DISPATCHES:The French Foreign Legion counts several Irish soldiers among its ranks. Established in 1831 as an elite corps of foreigners willing to take up arms for France, it's as secretive as it is selective. RUADHAN MACCORMAICmeets Irish members, past and present, and discovers some truths, some myths, and the uncompromising code of discipline that make it the most notorious army in the world
AS DERMOT O’SHEA was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, a superior told him to imagine a scenario like this: You’re manning a border post and you’ve got an order to shoot on sight. No one is to cross. A woman comes running. What do you do?
“It was such an outrageous hypothesis, it really was, but it still had me a little worried and anxious, thinking, ‘God, what would I do?’ ”
As a gunner in Afghanistan, O’Shea’s job was to man a vehicle-mounted 50-calibre machine gun while the rest of his team scoured for road-side bombs. He came under fire several times on his six-month tour, although in the end he never had to fire a shot. Not that he wasn’t prepared. “When you’re detached and removed from that environment, you can spend hours and days philosophising about taking someone’s life,” he says. “But when gunfire starts cracking in the air and you see little shadows and feet and coat-tails running ahead of you, you don’t think, ‘that man, he has his own stream of consciousness and a family’, you just think, ‘well, he’s got a f**king AK-47, and if his bullets don’t hit me, mine have got to hit him first’.”
O’Shea, a gregarious 25-year-old from Balbriggan, Co Dublin, is sitting in a Paris café on his first holiday since the end of the Afghan tour. His hair is close-cropped, but with his bright T-shirt, an incipient beard and a rapid-fire laugh, he could pass for a student whiling away an off-term afternoon.
It’s more than three years since his journey to Afghanistan, via Paris, began at his desk in a Dublin bank. He had gone straight into the job after his Leaving Cert; initially, the idea was to spend a year saving for a laptop and clothes for college, but a steady wage and the sight of a good career path was enough to change the plan.
In January 2008, recession had yet to re-enter Ireland’s vocabulary, but in the bank, staff could clearly see the wheels slowing down. They noticed less paperwork passing their desks, more loans being refused, internal promotions seeming to freeze. “We knew something was up, and then the boredom started to kick in,” he recalls.
A few years earlier, O’Shea had watched a TV documentary about the French foreign legion. “I saw these guys running around in the desert, shouting orders. I thought, ‘that sounds exciting and romantic’.” He shakes his head, as if at his own innocence.
Friends were sceptical; he was not, he admits, the soldierly type. “At 17, I had hair down to my shoulders. I was lead singer in a rock band. I was prancing around in ripped jeans in Eamonn Doran’s on a Friday night,” he laughs.
Neither were his parents keen on the idea at first. “My mum was distraught at first, but not showing it. ‘That’s nice, that’s nice,’ she’d say. Then my dad would come into my room later and say, ‘Your mother’s in tears, what are you talking this nonsense for?’.”
That August, aged 22, O’Shea took a flight to France. He made his way to the huge iron gates of the Fort de Nogent, the foreign legion’s recruitment centre on the outskirts of Paris, and handed over his passport.
There are two French foreign legions. One is a physical entity – a wing of the French army created in 1831 for foreigners willing to take up arms for France. It’s a professional, elite corps made up of soldiers from every part of the globe, who are recruited and trained separately to the regular French army but fight and carry out missions alongside it. The second one is an idea, a mental image-bank, a jumble of myths and legends created over almost two centuries. Some of these are true, others not, but together they have given the legion a mythic resonance.
It’s a glorious morning when I pull up at the legion’s command headquarters, a vast complex in Aubagne, near Marseille. The security barriers are lifted by immaculately dressed légionnaires with grey-green uniforms and thick beards. Inside, small groups of young men in blue tracksuits jog along the road under an officer’s watchful eye; others are sweeping rubbish or scrubbing spotless walls. In one of the main buildings, where the corridors are abuzz with the accented French of eastern Europeans and Latin Americans, Capt Florent Legras points out the seven-article honour code that all new recruits must memorise. Article one: “Légionnaire, you are a volunteer serving France with honour and fidelity.”
