The forgotten drama of the Italian legionaries in Vietnam

The story of the young Italians, who fought in Vietnam in the First Indochina War from 1946 to 1954 with the Foreign Legion French, is a page removed from the memory of our country. The Bolzano journalist Luca Fregona tells in the book "Laggiù dove si muore" (ed. Athesia) of seven Italians, mostly illegal economic migrants in France, "convinced" to sign the engagement after being discovered and arrested.
"The stories - explains Fregona - were reported to me by the families of other legionaries in the wake of my book 'Soldiers of misfortune'". At least seven thousand Italians, mostly very young between 18 and 24 years old, ended up in the "green hell". "The research - says the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Alto Adige - then allowed me to reconstruct episodes that the survivors had never told once they returned to Italy, and, in one case, date, place and circumstances of the death of a young man from Bolzano, Alfredo Decarli, of whom the family had known nothing for seventy years". Thanks to research

The forgotten drama of the Italian legionaries in Vietnam

For the book, his family finally knows where, when, and how he died. His name did not appear in the official lists of the fallen, lost in the thousand streams of military bureaucracy.

Giorgio Cargioli, born in 1935, who lives with his wife in La Spezia, tells his story in the first person. At the end of the conflict, horrified by what he saw and experienced, he deserted and remained for eight months in a Viet prison camp. His dramatic experience in Vietnam is not over yet.
He returned to Italy only in September 1955, after a daring escape in the Suez Canal from the prison ship that was bringing him back to Algeria. An escape that will end up in newspapers all over the world.
Pierino Leone from Aosta survived, seriously wounded, in the green hell, arrested as an illegal immigrant in France and faced with the prospect of "jail or Legion". Ildo Della Torre di Valsassina from Merano will come out of that experience with a deep aversion to every war.