Alan Lochrie had seen a lot of ups and downs in his life. He'd overcome dyslexia and doubting parents to become a commercial artist and then police officer. He'd gotten married, learned to fly, gotten divorced, lost his job, moved back home with his widowed mother, and tried to drink himself to death, all by age 38.

With a life like that, there's only one place to go when you hit rock bottom, and that is the French Foreign Legion. Lochrie didn't speak a single word of French and he was ancient. To his advantage, he was in excellent physical condition and had wells of psychological resilience. He signed up in 1983 and made it through the rigorous selection process. The Legion has far more applicants than slots, and a wash-out rate in excess of 80%. Become a Legionaire requires strength, courage, combat skill, impeccable élan, and an unbending devotion to your new family.

After introducing his dire origins, Lochrie moves through training, including a thrilling escape and survival exercise, and several deployments to Francophone Africa, stabilizing Chad and the Central African Republic (I think, not going to look it up.) The biggest threats were extreme heat in jungle and desert and swarms of scorpions, though Lochrie claims he encountered some skullduggery after a coup in Chad, when the CIA asked the Legion to help evacuate a secret army of Libyan POWs they were training to overthrow Gaddafi and destroy a warehouse full of weapons.

Lochrie served mostly with the elite 2e Régiment étranger de parachutistes, but he turned his artistic skills to military ends. He became a member of a special reconnaissance detachment as a photographer, and won a painting contest across the entire French military. 

The first 75% of the book, including Desert Storm, leads to the capstone of a peacekeeping deployment to Sarajevo.  This was by far the heaviest combat that the Lochrie saw, and by far the most complicated political environment. The Legion held the airport, but rules of engagement prevented any further efforts to protect the civilian population. There were no heroes anywhere. While Serbian militias were clear aggressors, Bosnian factions were not above committing false flag atrocities. Lochrie reserves special contempt for reporters and politicians more interested in their own careers and making money on the black market than peace.

On a tactical level, Lochrie applied police techniques to military intelligence, taking covert photographs of Serbian and Bosnian negotiators to build dossiers. The Legion had trouble responding to sniper fire from ruined buildings because it was impossible to communicate where the fire was coming from, and Lochrie developed a gridded photomosaic from each friend OP, with relevant landmarks mapped, so that a sentry under fire could call out "OP3-B6", and get counter-battery immediately, an innovation which has since become common practice. He also witnessed thousands of Bosnians starving and freezing in a UN "safezone", but his film was confiscated and buried for political reasons.

After Bosnia, Lochrie took an early retirement in 1994 (50 was simply too old to keep up with 18 year-olds), remarried, opened an art gallery, wrote a series of novels, and passed away in 2018. Quite a life!

Lochrie is an engaging writer, and while this book is obviously partial, it has the ring of truth. And in one interesting note, of the 20 recruits who survived the 3 month bootcamp with Lochrie, 10 of them were from either the UK or a Commonwealth. A strength of the Legion is that it has people from almost everywhere, providing ready translators and contacts, but I was surprised to see English represented so heavily.