In the hell of the Indochina war

«I am a mother who does not receive news from her son Roberto Balzano, who. An expatriate in Belgium for work, he found himself somehow dragged into this accursed Legion. I entrust my hope to you. I can't figure out if he's dead or missing, I haven't received news from him since April 1952, you can imagine what a torment this is for a mother, losing a child…».

Between the late 1940s and early 1950s, thousands of letters like this were sent to newspaper editorial offices, Italian institutions and French consulates. They were letters from mothers, fathers, brides-to-be, sisters and brothers who asked for news of their loved ones who "disappeared" because they were enlisted out of desperation, by deception or by force in the French Foreign Legion. Enlisted and then sent to fight an unjust and hopeless war, the one the French fought in Asia to maintain control over their colonies in Indochina

A very approximate calculation estimates that as many as seven thousand of our compatriots went to swell the ranks of the French expeditionary contingent in the Indochinese conflict. Of these, 1300 never returned, killed by the Viet Cong, by disease or by the desperate choice of shooting themselves on the head to put an end to the madness of a conflict with no hope of victory for the French. Furthermore, as with every war, the drama of the veterans was added to the fallen with hundreds of young people mutilated forever, tried by very serious psychological traumas linked to the stress of fighting in a totally hostile environment, where ferocity dominated between the two contenders.

The journalist Luca Fregona (with Giorgio Cargioli who recounts his story as a legionary in the book), who in 2021 had already dedicated the volume Soldati di sventura (Athesia) to the forgotten drama of the Italian legionaries, recovers seven stories of young Italians enlisted in the Legion in his new work, “ Over there where we die ” (Athesia, 2023, pp. 360). "Stories - explains Fregona in the introduction to the volume - that have been reported to me by the relatives of other legionaries on the wave of Soldati di sventura".

Seven events reconstructed thanks to direct testimonies and the material made available by the families : photographs, letters, postcards, newspaper clippings, fragments of uniforms, merit crosses, commendations and military booklets. But Fregona went even further than what was offered by family documents and memoirs. Thanks to his research in the archives of the Legion he was able, in fact, to reconstruct episodes that the survivors had never told once they returned to Italy and, even, to discover the date, place and circumstances of the death of a young Italian legionnaire, whose family he had known nothing for seventy years.

In fact, engagement in the Legion was too often a one-way ticket to hell. A kind of lottery with death. For many of the enlistees, Indochina was an unfamiliar place . They were convinced they were ending up in some quiet garrison in the Algerian desert. They ended up in a real nightmare circle, not unlike what has been described to us in so many films and books dedicated to the war fought by the Americans in Vietnam. The reality was therefore an unbearable experience, as evidenced by the letters sent to the families and the many attempts at desertion despite the fact that the punishment for deserters was often relentless in the Legion . Often a prolonged silence was the prelude to a meager communication to the families from the French Ministry of War, with the caption: »Died for France. Fell on the field of honor.' This was what happened to Roberto Balzano's mother, whose letter we presented at the beginning.

Yet, the tragedy of our compatriots caused little emotion and was quickly removed . However, those dead and those boys who fought in Vietnam were too uncomfortable in the years of the Cold War and work was done at the level of Italian institutions so that oblivion descended upon them. In fact, month after month, the Indochina war was transforming itself from an internal French affair into a major international confrontation, the umpteenth step in that Cold War in which the Western and Communist blocs faced each other. The United States supplied France with millions of dollars, planes, tanks and the infamous napalm. China and the Soviet Union gave the rebels an arsenal of grenades, bazookas, machine guns and mines.

Our compatriots became expendable, even if they were in most cases poor people enlisted by deception .