I made my first impression of France – or, more accurately, the French – in 1963. In Texas. It was not accurate.

I had been stationed at Ft. Bliss training in the HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer) missile system. In 1963, Ft. Bliss was the training center for HAWK and they trained all the NATO troops – including the French – plus the Japanese and Israelis.

As an aside, when I came back from Korea, I was assigned to a unit teaching the HAWK system to Germans. As an aside to the aside, I had a friend – probably not really a friend, a fellow E-5 sergeant that lived in a room near me – who was from North Dakota and spoke rudimentary German; he taught Israelis. End aside to the aside. We taught outside, in the desert at the Orogrande [Missile] Range, in southern New Mexico. I started in late April and it got hot, really hot by mid-afternoon. To get around the heat, we started classes at five in the morning and ended at one in the early afternoon, before the heat (then the Germans went back to Ft. Bliss and we hung around Orogrande pretty much doing nothing). We were already there, every morning when the Germans marched into the training area. I was in the Army duh – and HAWK was an Army system in the US military, but the Germans assigned it to the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. The Luftwaffe wore grey fatigues with jackboots which had just been relegalized for the military (the Allies had banned them for the German military after the war because the jackboot was identified with the Nazis). I still remember the creepy feeling watching the Germans march into the park – that’s what we called it – in the darkness of the early morning twilight. They marched much closer together then we did – about 15″ apart while we marched at 30″ apart – dressed in field grey, wearing jackboots, singing Deutschland über alles as they marched. End aside.

But that was later, in 1965, and I formed my French impression in the spring of 1963. The French, while still in NATO, had just started distancing themselves by building their own nuclear deterrent, and developing a separate command structure under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. For reasons that seem incomprehensible now, we – we being the commanders and troops I saw every day in 1963 – thought this was treasonous and that the French people and troops were cowards at best and probably traitors to the cause of saving the world against communism. The funny thing is that, even then, I knew our constant war was mostly bogus but I signed on to the belief that the French were cowards for not slavishly following us (I do take comfort, however, in that I never even thought of calling French fries something else).

France, it turns out, left NATO in the 60s for the same reason they didn’t support the invasion of Iraq, they did not consider it in their self-interest. And there is an additional factor, France considers itself a world power and does not want to be in anyone’s shadow (and, with the US, everyone else is in the shadow). All one has to do is spend a couple hours walking through the Louvre to see why. Look at the sculpture, the paintings, the opulence: money flows towards power and art follows. For most of the last 1500 years, France, or proto-France, has been the center of Europe and that is hard to give up.

That is why I was shocked when I turned a corner in the Louvre and saw this: 

*with credit to Gail Cousins