Five Best


Max Boot

on books about guerrillas

Jan. 25, 2013 2:48 p.m. ET
The Centurions

By Jean Lartéguy (1960)

1. This book is nearly impossible to buy (a used copy goes for $800 on Amazon), but it is well worth making the effort to find it at the library. There is no better portrait of the French troops who fought and lost the wars in Indochina (1945-54) and Algeria (1954-62). Jean Lartéguy, a former soldier, follows a group of fictional paratroopers from their confinement in a brutal Vietminh prison camp after the fall of Dien Bien Phu back to France, where "they were almost horrified...

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