Chapter 1: Rough Justice

“Welcome to the French Territory of the Afars and Issas, formerly French Somaliland, Legionnaire Soissons.” Sergent-chef(Staff Sergeant (US&UK)) Champignon said and held out his hand, which I shook. I was somewhat surprised at him being on the tarmac to meet me and being so friendly. “You have been posted to the Second Platoon of Two Company and I am your Platoon Sergeant,” he continued. “Pick up your kit and follow me.”

I hoisted my kit bag onto my shoulder and followed Sergent-chef Champignon across the hard standing where the C 130 was now being unloaded, to a single story barrack block...

“Your squad is in room three. I’ll leave you to get acquainted with them and then you are to report to Two Company’s Orderly Room. Your squad leader will show you where that is.”

I stared after him as he left, wondering why he had taken the trouble to meet the aircraft and personally welcome me. I knew little of him other than when he helped me get an exhausted Ferdi Azarian back to camp when on a route march in Corte. Sergent-chef Champignon wasn’t the typical Legion Senior Non Commissioned Officer (SNCO). Unlike most Legion SNCOs, who used a hectoring, bullying tone when talking to lower ranks, when not issuing orders on parade or firing orders on the rifle range he spoke quietly in a similar Grenoble regional accent as mine. Sergent-chef Champignon was not much taller than 175 cms (5ft 9ins), with a wiry rather than burly build of around 85 kilograms (188 lbs.) but was much stronger than one would think from his appearance. He had hefted Ferdi’s 30 kilogram backpack with no apparent effort and carried it at least 10 kilometres without breaking a sweat,

Another surprise awaited me when I entered room three.

“‘Ullo Phil, me old china. ‘Ow’s your belly off for spots?” Alfie Hinds, the Englishman who had paid to have French lessons before he joined the Legion, addressed me in his Cockney flavoured English that had me mystified although I gathered he was asking after my health. I noticed he wore the rank insignia of Caporal (PFC(US);Lance Corporal (UK)).

“I’m very well thank you, and congratulations on your promotion, Caporal Hinds.”

Alfie grinned. “Thanks mate. I got me promotion about two years ago and ‘ope I’ll get made up to Caporal-chef(Corporal (US &UK)) before too long.” He waved his arm around the room indicating the inhabitants, all of whom were looking at me intently. “The usual run of blokes in ‘ere, Phil. No dead legs or scallies, and you know ‘oo our platoon sergeant is?”

I nodded. “Yes, Sergent-chef Champignon met me at the aircraft.”

“We’re lucky to ‘ave Red Maurice as our platoon sergeant. ‘E ‘s the best in the battalion and no mistake.” His face changed from jovial to sad. “I was sorry to ‘ear that poor little Ferdi got the chop, and it seems you was lucky not to join ‘im?” I nodded but said nothing. I still had feelings of guilt about Ferdi’s death. Alfie raised his voice and glared around the room. “And I ‘eard about you not being on parade for Camerone Day, but like I said at the time there would be a bloody good reason. Now we ‘ave had the full S. P. (the complete story) them blokes what bad mouthed you will ‘ave to apologize.” Alfie stared belligerently at a tall, fair haired, legionnaire who wouldn’t meet his or my eye.

“There’s no need for that, Alfie.” I said, loud enough for the room to hear. “I can see how it appeared I had disrespected the Legion.” A look of relief showed on the face of the fair haired man and I grinned. “Anyway, I have to report to the Company Office, where ever that is.”

“I’ll walk you over there, Phil,” Alfie said, and we left the room and made our way down an asphalt path toward a single story building about 150 metres away. “The company commander, Capitaine (Captain (US&UK) de Spenser, is OK but he is a bit of a toff and is only passing through,” Alfie informed me as we walked. “But Lieutenant (1^st Lieutenant (US); Lieutenant (UK)) Draganov, our platoon commander, is a good bloke. ‘E come up froo the ranks and knows ‘is stuff, and of course ‘e’s got Red Maurice to put ‘im right if ever ‘e gets it wrong.”

Capitaine de Spenser spent no more than two minutes with me before handing me over to Lieutenant Draganov, a man with 20 years of Legion service under his belt, and the four service stripes on his a sleeve to prove it. He handed me a cap badge.

