Joining the Foreign Legion

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LEGION OF THE LOST: THE TRUE EXPERIENCE OF AN AMERICAN IN THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGION

By Jaime Salazar

Berkley/Caliber, $23.95,

243 pages

REVIEWED BY ROGER K. MILLER

"Everyman thinks meanly of himself for nothaving been a soldier, or not having been at sea," Samuel Johnson said. We might add, as a generality just as glittering, that every man at one time or another thinks how great it would be to run away and join the French Foreign Legion.

How great it is, or not, we can know in some detail, thanks to that oxymoronic literary genre, the youthful memoir, penned by young men who have left the Foreign Legion, often via desertion. There have been many over the decades, including that of Christian Jennings, an Englishman who, at 22, joined the Legion in the 1980s, fled after a couple of years, and wrote about it in "Mouthful of Rocks."

The experiences Jaime Salazar describes in "Legion of the Lost" are similar to Mr. Jennings', though the latter was attracted by the supposed glamour of the military force while what Mr. Salazar sought was even more ineffable than that. Both describe many of the same things -- discipline consisting mostly of blows to the head and knees to the groin accompanied by curses and verbal belittlement -- and both, once they completed the four-month basic training, rather enjoyed the life, made up of days of hard training followed by nights of hard drinking. And both of them, though impressed with the Legion, are, if unconsciously, just a little more impressed with themselves. Presumably Mr. Salazar would not consider himself among the "a collection of humanity's rejects" that he said described his fellow new enlistees.