Document created: 1 March 06
Air & Space Power Journal - Spring 2006

Mémoires: Les Champs de Braises by Hélie de Saint Marc with Laurent Beccaria. Editions Perrin (http://www.editions-perrin.fr), 76, Rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris, France, 1995, 348 pages, 19,67 Euros.

Les Champs de Braises is a subtle and moving French-language memoir of a tumultuous military career spent fighting insurgencies and injustice in wild corners of the world. Saint Marc’s counterinsurgency experiences proved disappointing, but his moral strength helped him weather misfortunes with dignity. The book offers today’s military professional useful insights into the nexus between counterinsurgency operations and military ethics.

Saint Marc began his military career as a teenager when he joined the French Resistance in 1941 during World War II. Unfortunately, the Nazis captured him in 1943, interning him in the notorious Buchenwald and Langenstein concentration camps. He survived extreme privation until US forces liberated his camp in 1945. Dissatisfied with postwar French civilian life, he attended the famed Saint Cyr military school and in 1947 joined the Foreign Legion, whose members were known as “the men without names.” He served three (almost continuous) combat tours in Vietnam from 1948 to 1954 as France struggled unsuccessfully to retain its Southeast Asian colonies. After the Communists drove the French from Vietnam, Saint Marc continued his Foreign Legion career in Algeria, where he fought another unsuccessful counterinsurgency from 1954 to 1961, during which time he saw combat in the ill-starred Suez Crisis of 1956. In 1957 he served on Gen Jacques Massu’s personal staff during the Battle of Algiers, a landmark urban-combat operation against Islamic insurgents. Finally, disillusioned with what he deemed misguided French policy in Algeria, Saint Marc participated in the failed “putsch” of 1961, when some French military units briefly revolted against their government. Imprisoned in France until 1966, he thereafter dedicated his life to calmer pursuits.

Saint Marc’s story might seem a jeremiad, but it is actually more complex. Although he describes beautiful jungle and desert scenery, exotic people, and delicious cuisine, these elements serve as mere backdrops for terrible suffering and loss. After developing a profound affection for Vietnam, where he recruited partisan fighters to oppose the Communists, he received orders to desert these people, who had boldly sided with France. The knowledge of their massacre after betrayal at the hands of French forces torments Saint Marc. Faced with what he deemed a similar tragedy in Algeria, he resolves to mutiny against his own country and face imprisonment. The author laments his many Legionnaire friends who died bravely for lost causes, yet, remarkably, he manages to grow philosophical rather than embittered about such traumatic events.

Among Saint Marc’s varied experiences in counterinsurgency, modern readers will find his tenure on General Massu’s staff in Algeria particularly instructive. Shot while fighting in the Vietnamese jungle, he suffered even deeper wounds to his spirit during the Battle of Algiers. Militarily, the French temporarily won in Algiers by resorting to torture of suspected insurgents, but the resulting international outcry cost them much-needed political support. Saint Marc decries the corrosive moral effect that torture had on the French military but finds some cause for optimism during that war. His analysis of what we would call General Massu’s information-operations philosophy will sound familiar to individuals who seek to dominate the informational domain in the current global war on terror.

The implications that the book has for military ethics also call for careful reflection. Saint Marc’s strong sense of humanity and integrity is clear; however, his willingness to follow his conscience whatever the personal consequences cost him dearly after his failed mutiny. The profound camaraderie he found in the Foreign Legion gave him strength to endure hardships, but his decision to stand with his fellow Legionnaires against his own government makes one wonder how today’s military members might respond in a similar situation. Perhaps only Legionnaires and individuals in special operations forces can truly understand such fraternal bonding.

Les Champs de Braises offers the important lesson that counterinsurgencies demand firm, consistent national policy. French political instability and weakness led to vacillating, ultimately craven, policies that undermined military morale and condemned to death many Vietnamese and Algerian people who had sided with the French. American policy makers would do well to heed this lesson as the United States confronts a protracted struggle against terror networks in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Since the book contains many photographs but no maps, readers unfamiliar with remote parts of Vietnam and Algeria may want to keep an atlas handy. Furthermore, the author’s chronological arrangement of events helps readers find passages despite the lack of an index, and an appendix that lists milestones in Saint Marc’s life also proves useful. In sum, military professionals interested in counterinsurgency can profit from reading Les Champs de Braises.

Lt Col Paul D. Berg, USAF
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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