As a teenager, Ron Reynolds trekked across the United States and overseas in quest of adventure. Stints as carnival worker, ranch hand, cabana boy, and lifeguard to a deckhand on the China seas could not quench his thirst for excitement until the nineteen-year-old Buffalo, New York, adventurer saw a poster in Paris luring him to a five-year enlistment in the famed French Foreign Legion. For eighteen months, that dream became a horrible nightmare of senseless desert killings and brutal and sadistic treatment, including a thirty-day imprisonment in a desert dungeon at the hands of a half-crazed Turk. Finally, after two unsuccessful attempts to escape in which he barely survived the punishments, Ron was determined to make it to freedom or take his own life by falling on his bayonet. His daring escape, filled with terror and suspense, was bittersweet. The Yankee mercenary found himself a man without a country and a price on his head by the French government. In essence, he had escaped to nowhere. He says that if he had to do it over again, he would take the easy way out—in front of a firing squad. On a happy note, Ron Reynolds is once again an American citizen.