"I'd like France to have two armies- one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, and the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught." Ticking time bombs around the city are set to explode, and only a captive rebel knows their locations. Does saving lives justify torture? Or is such cruelty always unpardonable? Over the course of the 20th century, conventional modern warfare--that precise theatrical art cultivated by Napoleon--was supplanted by irregular fighting, guerrilla tactics, and counterinsurgency. No fictional account better depicts this historical shift and the ethical dilemmas that entailed than Jean Larteguy's searing military classic, The Centurions . While imprisoned in the notorious Camp One in Vietnam for over a year, Lt. Col. Pierre Raspeguy studies his captors, the Viet Minh, and begins to understand how they employ ideology and dogma to create a politically motivated, efficient fighting force. Raspeguy eventually gains his release, but in France he finds himself a part of the new reality of soldiering- a loyal fraternity of warriors alienated from an unsympathetic public at home.

Unable to sit idly while conflicts abroad rage, Raspeguy joins a paratrooper unit in Algeria, where he again faces an enemy with complete freedom to conduct war without rules. Yet rather than turning to the conventional tactics so shockingly unsuccessful in Vietnam, he builds off what he has learned from his enemies--tactics suited to the chaos of guerilla war but out of step with the ideals of a just war. When life and empire are in danger, how far is too far? An extended symposium on waging war in a new global order, an essential investigation of the ethics of counterinsurgency, and an intensely thrilling account of soldiers faced with chilling moral decisions on how to survive in hostile environments, The Centurions poses crucial questions about how we fight when "the age of heroics is over.".