Fighter, writer, poet, spy: Max Evans is too dangerously usual. Max is just another face in the crowd...unless you care to look into that indomitable and mischievous glint in his "I." Get that close and he stimulates those deep and secret dreams of what could be.
Get even closer and Max makes you sneak up on yourself: not because of the things he's done, but because he'd done them. And does them. And honors his dreams. Max is that ruggedly-independent child many people deniably or secretly wish they could have grown up to be.
"Reach up and grab your dream," advises Max. "When you decide what that dream means to you, anything can be an adventure. It never has to be something dangerous, treacherous or glorious. Adventure is simply a fond determination to pursue your rightful self.
"An adventurer is not that different from the so-called average person," adds Max, a Kansan who stands five-foot-four and weighs 140 pounds. "The only difference is in the state of mind. I don't know who people are disappointed in the most when they meet me. Having learned about my past, they expect to meet somebody, or something, bigger than life."
Max lacks the glamorous traits of a stereotyped Hollywood adventurer, except for a background he doesn't brag about or flaunt. He wildcatted for oil in the Southwest in his teens and again between combat tours in World War II and the Korean Conflict. Max was a counter-intelligence agent in Vienna and Salzburg, Austria, "...when the Cold War wasn't so 'cold,'" as he recalls. He served briefly as a mercenary soldier in the Belgian Congo, trained Anti-Castro troops in Bolivia and Yucatan, and did undercover investigative reporting for the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune newspaper.
The longest job he's held to-date--five years--ended shortly after the 1961 Algerian War. It was then that Max became the last American to ever serve and fight in the "Old Time" French Foreign Legion.
Because of its involvement in the Algerian Revolt against France, the Legion fell into disfavor with General Charles de Gaulle. The force was shifted from its traditional Algerian headquarters in Sidi-bel-Abbes to Aubagne in Southern France. "I couldn't be talked into re-enlisting," says Max, "it just wasn't la Legion we knew anymore."
King Louis Philippe, who created the force of mercenary soldiers in 1831, defined its mission as serving outside the Kingdom. An elite band of professional soldiers from more than 50 nations, today it guards three of the few remaining outposts of the once-mighty French empire.
The Legion's 1st Regiment, in which Max initially served, is still the world's most decorated military unit, credited with more than 400 battle citations. Max's combat service earned him the Algerian War Medal and the Medaille Militaire.
By law, French Nationals are barred from the Legion, but a many may join under any nationality and name, no questions asked. "Evans" temporarily became "MacGregor" for reasons Max won't divulge. With one's past forgiven and forgotten, a Legionnaire recruit is assured that it is better to die well than to live badly. Max signed up in August 1956 with 240 other men and only 25 of that group were alive five years later. "The others either died in battle or were shot for desertion," Max says.
Max’s closest brush with death was on March 24, 1959, in the South Sahara Desert. "Our platoon was forced into a box canyon where we immediately drew heavy weapons fire from the enemy situated on the peaks above us," Max recalls. "The enemy was so highly emplaced that we couldn't raise our armor pieces and our small arms fire was practically ineffective.
"That night," he continues, "I couldn't figure out if could get out of there alive and dozed off to sleep. I awoke later when an electric-like shock raced through my brain. Some eerie, unfamiliar voice in my mind said, 'Max, don't you know somebody cares about you?' I quietly ordered my troops to crawl out of the canyon while it was still dark. We force marched 45 miles through the desert before we were rescued by a reconnaissance patrol."
Max adds, "Without mentioning that encounter to my mother in 1961, she happened to say that one the night of March 24, 1959 she felt I was in danger and started praying for me. The time and distance factors worked out so precisely that I firmly believe in mental telepathy as well as God."
A natural storyteller, Max channels his creative writing talents into Bread, Chocolate and Beer, a book of fictionalized stories about his Legion experiences. He draws the title from his first day of service, when the check-in clerk offered him that three-course meal. "I just took the beer," he says with a chuckle=. "When I asked about some food later that morning, they told me I had already passed up two-thirds of the regulation breakfast."
