SPECIAL FORCES: six men, three days, one photo
Somewhere in the Sahel, six men leave an unnamed base. They have three days' worth of supplies in their packs, a ten-kilometer trek at night, and seventy kilos on their backs. Their objective: a jihadist leader wanted by France. Their instructions can be summed up in three words—they are to observe only.
Because their weapon isn't the rifle they're carrying. It's a camera.
This video recounts an operation by the 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment, from the briefing to the capture. The pack being weighed in front of the captain, and the garden rake they actually take. The two hundred meters where they stop to listen to the silence. The several tons of earth moved before dawn, then put back in place until the ground returns to normal. The two men who live there for a week. And the optics
that reads a license plate from five hundred meters away and brings a face
photographed from three hundred meters out of the shadows.
Above all, it tells the story of what becomes of this photograph. Coded, transmitted by satellite, processed
in a command center in France, modeled in three dimensions, and studied detail
by detail—in the event of an assault. Six men lying in a hole photograph
a face; the face becomes a model, the model a plan, and the plan a night when
other men enter somewhere. Those who carry out the assault may have their names in
the newspapers. Those who took the photograph, not.
Finally, it goes back to the origin of this profession, and it is surprising. The trench that six Frenchmen are digging today in the Sahel sand was conceived in 1968 as a precaution against a Soviet invasion: in the event of war, these men were not to retreat with the rest of the army, but to remain in place, entrenched, within the occupied territory, and continue gathering intelligence. Stay-behind.
Kolwezi, Chad, the Gulf, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Mali: each time, they arrived first. Five palms on the Military Valor Cross, four theaters of operation, thirteen years—and that's all the State will say about it publicly.
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