Say it in Pashto: US troops learn new tongues

At heart, Jim, a "special ops" commando out of southern New Mexico, is probably a bit more John Wayne than Lawrence of Arabia.

But the blond, 30-something veteran of several Middle Eastern tours hasn't spent the past few weeks target training for raids on terrorist camps. Instead, he's been boning up on his standard Arabic.

For this brawny "military occupational specialist," that means six hours a day of listening, reading, and conversing solely in Arabic at Ft. Bragg's JFK Special Warfare Center and School, a low-slung concrete structure that serves as a kind of community college for the Army. Beyond words, he's learning how not to offend hosts and sources in far-flung villages.

"This isn't exactly what I signed up for, but I'm glad I'm getting it," Jim says. "At the end of the day, knowing this stuff gives you a strategic advantage.... It can also save your life."

This Southern soldier's school, which trains some 3,300 students a year in 21 languages, is becoming a focal point in America's quest to make its troops more self-sufficient. The Army says little has changed here since Sept. 11 besides the addition of three new languages - Pashto, Dari, and Uzbek (all spoken in Afghanistan). But it's clear that there's a shift toward cultural training for the men who will be searching out terrorists everywhere from Yemen to Indonesia.

The cacophony of clattering tongues at the JFK school hints at how the American soldier is evolving from happy-go-lucky grunt to worldly-wise road warrior. It might seem antithetical to watch grain-fed fighting men practicing the Dari phrasing of "Take me to your leader," but the Yanks, analysts say, are proving increasingly adept not just at making war, but at making friends.

"We tend to think of the military as immune to language and culture, but these efforts show a great sensitivity and intelligence, and run counter to the idea of Americans as ethnocentric, or nationalistic, people," says Roger Axtell, author of "Do's and Taboos Around the World," one of many civilian tomes the Army uses to teach cultural understanding.

After a six-hour day of classroom instruction, 10 to a class, soldiers shift to the language lab. There they don headphones and repeat Uzbek phrases or cram for a Croatian test. At night, they might watch "Mary Poppins" in Arabic and read some Pakistani fashion magazines. For easier languages - Spanish, say, or French - it's a four-month course. For Uzbek or Tagalog (one of the major languages spoken in the Philippines), it takes six months, at a pace of about 50 vocabulary words a day.

Much of what's being taught here is "basic survival communication"; for more-detailed primers, soldiers are sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif.

The hoped-for result, though, is far from a stammering cadet; Army officials say the primers, software programs, and tutors at JFK are top-notch.

"This is not the old textbook stuff that you get in high school," says Tim Loney, commander of Charlie Company, which runs the linguistics labs here.

Page: 1 | 2