All in Army
Malia was 18 and looking for adventure. She found it in Valence, at the foot of the French Alps more than 22,000 km, a 36-hour flight and an 11 hour time difference from her home. The young woman, today a radio transmitter and top-performing athlete, was born and raised on Wallis, which, together with the islands of Futuna and Alofi, form a French overseas collectivity in the Pacific Ocean…
Even though she'd dreamt of enlisting in the army since childhood, Myriam, who clearly likes planning ahead, decided to first train as a cook “for after the army.” Aware that a soldier can retire and have plenty of time left for a second career, she thought that with a professional diploma in catering she would always find work (except during a pandemic, but let's hope that this is a once a century event). Today she's an army firefighter team leader…
For two years Corporal Gwenaëlle of the 1st Spahis Regiment was the only woman in the 'amphibious engagement support platoon', the regiment's amphibious combat and intelligence unit. But having held on for that long and done a lot of hard thinking, she's now left this mounted combat unit (…) because “it's extremely tiring, it's really exhausting me and it requires you to make many, many sacrifices.” In addition she thinks she's “too much of a burden” for her comrades in arms. But she stresses that if she had to do it again “I would do exactly the same thing. I didn't join up for a calm life!”…
I'd always wondered why the beret worn in France's mountain regiments is much bigger than those worn in other regiments. “That's because it was designed to be stuffed with straw so that you could then put your feet in there and keep them warm,” Delphine laughs. Brought up in Grenoble at the foot of the Alps, Delphine was naturally drawn to a mountain regiment, although it wasn't the one she started out in…
Corporal Jacqueline always wanted “to wear a uniform.” As a teenager, her Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings were spent training as a young firefighter. So it was natural that her first choice of uniform was that worn by the Paris Fire Brigade which is actually a unit of the French Army but under the authority of the Paris prefect…
Amandine joined the French Army's Ad Hoc Regiment of Chad* as a mechanic when she was 19. That was two years ago. It was a period when many youngsters chose to join the armed forces or the police in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks in France. But “my choice was not inspired by these attacks,” she explains. It was simply that she has a vocational certificate in automobile mechanics and a vocational bacalaureate and thought the army might be the best place to exericise her talents as a mechanic…
