Vladimir Miletic does not write from a desk. He writes from memory—hard-won, brutal, unromantic memory earned in some of the most unforgiving environments on Earth. At 21, restless and searching for what he now describes as “a desperate search for freedom,” he joined the French Foreign Legion. Thirty-six years later, in his sixth decade, he has distilled those experiences into Preživeli smo pistu Jaguar (We Survived the Jaguar Track), a survival manual built not from theory but from direct confrontation with nature at its most extreme.

This interview was conducted in connection with his book, a practical guide to survival that covers the four pillars: water, fire, shelter, and food. Unlike typical survival guides, Miletic’s manual shifts priorities based on the environment. In the desert, water is paramount. In polar regions, shelter and fire become urgent. The book opens with a stark reminder: “In nature, there are no rewards and praise. There are only punishments and consequences.”

Miletic served with the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2 REP), an elite unit within the French Foreign Legion. His training took him through environments designed to break the unprepared: the jungles of French Guiana, where humidity reaches 99% and temperatures hover around 45 degrees Celsius; the deserts of Djibouti, where Grand Bara stretches under a merciless 49-degree sun; the mountains of the Pyrenees at Mont-Louis; and conflict zones across Africa—Rwanda during the genocide, Somalia during the humanitarian crisis, Iraq during the first Gulf War.

The title refers to the Jaguar Course—an elite two-month jungle warfare and survival program conducted by the Legion’s 3rd Foreign Infantry Regiment (3e REI) at the CEFE (Centre d’Entraînement en Forêt Équatoriale) on the Maroni River in French Guiana. It is not a place but a threshold, one of the Legion’s most uncompromising tests where mistakes carry immediate consequences and nature itself becomes the primary adversary.

The course is divided into four segments: one modular phase and three practical phases conducted entirely in the field, covering combat, extraction, orientation, survival, swimming with loads, river assault, and patrol operations. Miletic describes the third phase—the Jaguar and Leopard tracks—as the most demanding, where daily rations dropped to 150 grams of food and half a liter of water, forcing trainees to implement survival knowledge in real time.

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The book’s wisdom is earned through experience. Miletic explains how to collect dew by tying a shirt below the knee and walking through thick grass, then straining and boiling the water. He describes the specificity of different environments: in Djibouti’s CECAP in Arta, constant temperatures of 45+ degrees with 10% humidity; in Guiana, 45 degrees with 99% humidity. “It’s one thing to conduct training at 45 degrees with 99% humidity and at 50 degrees with 10% humidity,” he writes. “The only thing in common is thirst and hydration.”

The manual draws from both Legion doctrine and SAS survival handbooks (Survival and Survie dans les conditions désertiques et équatoriales), combining military survival guidelines with specialist training for extreme conditions. Miletic insists this knowledge is accessible to everyone: “The book is for everyone, written in simple language that can be understood.” It’s designed for professional soldiers, hikers, mountaineers, foresters, and anyone who ventures into nature.

What comes through in this conversation is not heroism but honesty. Miletic does not soften the brutality of Legion training—the punishments, the exhaustion, the relentless pressure designed to strip away everything comfortable and familiar. He speaks of the “self-knowledge house” at Grand Bara—a metal container placed on the sunny side where temperatures inside become hellish, punishment for indiscipline. He describes being trapped there for half an hour after a fight in the canteen when Red Star Belgrade became European champion. “I’ll never forget that from Pančev,” he says. “The next morning it was like nothing had happened between us.”

He describes the 38-kilometer march from Arta to Grand Bara with one liter of water in 49-degree heat: three sips per kilometer, the last sip held in the mouth for hydration, no gargling—that wastes precious water. He describes being bitten by a viper during training at Grand Bara, watching his hand turn dark blue then increasingly black, and the relief when serum arrived in time. These details matter. They’re the difference between making it and not.

The book is dedicated to his instructors in Calvi, Mont-Louis, French Guiana, and Djibouti—” Honneur et fidélité, mon instructors.” That dedication runs through every page. This is knowledge passed down, refined through hardship, offered without pretense to anyone willing to learn.

What follows is a conversation about motivation, endurance, and the cost of pushing beyond what seems possible. It is about iron discipline and about learning to rely on yourself when everything familiar is stripped away. It is about the difference between marching forward and giving up—or as the Legion puts it more bluntly: Marche ou crève. March or croak.

• What motivated you to join the French Foreign Legion, and how did your expectations of life in it align with the reality of service in the Legion?

