Jean Lartéguy: Decoding the Warrior Ethos
For thousands of years men have fought one another in situations where the battle lines are not fixed and words like front and rear lines have little meaning—for the war is everywhere, with civilians caught up and brutalized in the conflict. Irregular warfare, guerrilla uprisings, and counterinsurgency are timeless—not merely fads of the moment. Malaya, Vietnam, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are just some of the datelines in which the twentieth and twenty-first centuries register conflicts whose fundamentals the ancients would have been familiar with. With the collapse of central authority in the Middle East, otherwise known as the “Arab Spring,” this situation applies to an even greater degree. For countries like Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are barely states at this juncture, with tribes, militias, and gangs, divided by territory, sect, and ethnicity, battling for primacy over a confused and violent landscape.
Conventional modern war, which Napoleon did so much to define and institutionalize, with its formalized set-piece battles and vertical chains of command, has mainly been with us for little more than two centuries. Its future, moreover, is uncertain. So while counterinsurgency is presently disparaged, because the results in Iraq and Afghanistan have been so unsatisfying for Americans, the lessons of counterinsurgency—if forgotten—will only have to be relearned on some future morrow. For that is the verdict of history going back to antiquity.
You cannot approach Vietnam and Iraq in particular, or the subject of counterinsurgency in general, without reference to Jean Lartéguy, a French novelist and war correspondent who in his own person encapsulates the divide between a professional warrior class that lives by these enduring, historical truths and a civilian home front alienated from them. Lartéguy inhabits the very soul of the U.S. Special Operations community, alienating not only civilian readers but members of the conventional military in the process.
Throughout my years observing the Special Operations community close up, I witnessed several editions of Lartéguy’s The Centurions (1960) passing through the hands of those about whom I reported. Green Berets recommended to me not only Lartéguy’s The Centurions but also The Praetorians (1961): books about French paratroopers in Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950s that resonated with their own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it wasn’t just Green Berets who found Lartéguy essential. Alistair Horne, the renowned historian of the Algerian War, uses Lartéguy for epigrams in A Savage War of Peace (1977). Some years back, Gen. David Petraeus—then the future commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq—pulled The Centurions off a shelf at his quarters in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and gave me a disquisition about the small-unit leadership principles exemplified by one of the book’s characters.
More than half a century ago, this Frenchman was obsessed about a home front that had no context for a hot, irregular war; about a professional warrior class alienated from its civilian compatriots as much as from its own conventional infantry battalions; about the need to engage in both combat and civil affairs in a new form of warfare to follow an age of victory parades and what he called “cinema-heroics”; about an enemy with complete freedom of action, allowed “to do what we didn’t dare”; and about the danger of creating a “sect” of singularly brave iron men, whose ideals were so exalted that beyond the battlefield they had a tendency to become woolly-headed. Lartéguy dedicates his book to the memory of centurions who died so that Rome might survive, but he notes in his conclusion that it was these same centurions who destroyed Rome.
Born in 1920, Jean Lartéguy—a pseudonym; his real name was Jean Pierre Lucien Osty—fought with the Free French and afterward became a journalist. Because of his military experience and Resistance ties, he had nearly unrivaled access to French paratroopers who fought at Dien Bien Phu and in the Battle of Algiers. His empathy for these men, some of whom were torturers, made him especially loathed by the Parisian Left, even though he broke with the paratroopers themselves, out of opposition to their political goals, which he labeled “neofascism.”
Lartéguy eventually found his military ideal in Israel, where he became revered by paratroopers who translated The Centurions into Hebrew to read at their training centers. He called these Jewish soldiers “the most remarkable of all of war’s servants, superior even to the Viet, who at the same time detests war the most.” By the mid-1970s, though, he became disillusioned with the Israel Defense Forces. He said it had ceased to be “a manageable grouping of commandos” and was becoming a “cumbersome machine” too dependent on American-style technology—as if foreseeing some of the problems with the 2006 Lebanon campaign.
I remember walking into the office of a U.S. Army Special Forces colonel in South Korea and noticing a plaque with Lartéguy’s famous “two armies” quote. (The translation is by Xan Fielding, a British Special Operations officer who, in addition to rendering Lartéguy’s classics into English, was also a close friend of the late British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, to whom Fermor addresses his introduction in his own 1977 classic, A Time of Gifts.) In The Centurions, one of Lartéguy’s paratroopers declares:
I’d like . . . two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers . . . an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.
The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom . . . all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the army in which I should like to fight.
But the reply from another character in The Centurions to this declaration is swift: “you’re heading for a lot of trouble.” The exchange telescopes the philosophical dilemma about the measures that need to be taken against enemies who would erect a far worse world than you, but which, nevertheless, are impossible to carry out because of the “remorse” that afflicts soldiers when they violate their own notion of purity of arms—even in situations where such “tricks” might somehow be rationalized. They may win the battle, but will surely lose their souls.
