Grand écart : parcours d'un saint-cyrien atypique
parcours d'un saint-cyrien atypique
Édouard Terzian
368 pages, parution le 26/03/2007
Résumé
This book is the eventful story of an atypical French officer, a graduate of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy and son of Armenian immigrants. His life knew many upheavals, at the junction of the two millennia. It began in Draguignan, Southern France, in a family suffering the drama of exile, then in the Resistance under the German occupation. After his training at the Military Academy, his professional itinerary led him to Indochina for two tours, then to Algeria, Africa, the USA, Germany and at last to the Pacific Area. In Africa, he was the only French officer who officially served under a foreign uniform with the UN Congo forces. During the Cold War, through his training, he had the rare privilege, as a French army officer, of witnessing both the sheer scale of the American power and that of the worldwide nuclear threat. At each step, he expresses his non-conformist, provocative or unusual views. Aged 48, he resigned from the Army and started a civilian career by creating a subsidiary of Hachette company in Noumea, as well as a local TV magazine, Tele 7 jours Nouvelle-Cale'donie. Having visited China over 50 times, he was one of the few company directors to have lived side by side with the Chinese working class and have witnessed the tremendous rise of the Middle Empire. Finally, from New Caledonia, his adoptive country which was the setting of intense unrest, he reveals the circumstances of his humanitarian intervention in Vietnam at a time when he was among the first foreigners authorized to visit the country. Where civilian and military worlds meet, he expresses his views on the readjustment of armed forces, on New Caledonia, on planetary stakes in the Pacific buffer area, onimmigration, Turkey and on the internal security of the European Union in which "there are no longer threats at borders or borders to threats." Born in 1926, retired Colonel Edouard Terzian, when a student, distinguished himself in the Resistance under the German occupation and then joined Saint-Cyr Academy in 1946. An officer in the Army Marine Infantry paratroops, he participated in the Indochina and Algeria campaigns, was trained by the Special Forces in Corsica and served as a military adviser in Africa. Having graduated from the US Command and General Staff College, as well as from the US Armed Forces Staff College, and as a liaison officer in Germany, he was called upon to closely study the NATO nuclear strategy. Assigned to New Caledonia, he resigned from the Army in 1974 and began a 25 year civilian career in the Pacific, as the director of a corporation. Edouard Terzian is a Commander of the Legion of Honour.
