The Red Berets

THE CENTURIONS (487 pp.)--Jean Larteguy--Dutton ($4.95).

Nearly every visitor to France has seen them: lean men in red berets, with open collars and rolled-up sleeves, who walk with the self-conscious swagger of a military elite. They are French paratroopers, who both defend De Gaulle's Fifth Re public and threaten to destroy it. This engrossing novel, by ex-Paratrooper Jean Larteguy, 40, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in France, examines at length the fury and frustration animating this brotherhood.

From a Kafka Hell. The mystique of the paratrooper, says Author Larteguy, was born in the Kafka-like hell of Communist prison camps in Viet Nam after the fall of Dienbienphu. Like U.S. soldiers captured in the Korean war, the French were subjected to intensive brainwashing--but with vastly different results. The paratroop officers made a calculated decision to embrace the "political fiction" of the camp. They signed petitions condemning capitalism, accused themselves of monstrous crimes, made a noisy show of repentance, and even wrote a "progressive" hymn in which each word had a double meaning. They answered the doublethink of the Communists with doubletalk manifestoes that had "just the right amount of exaggeration to make anyone with any sense howl with laughter."

They had a serious purpose: to discover the secret that enabled the Communists to turn Vietnamese rickshaw boys and coolies into an army strong enough to humble France. Picaresque Captain Boisfeuras decided that Communist propaganda works because "it touches something deep, something real, in a man." Cerebral Captain Esclavier concluded that the West in its colonial wars suffers "from conscience and remorse; that's why we're losing." What is needed to win. declared Colonel Raspeguy, is shrewd, cunning missionaries "who preach, but keep one hand on the butts of their revolvers in case anyone interrupts them--or happens to disagree."

Bidet Civilization. Back in France after the Indo-China war, the paratroop officers are sickened by the "civilization of the Frigidaire and the bidet." They welcome the Algerian rebellion, and. under Colonel Raspeguy. take over the misfits and mutineers of the 10th Paratroop Regiment, determined to turn them into "Communists" who are antiCommunist. For two months, the regiment is molded by forced marches and the blare of loudspeakers that ceaselessly extol "us" and denounce "them," i.e.. anyone who is not a paratrooper.

After this brainwashing in reverse, the regiment is sent into a remote village to track down an elusive F.L.N. band, and promptly loses two men in an ambush. In reprisal, the paras cut the throats of 27 Moslem villagers who had nothing to do with the affair. It is brutal, but in "Communist" terms it works, since the natives are now too frightened to help the guerrillas. The band is soon cornered and wiped out.

At the novel's end, the paratroop officers are subpoenaed in connection with charges that some of them had tortured prisoners. The officers are outraged. Colonel Raspeguy defiantly tells his staff that whenever Cabinet ministers or Deputies visited his headquarters, he had flatly told them: "'We're doing this job because your government has ordered us to, but it repels and disgusts us.' And now these same bastards are trying to haul us into court! Hold tight to your guns, then no one will come to bother us."

Author Larteguy's book was published in Paris in 1960. Since then, history has proved him correct in his assessment of the reckless desperation of the paratroops: when the rebel generals revolted in Algiers last April, three paratroop regiments stuck with them to the bitter end.

Rebel General Raoul Salan escaped arrest to become the leader of the terrorist Se cret Army Organization, and his staff is made up of such tough ex-paratroop officers as Colonel Yves Godard and Pierre Lagaillarde.

LartYeguy argues that a large part of the French officer corps shares the paras' impatient rage at the politicians and blames them for leading the nation in a long retreat from its onetime glory. In effect. Larteguy's novel is a warning (echoed by many French observers): unless De Gaulle can perform the miracle of ending the Algerian war without further damage to the sense of gloire, the army that put him in power may yet try to overthrow him.

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