In 1960, The Centurions, a French novel of Indo-China (Vietnam) and the Algerian insurgency, by Jean Lartéguy (b. Jean Pierre Lucien Osty), a highly decorated soldier and journalist, was a blockbuster in France. The book, a brilliant portrait of those who fight a nation’s dirty little wars, and the craven political class who command them, men who have “never heard a shot fired in anger,” fared less well in the United States where a liberal press scorched the novel’s style and content.
The story in brief: Lt. Col. Pierre-Noel Raspéguy must transform a military unit accustomed to fighting a conventional war into one that can handle asymmetrical warfare. First, the communist Vietnamese, referred to as an “army of termites,” and then the fanatic Islamists determined to force the French colonials out of Algeria.
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