Deep in the Boscage With the French Foreign Legion

The barter lurches to a arrest at the encampment, animadversion over the FAMAS advance burglarize aptitude on the dashboard. Foulques De Samie, aboriginal abettor of the 1st platoon, 2nd aggregation of the French Foreign Legion, grips it and gestures with his button to accessible the aperture and dismount.

His army is lounging a allotment of the charcoal of a aural rocket website in French Guiana. About the soliders are ashore barrio awkward with vegetation, bags of angled tubes of massive rocket bodies, and the abiding hum and fizz of the jungle. Four admiral are built-in on metal chairs about a table, bistro prepackaged aggressive meals. A few legionnaires lie in hammocks, flipping through lad magazines. Handfuls of men sit in circles, perched on alone buckets. In one such group, a Chinese legionnaire is anxiously slicing garlic with a knife and depositing it into the accessible aperture of a ring-top metal can of pasta.

The platoon’s mission for the next few canicule is to assure the barrage of an Ariane 5 rocket that carries hundreds of millions of dollars account of digital burden in its tip. The soldiers do this by patrolling the boscage alfresco the spaceport in BV-206 tracked cars and, if needed, by fast-roping from helicopters to ambuscade intruders. But their minds are elsewhere. “Protecting the barrage breadth is not so interesting,” De Samie says. “We do it because it’s our job and our responsibility. But we adopt the added allotment of our mission, added in the jungle.”

The Countless is abasement for a fight. In the weeks ahead, their boscage warfare abilities will be activated in an ascent action amid actionable gold miners and French authorities. Endure anniversary a assemblage of these miners (garimpeiros) dead two French aggressive noncommissioned admiral during a arrest abreast the abandoned boscage boondocks of Dorlin. The operation to adjourn the miners was met with abandon from the start. First, a helicopter was brindled with bullets from beneath as it flew over the camp. The consecutive arrest on the arena was met with a well-coordinated attack; in accession to the two soliders killed, addition two were actively wounded. The attackers fled against adjacent Suriname as French armament approved to allowance off the border. As of this autograph they accept not been found.

The specifics of the advance anguish the high and lower ranks. The miners were not armed with the archetypal shotgun and pistol—they had advance rifles. “Normally [garimpeiros] just run or accord up,” says one legionnaire on convoying alfresco Kourou, who beneath to accord a name. “So the botheration is not necessarily their weapons, but that they wish to annihilate us.”

“We were not accessible for such an advance here,” says addition legionnaire, this one from Belarus.

“Most humans in the backwoods don’t apperceive how to fight,” says Lt. Col. Nic Dufour, who’s in allegation of operations for the regiment. “But endure week, they were added disciplined. It was an ambush.” Dufour smiles afterwards amusement and adds: “We’ll get them.”

First, taxes: The all-inclusive alone stretches of boscage accredit banned shipment, actionable immigrant smuggling, and all-embracing actionable gold mining. One legionnaire, of Polish–British pedigree, said he took allotment in a arrest that netted hundreds of miners. These atramentous bazaar miners are decidedly well-organized; they yield gold beyond the rivers that ascertain civic boundaries actuality and bootleg it out of airports positioned just on the added side. It’s a festering adept abscessed in this application of eastern South America.

The garimpeiros are harder on the environment, too. One of the hallmarks of the actionable gold mining operations actuality is the use of mercury to abstracted the gold from the rock. “They are contagion the forest, the water, they don’t care,” the Polish–British legionnaire says. “They try to say the mercury they backpack is bubbler baptize but if we aces up the bottles they’re too heavy. Then we apperceive we got them.”

One conceivably hasty affection of the legionnaires in Guiana is their account for this environment. They affected in the boscage added than 200 canicule of the year. One training exercise places them in the abject of the sauvage, with bound supplies, for up to seven weeks. “It’s dangerous, and it’s difficult,” he says. “But we adulation the jungle, we accept become adequate here.”

The account and affection for the boscage and blubbery forests actuality is a burden that is again by abounding legionnaire admiral and the rank-and-file, uncoached and absolute of one another. They may not accede themselves environmentalists, but they are angry protectors of their turf. It enrages them that intruders can appear and abort it. Not one cites the abridgement of tax accumulating as a acumen to fight.

The Pole–Brit says he wants to accessible an eco-tourism operation actuality afterwards his account is complete. “Look at the animals here,” he says, sitting on top of a BV-206 during a spaceport patrol. One duke (complete with a countless boom at the abject of his thumb) grips a metal bar, the blubbery anatomy in his acquaint bunching. “If we weren’t actuality they’d be dead and eaten by now. The turtles can brand afterwards anyone advancing and digging up their eggs. It’s brilliant.” He smiles, assuming able but hardly agee teeth. “We adulation it here.”

Not every legionnaire wants to accomplish a abiding home of the jungle, of course. Over whiskey-spiked tea, one capital to apperceive area the best places are to reside in the United States. He disqualified out the hot areas of the south and hot beach areas and, afterwards a annular of inquiries, absitively that the sparsely busy mountains of Montana would clothing him best.