Jean Lartéguy

Lartéguy fought with the Free French, was wounded in Korea, and reported wars for French magazines across three decades, which is the ground The Centurions is built on. The novel follows French paratroopers from captivity at Dien Bien Phu into the war in Algeria, and it is read now less as a story than as a document of how an army talked itself into methods it had condemned in others. The interrogation argument at its centre made the book notorious, and made it required reading in parts of the American military after 2003. Lartéguy said afterwards that admirers had taken as endorsement what he meant as warning. He won the Prix Albert Londres for his reporting.