When I returned after five years, many people asked me why, what was my goal, those who knew my family background, “why did you need that,” to questions from relatives, “how could you do this to us...

Even today, I’m searching for the reason, searching for the motive. It’s not that you wanted to do something heroic, something you’d be remembered for, respected and condemned for, for adventure, money, having nowhere to go. As the years pass, I’m more and more certain that it was dissatisfaction with myself, with life, with the values that were imposed on me, which I accepted, hand on heart, with resentment. Now, in the sixth decade of my life, I know that it was a desperate search for freedom, to see the forest as it really is, beyond that old tree, independence, to rely on myself.

You can’t find two identical motives among legionnaires—for some it’s an escape from problems, for some a new beginning, for some a desire for money, adventure. I at least want to think that it was an attempt to escape from myself, a search for personal freedom, the flight of a spoiled child in every sense, who was losing himself and becoming something that wasn’t his true nature.

When I went to the Foreign Legion, I was 21 years old. Thanks to my parents, my grandfather, and my grandmother, I spent my childhood traveling around Europe, satisfied with everything, lost in my parents’ demands and expectations. There I encountered a diametrically opposite world—brutal, masculine, without prejudices and constraints. The Legion is an extreme environment with extreme demands and expectations of you.

In principle, the Legion made me what I am now, so the expectations I had proved useful in civilian life later on.

You’ve reached the heart of the story. Beyond this point lies the full interview with Vladimir Miletic.

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• Can you describe the selection process for the French Foreign Legion—the physical, psychological, and cultural aspects—and how it prepared you for what followed in your career?

I can describe how it was in my time, 36 years ago; though it’s changed somewhat, not drastically. The main emphasis in admissions is on mental stability and a healthy personality. Naturally, the minimum level of physical fitness, determined by admission to special units, must be respected. That’s a minimum of 30 push-ups, 30 pull-ups, running 4 times 800 meters in less than 12 minutes, and the Luc Léger test. These are still current and the basis for what follows. First, the motivational interview is done, then the medical examination and physical fitness test. In this process, a considerable number of applicants drop out. The psychological tests, in my time, were last in order and were based on conversations where they assessed whether you’re fit or not.

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Vintage Café is where culture becomes experience, not content. I write about music, books, film, and art as things we live with—records we return to, conversations that linger, works that quietly change how we see the world. This newsletter grows out of more than twenty years of listening, reading, interviewing, and moving between scenes and cities, con…

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Vintage Café is where culture becomes experience, not content. I write about music, books, film, and art as things we live with—records we return to, conversations that linger, works that quietly change how we see the world. This newsletter grows out of more than twenty years of listening, reading, interviewing, and moving between scenes and cities, connecting personal experience with cultural context.

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Years ago, while traveling in the Kenyan savannah, Ryuichi Sakamoto brought a piano into the wild and began playing for elephants. At first, they walked past without noticing—until he started playing "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." The elephants stopped. They turned. They listened. An elephant researcher who had spent 35 years studying their communication stood beside him, astonished: "They are listening." It was one of those rare moments where music transcended species, where a composition written for a 1983 war film found its way into the African wilderness and stopped time. On what would have been his 74th birthday, Sakamoto's 74th birthday, and in honor of his life and endlessly curious spirit, I'm sharing a conversation we had in 2018—about collaboration, improvisation, the mystery of creation, and the music that refuses to leave us.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in 2023, was an artist whose career resisted easy definition. Over more than four decades, beginning with Yellow Magic Orchestra, he moved freely between electronic music, classical composition, pop, film scores, and multimedia performance. Few musicians combined such breadth with such depth, or maintained such a consistent sense of curiosity throughout their working life. To encounter his music was, and remains, to encounter the world—filtered through an intelligence attuned to sound, place, and time.

He had a career unlike anyone else. For more than several restless decades, beginning with Yellow Magic Orchestra, he was a musician closely followed by other musicians, and few artists in popular music developed a catalogue as broad or as deep as his. To experience his music is to experience the world—not as a fixed identity, but as a field of exchange shaped by sound, place, and time. He often described himself as an “outernational,” a term that captured both his distance from national boundaries and his borderless musical vision.

Diversity and curiosity were traits consistently associated with his work and character. He first began learning composition at the age of 10, taking private classes with Professor Matsumoto at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts. During the 1960s, he became interested in a wide range of music, from the Beatles to John Cage, while his interests also extended to poetry, radical theatre, and modern art—an openness that would remain central to his creative approach.