“Now you’re in a parachute battalion you can get rid of your infantry cap badge and wear this instead.” I removed the 1RE cap badge (a seven flamed grenade with the numeral 1 on the ball of the grenade) from my green beret and replaced it with the cap badge worn by all military Paratroops of the Republic (a winged arm holding the sword of St Michael). The same badge worn in the maroon berets of French Army and Marine Paratroops, whereas all Foreign Legionnaires, including Paratroops, wear green berets.

Lieutenant Draganov then shook my hand and welcomed me to the unit. “We don’t spend a great deal of time in Djibouti,” he said. “We get around quite a lot and all Sub Saharan Africa is our bailiwick. However, Sergent-chef Champignon will give you the details of our likely deployments.”

That evening I sat with Alfie Hinds in the canteen and he confirmed what Lieutenant Draganov had said about frequent deployments from Djibouti. Of the four combat companies of the battalion two were usually on detachment somewhere in what used to be French Equatorial Africa. Currently BEPI (Bataillon étranger parachutistes indépendant; Independent Foreign Parachute Battalion) currently had Three Company in Chad and Four Company in Mali, and I had no idea where either of those places were. BEPI shared Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti with 13^th Demi Brigade of the Foreign Legion; ‘demi brigade’ being old fashioned terminology for a regiment that the 13^th DB maintained as their tradition. They also had detached companies in the former French Equatorial Africa.

I observed the men of BEPI as they relaxed in the canteen. They appeared to be a hard bitten bunch who took no prisoners – enemies or friends. Several members of BEPI had formerly been in 1REP (1er Régiment étranger de parachutists; 1^st Foreign Parachute Regiment), disbanded because if it’s involvement in the abortive 1961 coup against President de Gaulle. Many of the regiment’s SNCOs; Sergent-chefs, Adjutants(Sergeant First Class (US)Company Sergeant Major (UK)), and the Adjutant-chef(Master Sergeant (US);Regimental Sergeant Major(UK)), were retired from the Legion against their will. The pain and humiliation of the disbanding and dismissals had not yet been completely washed away or forgotten, and former 1REP legionnaires had hair-triggers whenever 1REP’s involvement in the coup was mentioned. Wise people never did, but they still stepped round them warily.

A day or two after arriving in Djibouti Sergent-chef Champignon gave me an in depth analysis of what the unit was doing in the Horn of Africa and detailed what BEPI would be called upon to do. Even now I can recall his summing up of the situation and the French governmental policy of the time. This is a synopsis of what he said.

When France withdrew from its African colonies it left behind a ramshackle collection of independent so called Democratic Republics. They soon dissolved into anarchy and chaos in a series of civil wars as each tribe /religion /region fought to be the ruler of their newly independent territory. France supported some governments and allowed others to go to the wall, sometimes giving them a helping hand in getting there. They ‘intervened’ when French interests were at stake, but usually in a clandestine way as the French public wanted no more colonial adventures; Indochina and Algeria had been more than enough. The Foreign Legion, separate from the French Army and an intensely inward looking organisation, its members refugees from normal life and with no family to worry about them, were the obvious choice to carry out actions that had not been debated in the Senate or National Assembly, or indeed anywhere else save the Quai d’Orsay and the Deuxieme Bureau. BEPI and 13^th DB could be deployed anywhere in Africa from their base at Djibouti and frequently were.

After two months of joining the unit I reengaged for another five years. BEPI was the antithesis of 1RE; little spit and polish and real soldiering. This was what I wanted to do and for the next six years or so it was my life. BEPI would drop in, sometimes literally, anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. The size of the units deployed varied from groups of four men (assassination squads known as Away Teams), platoons, and companies, up to and including the entire battalion. You will not find records of these activities anywhere in the official histories, not even in the Legion’s archives, but it was after one of these ‘drop ins’ that ‘Red’ Maurice Champignon was awarded the Légion d’Honneur and from then became known as The Chevalier. More of this later. However, the first action that I was involved is in the archives as it was a terrorist attack on Djibouti, more specifically the hijacking of a school bus and a hostage situation.

