11ème Choc

In France, on 7 February 1986: "11th Parachute Shock Regiment, here is your colours!" The voice of General Imbot, the new head of the D.G.S.E., carries far. It addresses the paratroopers forming the Regiment, rising from the ashes after 23 years of silence. It bridges the years, stretching a passage between a present reborn and a past that remembers. It speaks for History… A History that began forty years earlier, in the heart of a forgotten citadel deep in the Pyrenees, on 1 September 1946, and which continued, across every continent, wherever France needed courageous, discreet, competent, and effective men. Whether in Europe, gripped by the Cold War, in Indochina, in the heart of the Laotian maquis, on the beaches of Annam, in Algeria, from one border to the other (and even beyond), the officers, NCOs, and Chasseurs of the 11th fought — sometimes openly, most often in the shadows. They helped forge the "legend". For his new book "11e Choc", Erwan Bergot, who was one of them, chose to write about the men who had Service as their guide, Secrecy as their rule, who preferred silence to clamour, discretion to swagger, and who, more often than not, lacked the comfort of a communiqué at the moment of success, suffering, or death. When, in the wake of the "Greenpeace" affair, the Minister of Defence announced to the National Assembly the reformation of the 11th Choc, the silence that followed showed that not a single deputy present was unaware of what was at stake. The "veterans" felt it as a tribute to their qualities: loyalty, tenacity, effectiveness.