<div class="floatright">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/7/72/Ricoeur.jpg)</div>(Hello! In hopes that you are still accepting applications, I'd like to present: )<br/><br/>Name: Etienne Gervais<br/><br/>Gender: Male<br/><br/>Age: 45<br/><br/>Background (entirely open to change if needed):<br/>Born in 1925, his father was an early electronics repairman with a small shop on the outskirts of Montreal. Etienne wanted to sign up in 1942 but his Catholic father was vehemently opposed to his son (as he put it) "becoming a killer" and prohibited his enlistment.<br/><br/>The morning of Etienne's eighteenth birthday, he snuck out well before dawn and was standing in front of the registration center before it opened, waiting to sign up. He was promptly disowned by his father. Etienne was sent to Camp Valcartier for basic training, then was held back from deployment for radio and signal operations training due to his experience in his father's shop. Etienne participated in the landings at Juno beach, Normandy in June 1944 as a radio operator with 3d Canadian Division.<br/><br/>Discharged in 1945, Etienne returned to Canada but felt out of place and uninvolved in the civil sector. In 1946 he returned to France and joined the<em>Légion étrangère</em>, being deployed to Indochina in early 1947, again as a field radio operator. Shortly after the Battle of the Day River, he was promoted to<em>Caporal Chef</em>and recommended for officer's candidacy. He returned to France in late 1952 for cadet training.<br/><br/>By the end of the year as a fresh<em>Sous-Lieutenant</em>with field experience against the<em>Pathet Lao</em>and<em>Viet Minh</em>, Etienne had been snapped up by the SDECE's<em>11e bataillon parachutiste de choc</em>, given a brief series of course introductions to parachuting, counterespionage tactics, psychological warfare and guerrilla recruitment/liaison, and returned to Indochina as part of a unit which started out training the<em>Groupement de commandos mixtes aéroportés </em>and went on to establish and train Partisan units among the Northern Hmong and Nung<em>montagnards</em>.<br/><br/>During the transition, Etienne remained in Laos as a SDECE liaison officer among the Hmong, working with the American CIA (who were picking up the reins of the French-created<em>montagnard</em>units) until 1959, when he was shot during the Vietnamese invasion of Laos and lost his left leg below the knee.<br/><br/>Etienne returned to France and an SDECE desk job as a full Lieutenant, writing about operations in Indochina, the use of Partisan troops, and specifically his military experiences among the Hmong.<br/><br/>Now, almost nine years later, he is returning once more as a field liaison in Vietnam (and probably Laos) with a memorized list of personal and also recommended contacts (both American and Hmong), freshly minted<em>brevet-Capitaine</em>'s bars, and a prosthetic foot, to see what can be learned about the bizarre ultimatum which has surfaced.<br/><br/>(Etienne is: Fairly mild and moral; farsighted; missing his left leg below the knee; an adequate pistol and rifle shot; a reasonably good speaker and translator of French, Hmong, Vietnamese and English; good at orienteering, radio comms, and electronics repair; and a responsible leader. Hopefully his CIA connections and history will make him easy to fold into the group? He's no commando or Rambo, but an officer with some combat experience primarily focused around communications and liaison. He has carried a rifle, but rarely if ever shot it at a person, being more concerned with radio operations and command decision-making in the field while others handled immediate security.)<br/><br/>Current Profession: SDECE (French rough equivalent to the CIA) Liaison