Adieu vieille Europe...

Posted on Mon Sep 19th, 2022 @ 3:45pm by Staff Sergeant Nathaniel Wolf

Mission: Jumping Right In
Location: Calvi, Corsica
Timeline: Backpost
740 words - 1.5 OF Standard Post Measure

Calvi, Corsica

HQ of the 2e Régiment Étranger de Parachutistes
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Sergent Chef Nathaniel Jakob Wolf physically and mentally checked his gear to make sure he was ready for his trip. Apparently, he was ready, or at least as ready as he was ever going to be, given the reservations he had about his new assignment.

Nate was an NCO in the French Foreign Legion. That meant while he had French citizenship now, he hadn’t when he joined. Everyone who joined the Legion was either running from something or looking for something or both. Nathan had been both.

Nathan now had dual French and American citizenship, but he’d been born in the USA and was an American when he joined the Legion. He had been on a vacation in France that was supposed to give him time to decompress after a harrowing experience took his last two years of high school to resolve. But once out of the situation and out of the country, Nate found he didn’t want to go back, at least not right away. He wanted to escape his life, be someone else for a while. So he joined the French Foreign Legion and became Jacques Dubois for the first five years of his enlistment. The name change was a requirement for the first five years of every Legionnaire’s service, but if you wanted to get citizenship and a passport (or even just use your existing passport), open a bank account, travel outside of France, etc, etc, you needed to eventually reclaim your identity. Nate reclaimed his after his five year enlistment was up. He wasn’t wanted by the law, and he wasn’t a teenager anymore. He’d made a life for himself in the Legion and his parents wouldn’t be able to pressure him to return to the states.

Legionnaires sometimes faced awkward situations when they had to partner with military forces from their birth nation. Nate could avoid all of that because he was a hyperpolyglot. He could easily learn and retain a truly astounding number of languages. At home, his family had taught him to converse in English, of course, but also German, Russian, Italian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. He’d also learned French in middle and high school, and he’d picked up many other languages since joining the legion. He frequently pretended to be German, or Russian or Italian, and that he only spoke French and his “native” tongue. This usually deflected attempts to harass him.

Stargate Command. The SGC itself. It was, at least, a multinational unit. It wouldn’t just be American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. But still…

There was nothing to be done for it. Nate was saying goodbye to Corsica and hello to McMurdo Station… in fucking Antarctica.

“I must be out of my mind,” Nate thought to himself.

On the other hand, Nate wanted to do more to combat the alien threat. He’d been in Chad when the alien attack came. He'd been with the Sniper Platoon of 2e REP’s Combat Support Company at the time, there as part of Operation Épervier, fighting Islamic extremists. Instead, he ended up helping to defend the Earth from aliens. Not exactly what he thought he’d be doing in the Legion. Since then, he’d served several tours with in the Sahel region, first with Operation Épervier and then with Operation Barkhane, but what that really amounted to was playing whack a mole with terrorists, insurgents, and now aliens. Due to the climate and geography of the region, it was very difficult to do more than just play whack a mole. At least Nate had been with Groupement des Commandos Parachutistes (Commando Parachute Group) doing recon and direct action. The GCP was more likely to make contact with the enemy. The regular ground forces, including the Legion forces, spent a lot of frustrating days and even weeks patroling around the area without making contact at all. But the SGC was different, or at least it was supposed to be. Nate really hoped so.

Nate gathered his gear and hopped on a chopper from Solenzara Air Base that took him to Ajaccio Airport for the first leg of his trip to McMurdo Station. As he boarded the helicopter, Nate quoted a verse from a Legionnaire song:

Adieu vieille Europe
Que le diable t’emporte…

Farewell Old Europe
The Devil take you…