And article six: “The mission is sacred. You carry it out until the end and, if necessary, in the field, at the risk of your life.”
For many, the Foreign Legion conjures up images of men on the run, murderers and rapists fleeing their past. Today, all applications are vetted by Interpol, although minor misdemeanours are tolerated. “Some men have committed small errors,” says Legras. “We offer them a second chance. No problem . . . But the Foreign Legion is not an alternative to the French justice system, or any other justice system.”
That doesn’t stop people trying. Paul Hoey, from Raheny in Dublin, remembers sharing a dorm with 17 others just after arriving in Aubagne in 1985. The gendarmes would arrive at night and drag people out of bed. “You have people running in, saying, ‘Where do I sign?’. You get guys coming in with suitcases full of money. They think, once the door closes, that’s it, you’re safe. You see some hairy people there – you really do. Some really hard-looking nuts.”
Hoey worked as an apprentice net-maker in Howth before joining the Irish Navy at 17 and serving four years there as a communications specialist. When he left, it was the mid-1980s and jobs were scarce, so after a few months he and his friend Christy Browne put on their best suits and set off for the south of France. In a 15-year career in the Parachute Regiment, reputed to be the fittest and toughest in the legion, Hoey spent time in Somalia, Rwanda and Djibouti, where he survived a serious crash in which his truck overturned. By the time he left in 2000, he had risen to the rank of chief sergeant.
Sitting in the foyer of a Dublin hotel on a summer’s morning, Hoey looks every bit the long-distance runner, with his lean physique and chiselled features. His delivery is low-key and hushed, but his face lights up at the memories. “The mental side of it was probably the hardest,” he says of his early days. “New language, new culture. I remember getting to Aubagne, and the bowls are put out and you think, ‘great, we’re getting cereal’. No, it’s coffee in the bowls. There you are, drinking coffee out of a bowl. Who the f**k ever saw that in Ireland? And in the 1980s we hardly ever drank coffee in Ireland.”
Ciarán, the eldest of seven children from a single-parent family in north Dublin, was the first member of his family to go to college. In 1999, after graduating with a history degree, he joined the legion and spent five years in the same regiment as Hoey: the second parachute, based in Corsica. The Irish Army wasn’t recruiting at the time and he didn’t give the British army a thought. “I would have had a patriotic background and the British army was a bit taboo,” he says.
Ciarán’s memory of the initial three-week selection process in Aubagne is of a tiring, monotonous series of medical and physical tests. But once recruits are accepted, they are then brought to Castelnaudary for basic training, including five weeks in what is known as The Farm – an intense, physically demanding and psychologically punishing experience that takes place on farmland in Castelnaudary’s hinterland. If someone so much as coughs during meals at The Farm, everyone is made bring their tray outside and empty it on to the gravel. Anyone who dozes off during a class is made to do a hand-stand against a wall and dip their head in a bucket of freezing water. In Ciarán’s intake, there was a 50 per cent fail rate in basic training; some were invalided out, others were deemed unsuitable.
“The legion is psychologically tougher than it is physically,” he says. “One thing I learned in the legion is that anybody in the world – it doesn’t matter how small, how fat, how skinny or whatever you are – can be trained physically to do a job. Anybody. They will break you down and build you up the way they want you to be physically.”
In his five years in the legion, Ciarán travelled widely in Africa. In 2003, he spent five months in Ivory Coast, where the legion played a role alongside the regular French army during the country’s civil war. The capital, Abidjan, was in violent turmoil. Some incidents he has hardly told anyone about. He describes how he and a fellow légionnaire one day walked into an ambush of 30 armed men only to find that the backup from the French army wasn’t in place. Heavy fighting ensued. “Fire-fights from a distance are fairly easy to deal with. When an incident is close-quarter combat, very up close and personal, that’s more difficult to deal with.” Does it leave a scar? “You learn to live with them. You never forget them.”
