number of legionnaires from the REP due to go on a Caporals’ course. Out of the forty places on the course, twenty had been allocated to the ‘boys’ from Calvi.

  Our course was due to start on a Monday, with the last reporting time at Castelnaudary on the Sunday evening. Because of the sailing times from Corsica to the Continent at this time of the year, we were told that we would have to leave on the Wednesday night ferry from Bastia. This meant that we would arrive in Marseille early on Thursday morning and travel to Castelnaudary by train, arriving about 4.00 in the afternoon. We would be confined to camp for three days over the weekend before the course started which none of us wanted.

  While on the ferry we got our heads together to discuss the problem and agreed that there was no way that we were going to let that happen. A plan of action was quickly agreed. We were being escorted by a Sergeant who had been tasked to deliver us directly to Castelnaudary, but we planned to ditch him in such a way that he would not be able do anything about it. If we worked together as a team, using our collective power, nothing could beat us.

  The sea was calm and when we arrived at Marseille a bus was waiting for us on the quayside to take us to the railway station. We all boarded the train as planned and settled back to enjoy the run along the coast. Before reaching Narbonne, the last stop before the train headed inland on its run up to Toulouse, we made sure that the Sergeant was well established in the buffet car. He had no reason to suspect that we were up to anything and was enjoying a drink with a crowd of us around him for company.

  When the train stopped, Operation ‘Ditch the Sergeant’ was put into action. Timing was everything. Half a dozen of our group got out at the front of the train and walked slowly back down the platform towards the buffet car. In France, as previously pointed out, a three-minute stop means exactly that – not a second more, not a second less. Thirty seconds before the train was due to pull out of the station, our six volunteers walked past the buffet car window and waved at those inside.

  We made sure that the Sergeant saw them, he shot off his bar stool, ran for the nearest door and was out on the platform about five seconds before the train doors closed behind him. Once closed there was no way that they could be reopened. The door of the last carriage meanwhile was being held open by one of our group and the last of the six swung up into the train as it started to roll.

  The next thing the sergeant was aware of was the train pulling out of the station with not a Legionnaire in sight on the platform. When he looked up there were twenty legionnaires waving at him from the departing train, leaving him standing on the platform without his kepi, his bags and most important of all, his detachment of legionnaires. I must admit that I felt sorry for him. He was the innocent victim of a well-organized plot.

  The worst that could happen to us was that we would all be thrown off the course and sent back to Calvi. For the sergeant, I wasn’t so sure. We were all a bit nervous as the train pulled in to Castelnaudary. We half expected the Military Police to board the train to escort us all to the camp, but we needn’t have worried, there was no sign of them. I suppose up to that point we hadn’t done anything wrong.

  We all stayed on the train to Toulouse where we went our separate ways for some unofficial leave. Some got on the TGV for Paris, others like myself decided to stay on in what was France’s second largest city. I had never been there before and there was lots to do. Being so close to Castelnaudary, legionnaires in uniform were not unusual.

  We spent our time relaxing, bought some extra equipment to use on the course, went to the cinema and had a couple of good meals. On the Sunday morning, as agreed, we all headed for Castelnaudary, arriving at the station a little after 11.00. A reception committee was waiting for us as we stepped off the train. A sergeant chef, a sergeant and four MPs from the Training Regiment were standing on the platform. They wanted to take us to the camp in dribs and drabs as the lads arrived, but we had agreed that we would all regroup at the station and go to the camp together. Our strength was in our solidarity and we refused to go. There were only four still to arrive and their train was due in about five minutes, so we stayed. The REP has a mean reputation and the young MPs were afraid to take us on. Six against sixteen was no contest.

  The final four arrived on time and we got onto the lorries for the short drive to the camp. When the lorries stopped at the main gates we all jumped down and lined up in two rows to march into the camp. Again the MPs were taken by surprise and could do nothing about it. The gates opened and we marched onto the parade square singing the REP regimental song. The sentries and the MPs were obliged by tradition to stand to attention and salute as we marched past.

  Unbeknown to us, our second in command from the REP, Lieutenant Colonel Halbert, had flown by helicopter from Calvi and was waiting to interview us one at a time. He must have been watching from a window as we marched proudly into the camp. We were kept standing on the parade square for four hours before the interviews began, during which time we were not allowed to talk while we waited our turn, or question those who had been interviewed and returned to the ranks.

  We gradually became aware that we were being watched from the windows of the barracks by those undergoing their basic training. Everyone was confined to quarters while all of this was going on. Quite what they thought of us we will never know, but I am sure that they must have been impressed.

  I was second last to go in for questioning and by now it was just after six in the evening. We hadn’t eaten or been given any water, although fortunately for us it was a sunny but cool day. I am sure that we would have been left standing there even if it had been raining or even snowing.

  After being marched in, the Colonel simply asked me to explain what we had done and why we had done it. He did not raise his voice or show any sign of displeasure at what had happened. In fact I got the impression that he was quite pleased that we had stuck together and had enhanced the reputation of the Regiment as being something special, to be held in awe by those not part of it. When I had finished my explanation he said that we would be staying to do the course and that any disciplinary action would be taken by the Regiment on our return. He al
so made it clear that he expected us all to come out at the top of the course and that nothing else would be good enough.

  It was decided by the Colonel in Chief of the Training Regiment that everyone from the REP would be kept together for the course in one section. He felt that it would not be fair to those from the other regiments to be dominated by the ‘REPmen’. Basically, he thought they could break us that way. Half of us were Brits or English speaking, and that was another bond within our group.

  First thing on the Monday morning we were assembled before our own Colonel in private. He told us that he could not condone what we had done, but he was pleased that we had stuck together. We were now expected to return his trust with positive results on the course, both as a group and as individuals, in the name of the Regiment. At the end of the course any punishment would reflect our achievements.

  The only people to suffer immediate sanctions were the Sergeant who had been in charge of us and the Legionnaire who had been carrying our paperwork and had left it on the train. Fortunately it had been recovered but they were both sent back to Calvi. The Sergeant was demoted for six months but the Legionnaire was back at Castelnaudary on the next course.

  Fortunately we had good NCO instructors. Two of them were ex-REP and wanted to return, while the others had ambitions to be transferred there. It was good to know that they were on our side and would be working with us rather than against. It was going to be an interesting four months. Our fitness levels were far superior to those of the other section and probably that of our instructors. We were going to be doing all our training at the farm where I had done my basic training and I therefore had another advantage of knowing the terrain. We were soon well into the programme of instruction and there was a healthy competitive atmosphere right from the start. It was also clear from the beginning that there were at least half a dozen natural leaders in our section who would challenge for first place. Instruction was comprehensive and intensive, and our group thrived on it. Every challenge was met head on as a united unit while individual skills came to the fore.