What the Hell Is… the French Foreign Legion?

After teaching English in Ulyanovsk, Russia for a very bad year, I discovered my boss had lied to three levels of government about my wages and hadn’t paid the obligatory taxes.

Eventually I hired a Russian lawyer. The deal was simple: pay the wages she owed me and fly me home to Canada.

There was one problem.

She didn’t have enough money to get me home.

She got me as far as Budapest.

So I moped around Hungary for a few weeks in one of those cycling depressions where you aren’t exactly travelling—you’re postponing wherever you’re supposed to go next.

Eventually I took myself to Paris.

It was summer. Temperatures were pushing 40°C. I was staying in a two-star hotel, trying to write my second book with lousy Wi-Fi and an equally lousy brain.

Mostly, I was stuck.

Going back to Vancouver meant admitting that my strange little identity as an international teacher was probably ending. Soon I’d be job hunting in a place where, at that moment, I didn’t feel I belonged.

So I walked.

And one day I found myself standing outside a recruiting office for the French Foreign Legion.

The Legion is one of the strangest military institutions still operating in the world. Founded in 1831, it is part of the French Army but recruits foreigners from around the planet.

You don’t need a university degree. You don’t need previous military experience. Recruits have to survive medical, physical, psychological and other selection tests.

Then there’s the mythology.

For generations, the Legion has attracted men who wanted adventure, escape, reinvention—or simply somewhere else to go.

Legionnaires can initially serve under a changed identity. The first contract is five years. After five years of service, a foreign legionnaire can apply for French nationality. It isn’t the automatic French passport I believed it was while standing outside that door.

I’d watched videos of the training.

It looked insane.

I’d seen Papillon and had French Guiana in my head: jungle, heat, isolation, men being broken down and rebuilt into something else. The Legion still has a regiment based in French Guiana specializing in jungle operations.

And there I was.

Thirty-nine years old.

The Legion accepted recruits only until just before their 40th birthday.

This was it.

I was never particularly strong. I had no military background. There’s every possibility I would have failed selection spectacularly.

But that almost wasn’t the point.

If I walked through that door and somehow made it through selection, training and five years, my life would explode in a completely different direction.

No Vancouver job hunt.

No wondering what came next.

No writer sitting in a cheap Paris hotel unable to write.

Instead:

The French Foreign Legion.

I stood looking at the door handle.

That brass knob.

I thought about how many desperate, lost, adventurous, broke, angry, frightened or simply restless men must have put their hands on exactly the same thing.

Men who wanted another life badly enough to walk through.

Finally, I walked forward.

I touched it.

Then I left.

I did not try to make my 40th year on Earth something I would write about.

I returned to my two-star hotel and sat on the bed feeling that I had actually come close to joining the French Foreign Legion.

And another part of me screamed:

chickenshit.