On foot at night, in hiding during the day. This is how Giovanni Deiana escaped from the French Foreign Legion, eight years after enlisting… by mistake.
It all starts with a “patatrac”. A word that in the mouth of Giovanni Deiana – born in 1943, with the lively eyes of an eternal boy – perfectly describes the absurdity of that day in 1963, when he suddenly found himself a soldier in the French Foreign Legion.
"We were in France, me and a friend from Nuoro. We didn't understand a word. The gendarmes took us to the barracks and asked us something in French. We, without knowing what, said yes. After half an hour we were dressed as soldiers. Rifle on our shoulders and off we went."
Not a choice, then, but a linguistic confusion. He was then over twenty, with a naive smile and no idea what the Legion was. From that moment on, however, his life took the form of a pulp novel: very tough training in Corsica, secret missions in Algeria, intercontinental flights to Tahiti to participate – as a complete unknown – in the tests of the French H-bomb in the atoll of Mururoa.
"We built a small port in the lagoon, they took us there on barges. They detonated the atomic bomb there. Thinking about it today..." "It was a life of sold meat", he says in a dry tone, without whining.
"They paid you little and sent you where they wanted. What if I went back? I would say no, and I would run away first."
Yes, because in the end Giovanni really did escape. Like in the movies, alone: walking at night, sleeping during the day, without a ticket, without money. "If you ran away with someone else, they always caught you. I managed to return to Italy, but when I arrived I was stopped by the police: for Italy I was a deserter."
His daring escape brought him back first to the barracks: "they wanted me to do the military, after eight years of Legionnaires, another two years would have been a game, but I had no choice. So I did 15 months and then I was discharged". And then to love: Rosina, the wedding in 1974 in Esterzili and the departure that same day for Milan. There, he lived a quieter life: as a cook, without machine guns and orders in French.
Today he looks with bitter eyes at the new generations attracted by the Foreign Legion and his thoughts go to the young Italians who died in Ukraine: "If I hadn't escaped, I would have died too. In those years, I had also said to a fellow countryman: he had arrived in Africa: 'Go away while you can.' He had listened to me and had escaped too."