In colonial times French Somaliland, as the French Territory of the Afars and Issas (FTAI) was formerly known, had a southern border with British Somaliland. The British granted independence to their slice of Somaliland in 1960 and now the Republic of Somalia wanted what had been French Somaliland to be incorporated into their state. The French responded by holding a plebiscite that indicated the inhabitants of the French Territory of the Afars and Issas (FTAI) wished to remain under French protection and rule. Naturally this result didn’t go down too well with the Republic of Somalia who supported a so called ‘Liberation’ Movement. There followed a series of riots, and kidnapping of French citizens in Djibouti by local militants from the Somali Coast Liberation Front (FLCS) a Pan-Somali guerrilla organization supported by the Somali government. Matters came to a head when a busload of school children, the children of French citizens working /living in Djibouti, was hijacked. I had been with BEPI for eight months when this act took place and was now a Caporal, with Alfie Hinds Caporal-chef, of the Third squad of Second Platoon, Two Company

The only major road between Djibouti and Somalia crosses the border near the small village of Loyada where there was a strong military presence, both French and Somali. Any armed FLCS militants from Somalia would attempt to cross the border far to the west of the official crossing point. BEPI and 13h Demi Brigade mounted patrols along the border with Somalia with occasional fire fights with groups trying to infiltrate into FTAI. One terrorist team managed to get into Djibouti without being detected and hijacked a bus load of French school children and held them as hostages. The bus had been driven to the Somali border where negotiations took place between the hijackers and the French authorities. The demands of the FLCS militants were: to free all imprisoned FLCS members; to annul a planned referendum in the TFAI; to end French rule over the TFAI. If any demands were refused the militants were ready to kill all the kidnapped children. Obviously those terms were not going to be accepted by the French and it was decided to free the hostages by coup de main.

When the hijacking took place Two Company of BEPI was patrolling the border about 20 kilometres west of Loyada, with Second Platoon, my platoon, some 5 kilometres south of the border in Somalia. (The border region is unmapped and French forces regularly crossed into Somali territory). Two Company was ordered to Loyada where they would be used, in conjunction with a team of snipers, to first kill the hijackers on the bus and then recapture the bus and its passengers.

Lieutenant Draganov suggested his platoon proceed independently to Loyada to arrive in the rear of both the hijackers, and more importantly, the Somali Army manned machine gun posts covering the border crossing. Permission was given and we made a forced march, arriving well to the rear of the border crossing by late evening. We rested for several hours before moving, in silence and stealth, to a grove of palm trees approximately 500 metres behind the hijacked bus sitting parked in No Man’s Land between Somalia and TFAI. We were in radio contact with our forces at Loyada and a plan was formulated. The team of snipers from the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN) would take out the four hijackers on the bus. Then, under covering fire from First and Second Platoons, Third Platoon would storm the bus and rescue the children.

At first light the team of GIGN snipers shot dead all four hijackers on the bus simultaneously. At the same time Third Platoon rushed to the bus while First Platoon fired on the Somali army posts and those positions where FLCS militants were positioned in support of the hijackers. Lieutenant Draganov had grouped all three of Second Platoon’s light machine guns into a battery that demolished the targeted Somali army machine gun post in seconds. The rest of our platoon shot at the posts that were firing at Third Platoon. Our intervention caused chaos among the Somalis. Caught between two zones of fire the Somali army machine guns were soon silenced. The FLCS militants scattered in panic, and we mowed them down as they came crashing through our positions. One militant appeared to my front shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and firing his AK47 indiscriminately, the shots flying way overhead. I dropped to one knee, filled my foresight with his body mass and then squeezed off three shots. He went down like a felled tree. I put another two shots into him as insurance and then went to search the body for papers and other Intel. The militant couldn’t have been more than twelve years old and I felt like a murderer.

I was quiet and contemplative in the truck taking us back to Djibouti. All the hijackers had been killed and the school children rescued. However, one had been killed and two wounded in the assault and two legionnaires from Third Platoon killed and six wounded.

“The first one’s always the worst, Phil,” Alfie Hinds said bringing me out of my brown study.

“The first what?”

“The first man you kill. You’ll soon get used to it. You might even get to enjoy it.”

