Fielding Xan - The Centurions

Jean Lartguy: Decoding the Warrior Ethos

For thousands of years men have fought one another in situations where the battle lines are not fixed and words like front and rear lines have little meaningfor the war is everywhere, with civilians caught up and brutalized in the conflict. Irregular warfare, guerrilla uprisings, and counterinsurgency are timelessnot merely fads of the moment. Malaya, Vietnam, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria are just some of the datelines in which the twentieth and twenty-first centuries register conflicts whose fundamentals the ancients would have been familiar with. With the collapse of central authority in the Middle East, otherwise known as the Arab Spring, this situation applies to an even greater degree. For countries like Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are barely states at this juncture, with tribes, militias, and gangs, divided by territory, sect, and ethnicity, battling for primacy over a confused and violent landscape.

Conventional modern war, which Napoleon did so much to define and institutionalize, with its formalized set-piece battles and vertical chains of command, has mainly been with us for little more than two centuries. Its future, moreover, is uncertain. So while counterinsurgency is presently disparaged, because the results in Iraq and Afghanistan have been so unsatisfying for Americans, the lessons of counterinsurgencyif forgottenwill only have to be relearned on some future morrow. For that is the verdict of history going back to antiquity.

You cannot approach Vietnam and Iraq in particular, or the subject of counterinsurgency in general, without reference to Jean Lartguy, a French novelist and war correspondent who in his own person encapsulates the divide between a professional warrior class that lives by these enduring, historical truths and a civilian home front alienated from them. Lartguy inhabits the very soul of the U.S. Special Operations community, alienating not only civilian readers but members of the conventional military in the process.

Throughout my years observing the Special Operations community close up, I witnessed several editions of Lartguys The Centurions ( 1960 ) passing through the hands of those about whom I reported. Green Berets recommended to me not only Lartguys The Centurions but also The Praetorians ( 1961 ): books about French paratroopers in Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950 s that resonated with their own experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it wasnt just Green Berets who found Lartguy essential. Alistair Horne, the renowned historian of the Algerian War, uses Lartguy for epigrams in A Savage War of Peace ( 1977 ). Some years back, Gen. David Petraeusthen the future commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraqpulled The Centurions off a shelf at his quarters in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and gave me a disquisition about the small-unit leadership principles exemplified by one of the books characters.

More than half a century ago, this Frenchman was obsessed about a home front that had no context for a hot, irregular war; about a professional warrior class alienated from its civilian compatriots as much as from its own conventional infantry battalions; about the need to engage in both combat and civil affairs in a new form of warfare to follow an age of victory parades and what he called cinema-heroics; about an enemy with complete freedom of action, allowed to do what we didnt dare; and about the danger of creating a sect of singularly brave iron men, whose ideals were so exalted that beyond the battlefield they had a tendency to become woolly-headed. Lartguy dedicates his book to the memory of centurions who died so that Rome might survive, but he notes in his conclusion that it was these same centurions who destroyed Rome.