Ah, le Legion

The International Herald Tribune has an article by Simon Romero about the training of the French Foreign Legion in French Guiana:

There was no other way to put it: Stiven Baird, an American in the French Foreign Legion, looked terrible.
A week into the legion's jungle warfare course here in the equatorial rain forest, he was famished after eating nothing for three days but some agouti, a rodent that resembles a large, tailless rat. An obstacle course with Tarzanesque leaps from ropes depleted his stamina. A predawn swim in caiman-inhabited waters tested his nerves. Drinking dirty river water disgusted him. "I am just exhausted," the gaunt Baird, 30, said, before faintly uttering in French, "Fatigué, fatigué." But when asked why he joined the Legion a year ago, his eyes lighted up a bit as he described an apparently dreary past life as a truck driver in Virginia. "I wanted to see the world and learn some French," he said, as the Russian overseer of the course, Sergeant Sergei Provpolski, barked at him to join other legionnaires on a trot through the jungle. "There are easier ways to learn French," said Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Kopecky, an officer in the French Army who was observing Baird's predicament.
Yet that evening, Kopecky and other officers raised glasses of Esprit de Corps, a red Côtes de Provence vintage made from the legion's own vineyards near Marseille. At a dining hall overlooking the Approuague River, they boasted of taking recruits from 140 countries and turning them into mercenaries in the service of France. "We don't accept the hardened criminals anymore, the murderers or rapists, so this makes our job easier," said Captain Samir Benykrelef, the commander of Camp Szuts.
Formed in the 19th century as a way for France to enforce its colonial empire with foreign adventurers, the Legion has survived countless challenges, including the French loss of the Legion's North African birthplace, Algeria. But in this sparsely populated overseas French department, a former penal colony wedged between Suriname and Brazil, it has acquired a postcolonial mission protecting the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, some 110 miles to the northwest, which each year launches into orbit about half of the world's commercial satellite payloads. As temperatures soar to 90 degrees in the shade of transplanted baobab trees, legionnaires patrol Kourou, a quiet town of 20,000, their shaved heads shielded from the sun under white pillbox-style hats known as képis blancs. They guard the four-decade-old space complex from terrorists who could emerge from the surrounding jungle. (There is always a first time.) On launch days, legionnaires swap their képis for green berets and man artillery on roads down which rolls the odd Peugeot or Renault.
One of the most action-packed scenes in Kourou can be glimpsed nightly at the Bar des Sports on the Avenue des Frères Kennedy. Legionnaires with aiguillettes, or braids, dangling from their starched uniforms pack bar stools next to scantily clad women from Brazilian cities like Macapá and Belém. At this locale on a recent Friday evening, the Legion seemed to have kept its rough edges. Instead of the wine preferred by their officers, legionnaires downed whiskey mixed with an energy drink called Long Horn. A band belted out forró, music from northeastern Brazil. Couples swarmed the dance floor. "This is where we come to forget why we're stationed here," said Andrey Korivitsky, 28, a legionnaire from Belarus who resembles Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
The boredom legionnaires complain about in Kourou contrasts with the scene back at Camp Szuts, where the barracks are named for distant battles of decades past, like Vauxaillon and Stuttgart. Instructors at the camp operate one of the most grueling courses in jungle warfare and survival, opening it to Special Forces from around the world, like the Navy SEALs. But its main purpose is preparing legionnaires for hardships in places where France still uses them for military intervention, like Chad, Djibouti, or the Ivory Coast.
"We are the grunts who are supposed to suffer, like your marines, at the hands of sadists," said Sergeant Ivan Grezdo, 33, a Slovakian forced to exit the course after cracking two ribs.
The course offers a window into the culture of the legion, long dominated by Germans who flooded its ranks after World War II. Now, enlistees from former Soviet bloc countries constitute most of the legion's 7,700 men (no women can join), with the number of Latin Americans, particularly Colombians and Brazilians, rising fast. Officers say Interpol background checks weed out most undesirables. Americans account for only about 1 percent of legionnaires.
"Americans in the legion tend to be the Beau Geste types, the idealists, making them easy pickings for the bullies and malcontents," said Jaime Salazar, 34, a man from Indiana who joined the legion, deserted, then recounted it all in a book, Legion of the Lost. Indeed, the Americans in the legion seem a bit less hard-boiled than other enlistees. "Pick an area on the map where there's been a recent crisis, and that area will be a good source of legionnaires," said Corporal Buys Francois, 43, a South African who joined 11 years ago.
At 11:45 a.m. on a recent Monday, Francois and a handful of other grisly Legion elders from Hungary, Poland, and China could be found on break at the camp's dimly lighted canteen, sipping Kronenbourg beers. Most agreed it was worth sticking it out for 15 years, when they are eligible for French pensions.
"We call the new entrants Generation PlayStation because they're so soft," said Francois, who claimed he joined the legion after seeing action in South Africa's army. "Now we're taking the ex-husbands running from alimony," he snorted, "and all these guys with university degrees."
Turning men on the lam, and some learned ones, into legionnaires has never been easy. When the Legion's Third Infantry Regiment relocated here from Madagascar in the 1970s, officers ordered it to build an asphalt road by hacking its way through the jungle. At a small zoo at Camp Szuts, new arrivals must get acquainted with a few captured animals, including an ocelot, a tarantula, a red caiman, an anaconda and a jaguar named Fred. "Most of these beasts are no friend of humans, but I would especially not want to cross the fer-de-lance or a pack of peccaries," said Benykrelef, 33, the commander, as he petted an iguana. "At least the peccary is good to eat."
What makes someone want to kill a wild boar with his own hands, or suffer degradation from Slavic drillmasters, or risk fracturing his rib cage on a leap down a rain forest gorge? "The money," said a Brazilian legionnaire who gave his full name as Roberto Luís. As a fireman back in Recife in northeastern Brazil, Luís, 29, said he made the equivalent of 300 euros a month, about $384. "Now I earn four times that amount and have the opportunity to become a French citizen," he said.
Of course, everyone entering the legion must hew to some unusual rules, like marching at 88 steps a minute, slower than the 120 steps a minute of other French military units. And new legionnaires like Baird of Virginia must adopt pseudonyms, which often evoke their national origins, a tradition that seems to let them break free of the past, murky as it can be. "I guess the spelling of Stiven is French," said Baird, mumbling, almost incoherently, that he had once studied engineering at Old Dominion University under the name Kevin Barnet.

Rico says he flirted with the notion of the Legion at one time in his youth, but never acted on it; just as well, considering...