Ciarán is not his real name. He returned to Ireland after his five years and re-trained as a teacher, but asks not to be identified because some of his acquaintances don’t know about his time in the French army.
Of all the controversies that pursue the Foreign Legion, none is more damaging than the charge that abusive methods are used against its own men. In 2009, the Association for the Defence of Soldiers’ Rights, known as Adefdromil, published a report in which it claimed the command took advantage of its soldiers, exploited their vulnerability in a foreign country, and left them at the mercy of violence and humiliation by junior officers. It also released photographs it said showed that légionnaires’ rights were being violated. In one, about 20 men in their underwear line up with their faces to a wall while a man dressed in combat trousers walks behind them, a beer in one hand and a bat in the other. Another appears to show recruits being forced to crawl through mud in their underwear.
The legion’s command vigorously contests claims that its disciplinary regime oversteps the mark. In Aubagne, Capt Legras says the legion has the same rules as the rest of the army, although they are applied “fully” in the legion. “One must understand that the Foreign Legion doesn’t work by just clicking one’s fingers. It doesn’t work by giving a few orders. No. We have a challenge to meet – a challenge of cohesion, of putting in place rules so that this group, so diverse at the outset, emerges as one from the trenches. This challenge cannot be met with a relaxed command system.”
“People who stepped out of line were taught a lesson, if you want to put it that way,” Ciarán says. Taught a lesson? “They were beaten.” But he adds that such incidents were rare.
Hoey says he “only punched two légionnaires” in 15 years, and he regretted it each time. What had they done? “F**king eejits. One guy was spraying champagne. F**king sprayed me. He was being stupid with it. I just whacked him. Then he came over and he apologised.”
Hoey has no time for people who complain about the disciplinary regime. “You’re a volunteer. If you don’t like it, don’t f**king go there,” he says. “Nobody came knocking on my door in Dublin, saying, ‘Paul Hoey, we want you.’ I know people who have crossed barbed wire, have stowed away in trains, hid under the trains – this is before the Berlin Wall came down – to get over to Europe to join the legion. You’re being fed, you’re being clothed.
“It sounds a bit harsh, maybe. A lot of lads, they don’t realise what they actually got out of the legion. They learn French. Their values. They’ve met some of the best people they’ll probably ever meet in their lives.”
SINCE IT WAS established in 1831 by King Louis Philippe as a way for France to enforce its colonial empire using foreign fighters, more than 36,000 légionnaires have died for France, in conflicts including the two World Wars, Indochina and Algeria’s war of independence. Today it comprises about 8,000 men of 140 nationalities.
Official figures on the number of Irish people currently serving are not available, but there is always a small contingent. At Castelnaudary, O’Shea met another recruit from Dublin, but the young man tried to take his own life during basic training and was sent home. Two more Irish joined his regiment later – one from Tipperary, the other from Dublin – but both deserted. Hoey admits to having tried to desert in the early stages. He was caught, forced to do 15 days’ solitary and 15 days’ hard labour (including an 8km run wearing a backpack full of sand on his back and dogs at his ankles), and thinks, looking back, that it was the making of him.
The legion has won praise in France for its important role in recent French operations, notably in Afghanistan and Ivory Coast. But, as critics point out, the legion can also be politically useful in ways that other units are not, because the loss of foreign soldiers in the battlefield has fewer domestic repercussions than the loss of Frenchmen.
But are these Irishmen’s wars to fight? “Of course, you could take the philosophical approach and say you were a pawn that was used – absolutely an expendable pawn,” Ciarán replies. “But at the same time, you join the French foreign legion for a reason. You don’t expect to have any say in what your political masters have ordered you to do.”
Joining was far from a political act, he says. “And I suppose, to rattle a few cages a bit, there are, as we know, Irish military advisers in many countries – certainly under a UN mandate, but it does happen.”