Rather than a roughneck, this Army Special Forces colonel epitomized the soft, indirect approach to unconventional war that is in contrast to “direct action.” The message that he and other professional warriors have always taken away from Lartéguy’s famous “two armies” quote—rooted in Lartéguy’s own Vietnam experience—is that the mission is everything, and conventional militaries, by virtue of being vast bureaucratic machines obsessed with rank and privilege, are insufficiently focused on the mission: regardless of whether it is direct action or humanitarian affairs.
Of course, the conventional officer would reply that the special operator’s field of sight is so narrow that he can’t see anything beyond the mission. “They’re dangerous,” one of Lartéguy’s protagonists says of the paratroopers, “because they go to any lengths . . . beyond the conventional notion of good and evil.” For if the warrior’s actions contradict his faith, his doubts are easily overcome by belief in the larger cause. Lartéguy writes of one soldier: “He had placed the whole of his life under the sign of Christ who had preached peace, charity, brotherhood . . . and at the same time he had arranged for the delayed-action bombs at the Cat-Bi airfield . . . ‘What of it? There’s a war on and we can’t allow Hanoi to be captured.’”
Vietnam, like Iraq, represented a war of frustrating half measures, fought against an enemy that respected no limits. More than any writer I know, Lartéguy communicates the intensity of such frustrations, which, in turn, create the psychological gulf that separates warriors from both a conscript army and a civilian home front.
The best units, according to Lartéguy, while officially built on high ideals, are, in fact, products of such deep bonds of brotherhood and familiarity that the world outside requires a dose of “cynicism” merely to stomach. As one Green Beret once wrote me, “There are no more cynical soldiers on the planet than the SF [Special Forces] guys I work with, they snort at the platitudes we are expected to parrot, but,” he went on, “you will not find anyone who gets the job done better in tough environments like Iraq.” In fact, in extreme and difficult situations like Iraq, cynics may actually serve a purpose. For in the regular army there is a tendency to report up the command chain that the mission is succeeding, even if it isn’t. Cynics won’t buy that, and will say so bluntly. Lartéguy immortalizes such soldiers.
Lartéguy writes that the warrior looks down on the rest of the military as “the profession of the sluggard,” men who “get up early to do nothing.” Yet as one paratrooper notes in The Praetorians:
In Algeria that type of officer died out. When we came in from operations we had to deal with the police, build sports grounds, attend classes. Regulations? They hadn’t provided for anything, even if one tried to make an exegesis of them with the subtlety of a rabbi.
Dirty, badly conceived wars in Vietnam and Algeria had begotten a radicalized French warrior class of noncommissioned officers, able to kill in the morning and build schools in the afternoon, which had a higher regard for its Muslim guerrilla adversaries than for regular officers in its own ranks. Such men would gladly advance toward a machine-gun nest without looking back, and yet were “booed by the crowds” upon returning home: so that they saw the civilian society they were defending as “vile, corrupt and degraded.”
The estrangement of soldiers from their own citizenry is somewhat particular to counterinsurgencies and small wars, where there are no neat battle lines and thus no easy narrative for the people back home to follow. The frustrations in these wars are great precisely because they are not easily communicated. Lartéguy writes: Imagine an environment where a whole garrison of two thousand troops is “held in check” by a small “band of thugs and murderers.” The enemy is able to “know everything: every movement of our troops, the departure times of the convoys . . . Meanwhile we’re rushing about the bare mountains, exhausting our men; we shall never be able to find anything.”
Because the enemy is not limited by Western notions of war, the temptation arises among a stymied soldiery to bend its own rules. Following an atrocity carried out by French paratroopers that calms a rural area of Algeria, one soldier rationalizes to another: “‘Fear has changed sides, tongues have been loosened . . . We obtained more in a day than in six months fighting, and more with twenty-seven dead than with several hundreds.’” The soldiers comfort themselves further with a quotation from a fourteenth-century Catholic bishop: “When her existence is threatened, the Church is absolved of all moral commandments.” It is the purest of them, Lartéguy goes on, who are most likely to commit torture.
Here we enter territory that is unrelated to the individual Americans I covered as a correspondent. It is important to make such distinctions. When Lartéguy writes about bravery and alienation, he understands American warriors; when he writes about political insurrections and torture, some exceptions aside, he is talking about a particular caste of French paratroopers. Yet his discussion is relevant to America’s past in Vietnam and Iraq. I don’t mean My Lai and Abu Ghraib, both of which aided the enemy rather than ourselves, but the moral gray area that we increasingly inhabit concerning collateral civilian deaths.
In The Face of War: Reflections on Men and Combat (1976), Lartéguy writes that contemporary wars are, in particular, made for the side that doesn’t care about “the preservation of a good conscience.” So he asks, “How do you explain that to save liberty, liberty must first be suppressed?” His answer can only be thus: “In that rests the weakness of democratic regimes, a weakness that is at the same time a credit to them, an honor.”
One thing is clear: we have rarely been good at predicting the next war. And given the history of war, not to mention the undeniable, ongoing transformation of the army toward a greater emphasis on Special Operations, the lessons of The Centurions will persist. So will the need to nurture a professional warrior class that is determined to preserve its honor, even if that inhibits the mission.
ROBERT D. KAPLAN