Want to chuck it all and join the French Foreign Legion? Get accepted, serve three years with honor and it’s your ticket to French citizenship under the name of your choice. Aeon takes a look at the storied French fighting force, which is repositioning itself not as a group of ‘expendables,’ but as “an elite fighting force, to be compared with the British SAS or the US Navy Seals.” Go read “The legend of the Legion” in Aeon — it’s one part military history, one part psychological study, and well-enough written that you get to the end and wish there was more.

So if the Aeon piece isn’t enough, head back to 2012 and read the utterly inimitable William Langewiesche’s “The Expendables” for Vanity Fair: “The sergeant supervising the helicopter exercise had mastered the art of disciplining men without wasting words. He was a former Russian Army officer, a quiet observer who gave the impression of depth and calm, partly because he spoke no more than a few sentences a day. After one of the imagined helicopter landings, when a clumsy recruit dropped his rifle, the sergeant walked up to him and simply held out his fist, against which the recruit proceeded to bang his head.” From training to history and modern-day combat, Langewiesche has it all.

The Legion’s low-fi English-language recruitment site is here, by the way. Just sayin’.

If Langewiesche’s name looks as familiar as it is unpronounceable, it may be because he’s journalist and former commercial pilot who wrote “The Crash of EgyptAir 990” for The Atlantic magazine back in November 2001, ultimately suggesting that the pilot who crashed EgyptAir Boeing 767 from New York to Cairo into the sea either did so on purpose or was the worst pilot in history.