A visceral, unromanticized look at the French Foreign Legion from a man who actually wore the kepi blanc. The author, a young German down on his luck after losing everything that mattered, finds himself in Belfort signing away his life to escape a past he cannot outrun. What follows is not the swashbuckling adventure of popular imagination, but something far more brutal and human: the grinding tedium of training, the strange brotherhood formed among desperate men from every nation, and the slow transformation of a civilian into a soldier who answers to no name but a number. Rosen writes with the unflinching honesty of someone who lived it - the cold, the brutal discipline, the languages of a dozen criminals and idealists bound together in a unit that asks for everything and promises nothing. It is a window into a legendary institution stripped of myth, told by a man who discovered that running toward adventure was really just running from himself.