“It wasn’t a man I killed. He was a boy, a mere child. I murdered a child!”

“Don’t talk such bollocks! It was a child firing an AK Forty bloody Seven. If you ‘ad’t killed ‘im ‘e would ‘ave killed you. There’s ‘undreds of kids like ‘im out there in Bongobongoland, all wiv AK Forty Sevens and all finking they’ll get to Paradise if they kill an infidel; that’s blokes like you and me, mate.” He clapped me on the back then took a glance at his wristwatch. “We will be back in camp in an hour. Then it’s a quick wash and a brush up and we’ll leg it down to the knocking shop. They’ve got a new batch of Filipino girls in so I’m told. We’ll get a couple of beers down our throats and then bish, bash, bosh, get our legs over a couple of the new arrivals. You ain’t lived until you’ve ‘ad ‘a sexy Pinay squirming on the end of your todger.” Alfie’s infectious good humour soon brought me back to life and we did as he suggested. (Getting one’s ‘leg over’ is another euphemism for sexual congress and ‘todger’ one of the many names for a penis.)

Alfie was correct about the Filipino girls.

The Emerald necklace affair

As I say there are no official reports of the many clandestine operations where the Legion were involved. But from what I have learnt/heard over a number of years this account is probably the most accurate of the operation that ended with Maurice Champignon being made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and a Sous-lieutenant (Lieutenant(US);2^nd Lieutenant (UK)) in La Légion étrangère.

He was the Sergent-chef in charge of a four man Away Team, aka assassination squad, sent to a sub Saharan African state whose president was the usual corrupt, brutal, egomaniacal sort; typical of many such African states. However this one had made the bad, one could say fatal, mistake of upsetting the President of the French Republic, a man with similar traits to the African’s. Their altercation was over the ownership of an emerald necklace; not just any emerald necklace, but the one given to the Queen of Sheba by King Solomon, or at least that was one story. Other notable females who were said to have worn the necklace at one time or another were Helen of Troy, Roxanne, Cleopatra, Messalina, Catherine de Medici, Madame de Pompadour, Josephine de Beauharnais, and Marguerite Bellanger. The necklace was last seen around the neck of Irma Capece Minutolo, King Farouk of Egypt’s latest, last, mistress – Farouk, ex-King of Egypt, to be more accurate. The necklace disappeared around the time of Farouk’s suspicious death in Rome. Several years later it was reported the necklace was now adorning the neck of the youngest concubine of an African despot. It was assumed the African despot had acquired the necklace by underhand, criminal, means. As the necklace had been worn by so many wives/mistresses of French Kings and Emperors the French government laid claim to the bauble but to no avail, and the President of the Republic decided to take the necklace from the African despot by equally underhand, criminal, means.

Maurice and his group were to steal the necklace and kill the African president in that order, which they did. Using their cover of a ‘security firm’, i.e. mercenary contractors, the group tricked their way into the despot’s private love nest where he was being entertained by his youngest concubine wearing nothing but the fabled necklace. She left the love nest a little later fully clothed but minus the necklace and was never seen again. The African despot left in a coffin some days later, as did the guards that had been protecting him.

Maurice Champignon not only carried out the operation faultlessly but by leaving forged papers, and a dead body in the uniform of a neighbouring state’s army in the now deceased president’s love nest, incriminated the neighbouring African state in the assassination of the despot. The two states went to war. The President of the French Republic played the honest broker in getting them around a table to talk peace, for which he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was so delighted by Maurice’s deviousness he made him a Chevalier of Légion d’honneur and Sous-lieutenant in La Légion étrangère. He also promised him a post in his government if ever Maurice decided to change careers.

BEPI, along with 2 REP, were also involved in rescuing European hostages in Kolwezi, in what was then Zaire but is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but as this was an international operation there are official histories in the archives. BEPI dropped with the reconnaissance and mortar platoons of 2 REP and fought alongside them at Metal Shaba. Most of the heavy lifting had been done by 2 REP the day before but we managed to kill our fair share of the enemy. Who were the enemy? Simbas? Angolans? Zairians objecting to their President? It makes no odds to the Legion who the enemy are just so long as we kill them.