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storm-tossed Caravelle, flew to Perpignan in southeastern France. There were eighteen “shock parachutists” on the course. I had just turned twenty-one. Not only were most of them at least a decade older. They were the epitome of toughness. The guy who taught us how to set booby-traps had parachuted behind German lines in the Second World War. All of the men had fought in Indochina and Algeria. One had operated behind Vietminh lines, surviving for a year-and-a-half on nuts, berries, tree bark and snakes. With the benefit of my sayeret training, I was at least their equal in fitness. I had also not spent years consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol and smoking Gitanes. But I’d never experienced anything nearly as demanding as some of the training we were put through. With backpacks crammed with Alpine military gear and lead weights as well, we hiked on to the peaks overlooking the fortress. They were covered with snow and ice from about 6,500 feet upward. We trudged for hours, shifting to snowshoes with cleats for the ice. We were taught how to dig caves in the snow and to use ice axes to keep from tumbling down the steeper inclines. We scaled cliff faces, without safety cables or nets. Our training inside the fortress always included a break for lunch. Since the parachutistes de choc were, after all, French, it was a Paris-restaurant-standard meal with copious quantities of wine. I didn’t drink at the time, but could hardly abstain altogether. The first exercise after lunch was pistol marksmanship. The instructors kept well clear when it was my turn. Yet however impressed, even at times awestruck, I was by the toughness of the French commandos, and the obvious closeness they had built during combat, I began to sense a darker side in them as well. They didn’t talk much. Even if they had, my few words of French would not have been much help in deciphering what made them tick. But every few nights, I would accompany them when they walked into the small village down the road for a movie, or a few drinks, and the locals would literally cross the street to avoid us. Later, I discovered that every one of my French comrades had been involved in the OAS, the far-right anti-De Gaulle opposition in the French army in the late 1950s. In Algeria, they had mounted free-lance attacks on the insurgents, and on civilians as well. Though Algeria had been granted independence the year before, these men were unreconciled to it. In fact, a few months after my time in Mont Louis, the Demi-brigade was dismantled, when several of its top officers were found to be involved in an assassination plot against President De Gaulle. 74 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011545