When Mike Gregory Skorupski died in March, 2025 I was in the middle of helping a neighbour with her terminally ill husband. I had heard that Mike was not well and had gone to the military hospital in Marseilles in December for an operation on his feet. His health had been bad for a number of years.

I live in Italy and began to be bombarded by Whatsapp messages and phone calls from Roger, another ‘C’ Squadron veteran, who was in France for a skiing holiday, that I should go, that I had to go, to his funeral and could I bring a white shirt and an SAS tie. I dithered and flapped. Who was going to help my neighbour? My car had mechanical issues. Mike died on a Friday and the funeral was set for the coming Wednesday.

Somehow, I found someone who would help my neighbour. On Tuesday afternoon I got a haircut, a military haircut, from my local barber, who is short and talks too much. That night after helping get my neighbour’s husband sorted out for the night, I set out for the south of France. I thought I might stop along the way if I felt sleepy, but I drove all night, arriving at 4 AM, with the help of my cell phone, at the Doumaine Capitaine Danjou, one of the Foreign Legion’s home for old Legionnaires near Puyloubier, which is just north of Marseilles. I slept, badly, for a couple of hours in the front seat of my car and staggered out to introduce myself, in my worst school boy French, to the first person I met.

When I told the sergeant that I was there for Mike’s funeral, I was immediately taken to the orderly room and, in rapid-fire French, was offered black coffee and a sticky bun. The NCO told me that he would find “an Anglo-Saxon” to act as translator for the time we were there. I soon met up with Roger and Paul, who had served in the SADF’s 44 Para, and Mike’s sister Veronica. We were assigned Andrew, a British ex-Legionnaire, who had served in the British Army before joining the Legion. During my very brief glimpse at the Foreign Legion, I met an American, a Moldovan, Poles and an Italian.

Mike was, in some but not all ways, a very typical Legionnaire. He was born in England in 1950 to Polish refugee parents who had been imprisoned by the Soviets during the Second World War. He grew up in South America where his stepfather, an oil company executive, had been posted.

After a short spell at university, he embarked as a deck hand on a cargo ship. Shortly afterwards, he spent a year in the Swiss Alps as a ski instructor and traveled to France where he joined the Foreign Legion, as he told me, because he was broke. After basic training he was assigned to the elite 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e Régiment Etranger de Parachutistes). A skilled and enthusiastic mountaineer, he chose to serve with that unit’s 2nd Company (Mountain Warfare). Identified very early as a high potential legionnaire, he reached the rank of senior corporal (Caporal-Chef), a senior NCO rank in the Legion, within two and a half years. He deployed multiple times to French Guiana in South America, but mostly went to Africa, including combat operations such as the Loyada hostage crisis in Djibouti in 1976.

Shortly after completing his five-year contract in early 1978, Mike made his way to Rhodesia where he joined the army and served with the Rhodesian Light Infantry’s Recce Troop in Support Commando. In late 1978, he passed the SAS selection course and was assigned to B Troop/Squadron. During Operation URIC, he put his mountaineering skills to effective use by rigging up some of the main demolition charges under the bridge at Barragem.

Mike resigned from the Rhodesian Army shortly after independence in 1980 and returned to Europe. He subsequently served as a private military contractor in Chad and, in the early 1990s, he reunited with a group of former ‘C’ Squadron operators manning the private security team of a wealthy Middle East “personality” in Paris. In 2003, Mike followed most of his former Rhodesian colleagues and comrades to Iraq where they worked in various private security firms. After that, Mike returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo where he managed various exploration and mining ventures. He was at the Legion’s home in Puyloubier for six years.

Mike was given a full military funeral and his ashes are interred in the Foreign Legion’s corner of the civilian cemetery at Puyloubier.