I'm reading "Devil's Guard" right now which is fascinating. The book is supposedly based on a true story about an ex-Eastern Front S.S. commando who fled Europe after Germany surrendered. He then joined the French Foreign Legion and was then stationed and fought in Indochina.
The whole book is fascinating. Everyone except the British come out looking pretty bad. Germany looks brutal, France looks incompetent, America looks naive, and all the Communist forces get portrayed as bankrupt in all ways. The book has some definite rings of truth, but also of some exaggeration or outright fabrication. Some of it probably accurately describes what happened after WWII, where other parts are fantastically exaggerated.
I did like one particular exchange. The German officer was offered some Nationalist Chinese advisors to help him make some battleplans, but he wasn't sharing much information with them. One of the Chinese officers, Major Kwang, notices this and talks to him about it, saying that he can be trusted and wants to help. The reply -
"We have been around here for a long time, Major Kwang. We have outlived the average life expectancy of the Legionaires, and I think we are still around because we took nothing for granted - never!"
The major smiled politely. "Then you regard every stranger guilty until proven innocent?"
"We regard only one thing, Major - our own survival factors," I said. "We learned that a long time ago: to think, to plan, to calculate, to evaluate and act - everything related to survival factors. Friendship, relations, rank, sentiments are all only of secondary importance. We are living on borrowed time and abiding by the law of probability, which is the only law we carefully observe. Had we done otherwise, we would now be dead heroes instead of surviving experts. For that's what we really are, Major Kwang: neither invincible daredevils nor supermen nor heroes - only survival experts. But survival is the most important thing in any war."
"We are living on borrowed time and abiding by the law of probability, which is the only law we carefully observe. Had we done otherwise, we would now be dead heroes instead of surviving experts."