Max never kept photographs or souvenirs of his travels and experiences. "Those types of things tend to make one want to live in the past," he says. "I want to think progressively, to never story living, growing--but not growing into the Establishment."
In 1970 Max was homesick for the U.S. and wanted to settle down, if only temporarily. He left Paris for Wichita, KS, where his mother lived at the time, and where he later met his attractive schoolteacher-wife. He took a job in a Wichita plant but soon got "fed up with seeing the same people, constantly doing the same things, and hearing them air the same gripes. Once I mastered the job there, I wanted to move on."
Max and I met at Wichita State University in 1971. I was 24 and he was "43-years-old--stripped." We became close friends and confidants very quickly. On our first handshake, I instinctively knew I could trust Max with my life. In his jovial, offhanded ways, Max displays the same emotions, sensitivities, regrets, failings and potentials most people possess but try to hide. Much like the French Foreign Legion, Max accepts you for who you are and who you can be, no questions asked.
I've observed that people react to, and like or dislike Max for his subtle "So...? Sue me!" brand of integrity. His mustached face, mannerisms and magnetism suggest a blend of Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt and Comedian Mickey Rooney. Although impeded slightly by an old war injury to his left foot, Max struts as sure-footedly as he thinks and acts.
Max's serene sense of life is found in his hair-trigger wit. A good joke or pun jerks his balding head back and he belly laughs with swagger. And Max can tell a joke or a touching story with such poetry of feeling that I doubt if God Himself can help but grin at times. Plus, he has an amiable way with people that's as natural as lighting the perpetual cigar that punctuates his gestures.
Paradoxically, Max is a loner who attracts friends. "You're the first really close friend I've cared to make in more than 20 years," he told me once to my surprise. "While in counter-intelligence work, I learned not to make any lasting friendships. Many times I had to send agents on assignments in the Communist sector of Vienna, when I knew damn well they were never coming back."
Thinking about Max or talking with him can clear up my worries and self-doubts. I think about the much harder things he's had to face and to survive. And I chuckle thinking about the way he says, "That's the way it goes: first your money, then your clothes."
Max says the only real problem in his life right now is fighting a losing battle again an image placed on all people in their 40s. "You know," he says in a frustrated tone, "the kind where everybody has got their plow in the ground, supposedly successful, sitting around and just talking about business alllllll the time."
He's declined most requests to speak, and refused several interviews for publication, because, "People always want to write these 'sen-saaaational' stories about me.
Max has turned down two high-paying prestigious job offers because he says he wants to like what he's doing. "Awww Hell! These guys wanted to hire me because they thought I was unusual," Max complains irritably. "Even the unusual can become usual after awhile. Besides, anyone could have done the things I have.
"There's an adventurer within us all," he adds with a certain reverence.
"I've talked with people who insist you must get a college education first," Max says with a sigh. "Before they know it, too many men and women will get boxed into a career, a marriage, a mortgage and other such responsibilities to everybody, but themselves. Then one morning, they'll look in the mirror and wonder 'Where did it all go?'"
Max survived that trauma of a man's early 40s, what has been called the "mid-life crisis" or "male menopause." Researchers have found this period in men's lives to be a time of high risk for divorce, extramarital affairs, career dislocations, accidents and even suicides.
As Writer Don Schanche reported in the American Medical Association's Today's Health magazine, it is during the first 40 years of a man's life that he has been "...unrolling a scroll that bears the narrative of what he was striving to become as worker, thinker, father, husband, lover, doer, everything. All that he has achieved or failed to achieve is there, even his most implausible fantasies....
"Gradually he reaches the midpoint of the story, where some event in the narrative gently or abruptly forces him to see what and where he really is."
Max had that abrupt effect on my narrative, even before I wrote this profile at the age of 29.
That "dangerously usual" Max made me sneak up on that many in my mirror and focus on the purpose of my writing career.
Once I asked Max, "What motivated you to grab your dreams?"
He answered with a certain line by Poet John Greenleaf Whittier that has stayed with him since the age of 12: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"
Later I discovered that same quote prefaced Feel Free, a psychiatrist's self-help book which probes into reasons why people don't--but can--grab what needn't be just deep and secret dreams.