After finishing high school, he returned to Tokyo University to complete his degree in composition and, around that time, drew inspiration from French Impressionism and Minimalism. In the 1970s, he developed a deep interest in Stockhausen and electronic music, earning a Master’s degree while also studying electronic and computer music alongside ethnomusicology. From there, his career branched out into solo recordings, numerous collaborations, award-winning film scores, and multimedia performances. The quality and diversity of his output placed him in a category of his own, fusing global influences into a personal musical Esperanto.

One of the areas in which he excelled over the years was film music. In 1983, the soundtrack for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was released, a project in which Sakamoto not only wrote, arranged, and performed the score, but also appeared on screen alongside David Bowie. The film’s title theme, “Forbidden Colours,” written with David Sylvian, became one of the first of many collaborations between the two artists and demonstrated Sakamoto’s ability to create music that functioned as an emotional narrative rather than mere accompaniment.

Another film that followed saw him both acting and composing for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor.” This soundtrack brought him global recognition and an Academy Award, shared with David Byrne and Cong Su. For many listeners, myself included, this epic film was also a first introduction to Sakamoto’s music and to Chinese history and culture.

Bertolucci and Debra Winger and John Malkovich on location of Sheltering Sky

Very shortly after seeing the film in the late ‘80s (and maybe 6 months after the clashes at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, as I recall), as a teenager, I traveled to China with this music and moving pictures echoing in my mind. This film was the first of three films directed by Bertolucci with music by Sakamoto, followed by The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha, forming a sequence of works in which his music bridged geography, memory, and inner experience.

All of this led to collaborations with other acclaimed film directors over the years, including Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, Pedro Almodóvar, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. The Revenant marked a particularly significant moment in his career: it was his first major work following recovery from cancer and another milestone in his long-standing collaboration with German electronic artist Carsten Nicolai, known as Alva Noto.

The Revenant movie denotes many things for Sakamoto. Firstly, it is the first work he did after he recovered from a battle with cancer and secondly it was another achievement of his collaborative work with German electronic artist Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto. This collaboration with Nicolai is one of the long-standing ones in his career and it has yielded several intriguing albums with the latest being Glass where they turned architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House into an instrument and it became part of the performance.

In the final years of his life, Sakamoto’s work grew increasingly spare and inward-looking, though never withdrawn. His album Async (2017), created following his recovery from cancer, was widely regarded as one of his most searching statements—music shaped by silence, texture, and a heightened awareness of time. This approach continued in a series of performances and recordings that foregrounded fragility and presence, culminating in 12, an album recorded during hospital stays in 2021 and 2022 and released shortly before his death. Reduced largely to piano and ambient detail, the music reflected an artist refining his language to its essentials rather than closing a chapter.

Since January 17 marks Sakamoto’s birthday, I decided to republish this interview, originally published by All About Jazz in 2018. Sakamoto is an artist whose work I value deeply. That same year, the film festival I’m organizing awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award and premiered a documentary dedicated to his life and work (Coda). His life was marked not only by creative achievement but also by a sustained commitment to social and environmental causes. Vintage Café has reviewed several of his works and will continue to write about him—not out of nostalgia, but because his music remains a living presence.

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Over the years, your recorded output saw an incredible range of diversity and cross-cultural activities. What sparked your curiosity about various kinds of music from different geographies and genres?

Since I was very young, I have been listening to all kinds of music. I took piano lessons as a kid, but I didn’t listen to only classical music. I was listening to pop and rock music, and when I was in high school, I began listening to jazz. I don’t know why, as I can’t pinpoint the exact reason why I turned this way. I was born like this, and this is my nature. I enjoy all kinds of music, and not only music, but also other branches like art. For me, it’s impossible to live in one category. This is impossible.

I love avant-garde art, but I also like classical art. I’m talking about diversity more like a general matter. I was born like that, and I remember that when I was very little, I wanted to be born in Hong Kong, not in Japan. As a child, I thought that if I were born in Hong Kong, I might speak both English and Chinese. Being only a Japanese speaker was not fair to me. But that was the thinking of a little kid who wanted to break through barriers.

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Vintage Café is where culture becomes experience, not content. This interview is published in full for paid subscribers, with an extended preview below. I write about music, books, film, and art as things we live with—records we return to, conversations that linger, works that quietly change how we see the world. This newsletter grows out of more than t…

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