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Text originally published in 1942 under the same title.
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Publishers Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
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YANKEE FIGHTER
The Story of an American in the Free French Foreign Legion
BY
LIEUTENANT JOHN F. HASEY
AS TOLD TO JOSEPH F. DINNTEEN
Foreword
DEAR JACK:
This is your story just as you told it, and as you might have written it if you had been able to get to your own typewriter, instead of lying in a hospital bed with your head bandaged and a tube in your throat to control your vocal apparatus.
When we first talked about this story, you wanted to be sure that you would not look like a Rover Boy. You wanted the hero stuff played down, and above all you wanted to advance the cause of the Free French.
There is no way that I can carry over to type the glint of amusement in eyes that peeked out of bandages, or your own effort to minimize your own exploits, without intruding myself to stop the reader here and there to say: Jack was not boasting. He was merely stating a fact. He wanted to skip over it and dismiss it quickly, but I held him up and made him dwell upon it and amplify and elaborate. And this, I think, would have been out of place.
Because this is your own story, it had to be told in the first person singular in your own words as nearly and as accurately as I could transcribe them. Perhaps I have used some phrases that may make you wrinkle your nose, or cringe a little. Yes, I did it, you told me often in the hospital, and asked: Do I have to say I did it? I thought you had to say it to tell the story properly. If you are embarrassed by it, I am taking the blame here and telling the reader that the fault is mine.
Sincerely,
JOSEPH F. DINNEEN
Boston, July 15, 1942
ChapterOne
DRUMS rolled. Bugles blared. The sun was bright and hot and the town square was crowded with cheering Syrians surrounding a formation of white-capped Free French Legionnaires. I was being decorated with the Free French Order of Liberation, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm. General Georges Catroux called my name in the awkward, mixed accent of a Frenchman pronouncing the Yankee syllables, John Hasey. I advanced. He touched me gently on the shoulders with his sword, pinned the medals on my tunic and kissed me on both cheeks, a practice that I still find mildly embarrassing, the more so on this occasion because my head was thickly swathed in bandages, I had a heavy beard, and the General could not find a patch of cheek to kiss.
I listened to the citations and was uncomfortable for several reasons. I think that any man shrinks from public praise. I could not speak above a whisper, and then only with the aid of a steel tube in my neck that I had to regulate with my finger to govern the amount of air in it and in my throat. My jaw had been shot away and my vocal cords had been damaged. I was homesick, too, and my eyes were misty. I didnt hear the citations and knew I could read them later, anyway. I was thinking of a big, comfortable house on Union Street, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts; of my mother, who is still youthful, blonde and attractive; and of my father and the tennis court he built in back of the house, where he taught me and my brother Dick to play. I was thinking of Mrs. Sample and Mrs. Carroll, two teachers in school, recalling how Mrs. Carroll let me sit all one year at a desk by the window, where I could look out upon the girls in Teachers College, and see the fire engines pull out of the station across the way every time an alarm was sounded.
I thought, too, about Guita in Paris, and the fun we had together, and wondered what had happened to her now that the Nazis were there. I thought of another girl, silhouetted against the evening twilight horizon, in Finland, looking aloft for planes. She was nice, too. What had happened to her? I was remembering placing a necklace about Marlene Dietrichs neck, and catching it in her hair...not that I was making her a gift of it...I was selling it to her as a vendeur in Maison Cartier in Monte Carlo. I was thinking of a conversation with the Duchess of Windsor about peanut brittle as I showed her jeweled crests after the abdication...and I knew that I would never again be hunting prospects and collecting commissions from that famous jewelry house.
The band sounded off. Legionnaires passed in review in my honor. Standing beside General Catroux, I tried again to rationalize a decision that had brought me into twelve countries, three continents, six colonies, covering 50,000 miles, fighting four enemies in three years. And this was not the end. I was to be shipped off to Jerusalem for plastic surgery. The soldiers passing before me were the toughest in the world. I knew. I had fought with them; and yet they were an anonymous collection. They knew as little about me personally as I did about them.
My own platoon was there, with Blashiek, my faithful batmanor dog-robber, as he is known in the United States Army; and when I say faithful, I mean exactly that. For six months that tough Polish soldier had cared for me as carefully as any Southern mammy, fed me fresh mule meat when I was starved, and tactfully neglected to let me know what it was. He helped carry me back to a First Aid station outside Damascus when my jaw was shot away and my chest and arms were sprayed with machine-gun fire. It was upon him that I leaned when my legs began to wobble. I think there might have been pride in the platoons eyes, although it may have been sheer curiosity to see what I looked like with a bandage mask over my face. I was never able to classify their emotions. They were professional fighting men. They would fight for anybody. Thirty-five per cent of the Free French Foreign Legion were completely indifferent to the Axis and its aims, never interested or concerned with the broader political aspects of what they were fighting for, completely loyal to the Free French, and worse than barren ground for fifth columnists, because these men would kill anyone who suggested treason or sedition.
I had my share of them in my platoon, and willingly accepted all of them assigned to me because they were fearless, dependable fighters. There were forty men in my command, all told, divided into three groups of twelve with four utility men as observers and runners. I had about every race and nation represented among them. Curiously, there were few French in the platoon. Most of the French were in another regiment. One of my sections of twelve was made up entirely of men who had come out of the Spanish Civil War, and I had a sprinkling of unclassified men of uncertain races. They all spoke French exclusively and all commands were given in French.