He mentions private-security companies that recruit in Ireland, and suggests: “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek to say it’s an unpatriotic act and then, at the same time, there’s the whole post-western neutrality that we’ve always had.”
O’Shea – now three years into his five-year contract – never thought of joining the British army; he would have been uneasy with the idea, he says, so he considered only the Irish and French armies. To dismiss the choice to fight for France is to ignore the long military links between the two countries; a “Swiss cheese argument” he wouldn’t entertain. “Let’s say a bomb goes off in Dublin and al-Qaeda claims responsibility. Well, at least I’ve already served my five years with a Nato nation, fighting in Afghanistan to combat the Taliban, and by extension the al-Qaeda network.”
He bristles when critics liken légionnaires to mercenaries, a comparison he finds “completely unjust . . . A mercenary is someone who fights for a wage no matter where it comes from. A légionnaire is fighting under the French flag. We are part of the French army.”
The legion has a reputation for secrecy. It has opened up in recent times, but old habits die hard. It took more than a year from my first request for access to Aubagne before permission was finally granted, and my requests for interviews with recent Irish recruits were politely refused. At Aubagne, I was introduced to Maj Roderic Morrison, who was born in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, but moved to Scotland as a child.
Morrison was 20 years old in 1978, when he left home without telling his parents and headed to Paris to sign up. He thought of leaving a few times over the past 30 years, but couldn’t think of anything he could do in the civilian world that would be as satisfying as this.
Then there is the problem of readjusting to the outside world, which all ex-légionnaires experience. When Ciarán returned to Ireland in his late 20s, he didn’t know how to open a bank account or apply for insurance because he had never done either before.
Hoey was struck, back in Dublin, by how people didn’t follow orders. “It’s hard to accept that people won’t just accept to do as they’re told,” he says, laughing only a little bit.
After 15 years in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan organisations, he was also struck by what he felt was complacency and insularity in Irish life. “I grew up in the legion. My God, if I’d stayed in Ireland, I would have been a really naive person. The biggest thing that annoyed me when I came home was, you’re looking at people who are so narrow-minded. Open up. Look outside the box.”
Like each of the légionnaires I meet, Hoey describes his years in the legion as some of the best of his life, his comrades some of his closest friends. Like the others, he mentions the close relationship légionnaires build with France, its language and history. When O’Shea’s five years are up, he is thinking of going to college to study French.
The legion occupies an ambiguous place; of France and yet, subtly but unmistakably, self-contained and separate as well. Morrison has been a légionnaire for more than 30 years. He wife is French; so are his children, his syntax and his cultural references. So does he feel French? “No,” he replies without hesitation. “I’m a légionnaire. A légionnaire in the service of France. That’s all there is to it.”
Napoleonic sappers Legion tradition
About 1,000 men between the ages of 17 and 40 join the French Foreign Legion every year, having come through an evaluation process that whittles every eight applicants down to one. In the past, légionnaires were forced to serve under a pseudonym – a "declared identity" – but these days they can retrieve their own name after six months if they wish.
There's only one entry position: that of légionnaire, whereas most officers are seconded from the French army. After three years, légionnaires can apply for French citizenship, while the completion of a five-year contract comes with the reward of a 10-year residency permit.
All armies are sensitive to history and protective of tradition, but the legion has retained some of its oldest codes and customs as a way of forging common bonds between its diverse soldiers.
Légionnaires – or les képis blancs, after their famous white cap – march at 88 steps a minute, slower than the 120 steps a minute of other French military units. They have their own music, songs and ceremonies.
And the beards are another nod to the the past; in the Napoleonic era, the dangerous, life-shortening work done by sappers was rewarded with certain privileges, such as permission to wear beards. The tradition lives on in the legion's engineering regiments. On ceremonial occasions, such as the July 14th parade on the Champs-Élysées, they also wear the axe and leather aprons of Napoloeonic sappers.
