In the next few hours Fanshaw and his men would acquit themselves in the best tradition of France's renowned mercenary corps. The service demanded of them in Zaire was an extraordinary police action—helping to clear Kolwezi of 2,000 rampaging guerrillas from neighboring Shaba province. But high-risk soldiering is the Legion's raison d'être. "Nobody joins the Legion for fun," says Fanshaw, whose name, by Legion tradition and personal necessity, is a nom de guerre. "We all got something to hide, something in our background, some problems."
In that respect and others, Fanshaw, at 39, is the quintessential Legionnaire—except that he is one of only a handful of Americans in the elite corps of 8,000. Born and raised in small-town Ohio, he served a stint with U.S. Army intelligence in Turkey during the early 1950s, then enrolled at the University of Kentucky. There, his threat to divulge defense secrets as a protest against the admission of blacks brought both expulsion and a brush with the FBI. After a subsequent series of criminal escapades, he decided to join the Marines. "My life was a mess," he says. "I thought that if I could come back with a load of medals from Vietnam, things might be different." But lying about his past earned him a dishonorable discharge, and a sympathetic friend suggested the Legion. (Recruiting is forbidden in the States, but the French embassy put him in touch with the headquarters in Marseilles.) On the island of Corsica, in the frogman unit of the Deuxième Regiment Etranger Parachutiste, Fanshaw found a home where his past would not follow. "The Legion is like family," he says. "The men who come here have got no country. This is their country. That's the Legion's maxim, and it means what it says. Every Legionnaire spends Christmas Day at the camp. Doesn't matter if they're married or not—we're all together here."
They call themselves fauves domptés ("trained wild animals"), and the discipline is cordially brutal. Soldiers stepping out of line on the parade ground are routinely kicked and rabbit-punched by sergeants like Fanshaw, and the base infirmary treats an assortment of black eyes, split lips and broken noses nearly every morning. "Every other army in the world has forgotten how to walk," says Fanshaw. "We go on marches through the mountains which may last 24 hours. We eat on the march, and we don't stop—ever." The training is rarely wasted in combat. As master sergeant to a green lieutenant ("I had to teach him to be an officer"), Fanshaw was de facto leader of his 15-man unit in Zaire. After their jump left them more than a mile off-target ("All the pilot wanted to do was get the hell out of there"), he drove his men toward Kolwezi with a fury. "Move your chicken ass!" he screamed, and subordinates from a dozen different nations complied. "Anyone who mucked about was stripped of his weapons and sent to carry ammo boxes to exposed positions," he says. "They knew what would happen if they were captured—we found one Legionnaire who had dropped into enemy hands and had his eyes gouged out. After the men saw that they stopped their screwing around toot sweet."
The Legionnaires' first day in Zaire was their worst. Within an hour after landing, they were digging in to secure a bridge controlling the main railway line into Kolwezi when they were approached by an armored half-track flying the green flag of Zaire's National Army. "Des amis, des amis—ne tirez pas," crackled the command from field HQ radio. "It was our intelligence people telling us not to shoot," says Fanshaw. "They made a blooper. The men in the car were rebels." Fanshaw's men blasted away with bazookas, disabling the half-track and sending the guerrillas scrambling for cover. Another firefight followed that evening—this time with four rebels in a Volkswagen bus. All four were killed, including the commander of the Shaba rear guard in Kolwezi. The Legionnaires then dined on their field rations and went to sleep under scraps of canvas. They hadn't brought sleeping bags, says Fanshaw, because "it's better for the men to be cold. That way they don't sleep so well, and it's harder to surprise them."
The Legionnaires were carrying only two days' provisions, so in their remaining 16 days in Zaire they had to commandeer supplies as well as their transport. Patrolling Kolwezi in a bizarre caravan of garbage trucks and lorries from the nearby copper mines, they saw no sign of Cuban troops but found the natives unremittingly hostile. "They would do nothing for us," says Fanshaw. "They wouldn't even sell us food. Hell, we weren't sure at one stage whether the Zaire army wasn't going to turn on us too." The Legionnaires found abundant evidence of atrocities against the city's white population—in one place a bag containing seven scalps, in another a pile of 24 severed hands. "The captain took a dozen men up to the Protestant church," Fanshaw recalls, "and they found two dozen white people barricaded inside. When they saw it was the Legion, they began crying for joy and singing the Marseillaise."
By the time 700 Legionnaires boarded the U.S. transport planes that would return them to Corsica, they had lost five of their number in combat. "One of the dead men was my good friend," says Fanshaw. "When we got back to base his name was already gone from the door of his room." But considering the dangers, says Fanshaw, "it turned out pretty well in the end." Once he and his men had escaped incineration only when the wind shifted, sparing them from a raging brushfire set by the rebels. "It could just as easily have gone the other way," the sergeant reflects. "We could have taken a real beating. I'm proud of France and the Legion for what we did, but it's a dangerous situation down there. The rebels will be back, and as far as I'm concerned, Kolwezi is finished as a European settlement. Any white man who goes back there is asking for whatever he gets."
As for Fanshaw, he may yet see more fighting in Africa, whether he stays with the Legion after his current three-year contract expires next month or whether he follows the lure of the grubby envelope he carries stuffed in the back pocket of his fatigues. Tucked inside is the offer of a job as a mercenary in another of Africa's dirtiest and longest-running wars (he won't say which one). Fanshaw suspects he will take it—after first returning to the States for some R&R, trying free-fall parachuting in California. "The Legion has been very good to me," he says, "but as a professional soldier I'm entitled to look around. The money is important, but what I'm really after is adventure and excitement. I got no responsibilities except for myself, so I'll take the risk and if it goes wrong I'm not gonna come looking for sympathy from anyone."
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