american armed conflict in which troops wore kepis

If they ran out of vocabulary, they would have to start again. Those who charged into the imaginary tail rotor or committed some other blunder would have push-ups to do immediately, counting them off in phonetic French- uh, du, tra, katra, sank. The job of the others was to wait for the imaginary touchdown, then disembark from the imaginary helicopter and pretend to secure the imaginary landing zone.

Two recruits who had been injured while running sat facing forward holding crutches. The chairs were meant to represent the benches in a helicopter flying into action-say, somewhere in Africa in the next few years to come.

They wore camouflage fatigues and face paint, and held French assault rifles. They were new recruits sitting back-to-back on two rows of steel chairs. Last summer I came upon 20 of them on a grassy knoll on a farm in France near the Pyrenees. It refers to the Legion itself, which is a branch of the French Army commanded by French officers but built of volunteers from around the world. The word “foreign” in the name French Foreign Legion does not refer to faraway battlegrounds.

American armed conflict in which troops wore kepis