This was one of my favorite field missions. We marched out to the farm of the 1st company and passed a week in a forest just next to it. Only a couple of weeks left from the training and the instructors became a bit less strict. It made the atmosphere much better.
We didn’t have to do the Morse training during the nights and could go to sleep after dinner
The result: we didn’t become zombies in a couple of days. At the end of the week on Thursday, the night before leaving, we organized a barbecue. A small team went out in town to buy food and beer. We were drinking after dinner around the campfire when a guy told us “the Anglophone story of 2°REG” (an Anglophone is a person who speaks English fluently). I don’t know if it’s true or how it happened exactly, but I’ll try to recall his story as well as I can, because it was one of the bests I’ve ever heard.
Once happened
that a Finnish guy went up to St. Christol on a Friday evening after finishing a training in Castel. You need to know, that St. Christol is a very small village at 850 meters of altitude in the Alps. People living around the base are mostly farmers, cheese makers or shepherds. They keep sheep even in some parts of the base…
Legion Training
Prepare for selection.
Get ready for the French Foreign Legion with practical training tools.
So as the Finnish guy arrived to the base, he went up to the corridor and heard some music from a room. He found a brunch of his Anglophone comrades – mostly Scandinavians – gently drinking, chatting and listening to some music. The Finnish asked them if they have something left to eat, because he tried to catch up some food in the snack bar, but it was already closed. The others didn’t have anything edible left, so they just invited him to join them in drinking.
When it comes to alcohol, everyone has a bottle of whiskey or a few cans of beer hided somewhere in a locker. Just in case of emergency. This time it wasn’t different. As the evening turned into night and the important stock of alcohol diminished, our heroes became Irish-sailor-drunk.
Everyone knows that alcohol gives people an incredible level of intelligence and one of our friends got an amazing idea.
“What if we shot a sheep and made a barbecue?” – he asked the other legionnaires.
“F*ck yeah, that’s a brilliant idea! – said an American.
He took a bow (!) out of his locker and shot the first sheep in the ass out of the window. As his comrades were clapping him on the shoulder for the nice shot, they heard a blood-freezing scream from the meadow. The sheep didn’t die, but ran and turned around with an arrow in his ass.
Our heroes didn’t need more, they ran downstairs for dear sheep life and started to chase the injured animal.
Naturally, the poor sheep couldn’t resist this dream team of legendary war heroes and died a few hundred meters further from a second shot. They carried back the animal to their room’s lavatory and started to cut it into pieces. It became clear in a few minutes, that none of them had the necessary knowledge to prepare a sheep. The magic disappeared and none of them was motivated for a midnight barbecue anymore. They just threw out the carcass and went to sleep. They left lavatory in full of shit, blood and sheep fur…
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