Okay, so maybe I’m not as big of a deal in France as I thought. But working with the French Army was still one of the highlights of my military career.
Almost every time I tell someone I worked with the French, I get comments like, “You mean the French have an army?”, “Did they surrender to you the day you got there?”, or some other variation of the “cheese-eating surrender monkey” theme. And if they don’t outright insult French troops, they usually dismiss my experience by saying, “Oh, you must have been working with the Foreign Legion. They’re not really French.”
Those comments really get on my nerves. And they’re flat out wrong. I served with a few Legionnaires and a lot of regular French troops. Whatever the French public’s or government’s politics are, their soldiers are brave, well-trained, in fantastic shape and aggressive. Describing those men as cowards is an absolutely unfair characterization.
Admittedly, I had a low opinion of French soldiers before I served with them. In Kosovo, the French military had a reputation as being politically biased and ineffective. As a UN cop I worked with French gendarmes, a type of military police officer. They didn’t like the regular French military either.
So in early 2009, when I was told I was going to a French firebase in Afghanistan, I was a little worried. I didn’t speak French, didn’t have a positive view of their troops, and was worried I’d be stuck inside the wire with people who didn’t want to be in combat. I had spent all of my Iraq deployment in a humvee on a convoy escort team; that mission sucked, and I wanted nothing to do with fobbit life or force protection. In Afghanistan I wanted to spend as much time as possible on foot with guys who wanted to fight. The French didn’t seem that type.
Then I started investigating. I went to soldiers who had been in Afghanistan for a while and asked what they thought about the French. And I heard something I didn’t expect, a phrase I was to hear many times during my deployment:
“The only soldiers here who really want to fight are the Americans, Brits and French.”
This phrase was, of course, totally unfair to the Australians and Canadians. It may have been unfair to the Germans, who had a reputation as frustrated warriors whose government didn’t allow them to blitzkrieg Taliban like they wanted to. It didn’t give nearly enough credit to some Afghan National Army units who were aggressive and eager for battle.
But in addition to giving the French well-deserved praise, the phrase did address a certain unpleasant truth. Some countries, apparently in response to American political pressure, grudgingly sent troops to Afghanistan. Those troops were either mandated to stay inside the wire, or when they went out showed zero desire to risk their lives for a cause they must not have believed in.
As an example, one of my best friends worked with a different nation’s troops (I won’t name which nation because I have no firsthand experience working with them and don’t want to slander them all; however, my friend is a reliable, experienced veteran of multiple deployments, and I believe him). According to my friend, this nation’s soldiers would “patrol” by finding an open field not far outside the wire, sit for hours, then go back to the FOB. They took great pains to avoid danger and when engaged immediately broke contact. He described an experience at the Tactical Operations Center, where cameras caught a Taliban cell emplacing a rocket at a frequently-used launch site. As they watched the Taliban preparing to fire on the FOB, my friend asked, “Why don’t you fire on them?”
One of the foreign military officers answered, “We can’t. They haven’t fired on us yet.”
The Taliban launched the rocket. Without a word, everyone in the TOC jumped up and sprinted for bunkers. They knew from experience that rockets from that site would impact in about fifteen seconds. My friend chased them to cover. A few seconds later the rocket exploded. Everyone ran back to the TOC. The camera showed the Taliban hurriedly leaving the area.
Frustrated, my friend asked, “Why the hell don’t you shoot at them now?”
The answer was, “We can’t shoot. Now they’re unarmed.”
Another foreign military, the Italian Army, was widely believed to have paid the Taliban not to attack them. The French were furious about that, with good reason. In 2008 French Paratroopers took over an Area of Operations from the Italians. The Italians had suffered only one death during the previous year in that AO, and assessed the area as low-risk. The French accepted that assessment, and sent one of their first patrols into the area with light weapons and only 100 rounds each, their then-standard combat load.
The patrol was ambushed. One group of ten troops was separated, pinned down, surrounded and wiped out to the last man. Despite what the Italians reported, Taliban forces were extremely strong in that area. But they rarely attacked the Italians, just as Iraqi insurgents rarely attacked Italians around Nasiriyah when I was at Tallil in 2005. Gee, I wonder why.
I arrived in Afghanistan six months after that ambush. Over the next nine months, I went on numerous patrols and reconnaissance missions with the French Mountain Troops and Marines. I learned to speak French well enough that I was able to relay information between American and French radio networks. At times I was the only American on French missions. My worries about working with them were completely unfounded, and since then I get pretty angry whenever I hear tired, old “Frenchmen are cowards” remarks.