Suriname, between 1986 and 1991:
Before leaving [on the mission to assassinate the Tacujana leader], the mercenaries were provided with a local guide: he was contemptuously dismissed.
[…] They were all corporals in the [French Foreign Legion’s Parachute Regiment], and they thought, “We’ll just walk down this trail here, and turn off at this branch here, and that’ll take us to the village,” – about 200 kilometers away! I said to them, “You can’t go like that. The trails shown on the map might not exist anymore – the jungle grows so quickly – so take compasses and maps.” These guys told me they didn’t need maps and compasses. I repeated, “You’ve got to use them or you won’t get there. You’ll get lost and die in the jungle.” Then one of them admitted, “We can’t read the map,” which absolutely amazed me, because they were corporals in the Legion.
Mick put it like this: “We’re fucking Paras. We’re airborne. When we need to go somewhere, we parachute in, and then we get taken out after we’ve done the business. We don’t have to learn how to map-read.”
So, obviously, they got lost.
As told by Alan ‘Bowen.' Found in Someone Else’s War: Mercenaries from 1960 to the Present, by Anthony Rogers
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