What the Taliban Told Me, page 4
Here, again, a different recruiter. But this one was less calm, less fit, and far less supportive in person. When I asked where Sergeant R. was, the new guy sort of dismissively said, “He got blood cancer. Stationed him out in Arizona, I think, for treatment.”
“Oh, I… That sucks.”
“Yeah. His wife and kid will be taken care of by the Air Force though.”
I didn’t understand how fatalistic this proclamation was at the time, and so I just said, “That’s good.”
“So, you want to do what again?”
“Airborne cryptologic linguist.”
He sort of smiled at this, with that same now seemingly standard-issue surety that comes with not actually having any experience with the thing you’re so confident about. I can’t blame him for this dismissal. To him, I’m sure I was just another redneck kid who thought too highly of himself.
I agreed to take a practice Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, in his office. Every potential military recruit has to take this multiple-choice test, which “measures developed abilities and helps predict future academic and occupational success in the military.” There’s a minimum score for joining each branch of the military, but there are other, higher scores that serve as cutoffs for different career fields; I don’t think my recruiter expected me to score high enough to even qualify for the other test that all prospective linguists have to take. It turned out that the practice ASVAB was harder than the real thing, so when I scored in the 88th percentile, his tune changed drastically. Gone was his apathy, replaced with hustle and bustle, finding of paperwork, looking up of phone numbers, his excitement to get me to take the real ASVAB and then the follow-up I would have to pass in order to qualify for linguist training almost palpable.
The Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB, is a test used by the Department of Defense to assess a candidate’s ability to learn a language. This is in direct opposition to testing knowledge of any one specific language, as the military most often aims to teach you a new language, not use whatever random one you happen to already know. To this day, this test is spoken and written of in hushed, fearful tones. When I (and all the others before me) took it, before information about it was readily available on the internet, it was even more fabled. Allegedly, the DLAB is written in Esperanto, or at least derived from Esperanto, a synthetic language invented by a Polish ophthalmologist in the late 1800s. If this sounds confusing and slightly silly, you can imagine how I felt when the recruiter told me some of these details (he mentioned the Esperanto part, but either didn’t know or care to include the eye doctor detail). There are apparently guides and resources to prepare for the test now; Wikipedia goes so far as to say that without using these materials obtaining a passing score would be well-nigh impossible. Unless the test has changed dramatically, I can assure you this isn’t true, as I, and thousands of others that attended language school alongside and before me, didn’t have such materials. We just took the test.
As far as I could tell, a strong grasp of English grammar, or, I suppose, any language’s grammar, would take you pretty far on much of it. While it is specific to language, the test evaluates a much broader skill, that is, the ability to assimilate unfamiliar, seemingly conflicting information and apply it to novel situations. I, characteristically, believed that this test, like all other (non-math) standardized tests before it, would be a cakewalk. It was not. The DLAB, like other tests based on logic, doesn’t have wholly correct answers. Instead, it relies on the test-taker’s ability to determine the most likely, or best available answer. This could be, and indeed was, immensely frustrating for someone who had undergone traditional public education (in rural North Florida no less), where tests are multiple choice and simply have one right answer, and three wrong ones.
At the time, the Air Force required a minimum passing score of 100 (out of 164) to be eligible for language school. Through some combination of luck, exposure to the sound of multiple languages, and unalloyed bookwormishness that had provided me with a decent understanding of English grammar, I received a score of 103. Not great, but good enough.
The entire process of enlisting lasted six months, even if we don’t count the time it took me to lose enough weight to be eligible. Initially, my recruiter told me that I would likely head to basic training toward the end of November, maybe even the week of Thanksgiving. I wasn’t particularly excited to spend the entirety of the holidays (the Air Force’s basic training was six and a half weeks long at the time) trapped under the thumb of a drill sergeant, but I was eager to leave my life behind, so I accepted this timeline. I could have asked and would have found out that the Air Force doesn’t have drill sergeants, but, again, still me.
November came and went, with no open spots for yet another wannabe linguist to enter the training pipeline. I’ll likely never know why, maybe because it was becoming a realer possibility, or maybe because they felt that I was responsible for the delay, but those around me began sharing their misgivings about my decision. My relatives, none of whom were successful (either financially, academically, or interpersonally), felt that this was a waste of my God Given Talents, that I was Too Smart for the military. My work family, who knew far better than my blood family what my true work ethic and grit looked like, or more accurately, didn’t look like, routinely made remarks to the effect of “Well, when you come back from boot camp, we’ll have a spot for you.” Not if, but when. They were entirely sure I wouldn’t make it past the first month. I ignored this, mostly out of pride, and my contrary nature, though I see now why they felt this way. I was ill-fit for the military. Arrogant, entitled, lazy, combative, occasionally unreliable, usually fickle, I looked to them like someone I couldn’t see: a pent-up boy desperate for something greater than himself, willing to take a step toward it, but probably not capable of pushing through any obstacles.
But the thing about desperation is that it lets you do things that are otherwise impossible. Things that defy your nature. Things that can, ultimately, transform you. My metamorphosis began on February 5, 2008, the day I arrived at basic training.
* * *
And so the literary version of the eighties classic training montage begins.
Scene: my first time on a plane—I who signed up to be an airborne fucking linguist—is my flight to basic training. Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio is surprisingly cold in February, and sitting outside some building waiting to complete paperwork at 0200 is unpleasant. Staff Sergeant Raymundo Contreras, my training instructor, or TI, is more unpleasant. With his scarred, permanently frowning face, he asks me where I’m from, and when I, too scared to think about or remember that I was one thousand miles west of my hometown, respond “Lake City,” he punches the locker behind me and screams, “Lake City where, Fritz!” I nearly shit myself.
I manage to do only eleven push-ups during our first physical fitness test, immediately qualifying me for remedial physical training. I learn how to make a bed with hospital corners. I try to eat lasagna so fast that I burn my tongue and can’t taste anything for days. The weeks pass by in a blur of hunger and exhaustion, until, somehow, seemingly magically, I pass all of the tests, physical fitness included, and I’m marching down the flight line during graduation.
From here, along with one other wannabe linguist from my basic training flight, I travel the two miles across the road to Medina Annex to attend Aircrew Fundamentals, where, we’re told, our intelligence will be tested, and, more importantly, we’ll be told what languages we’re going to learn. I meet other future linguists. Despite falling asleep in class multiple times and receiving a formal Letter of Counseling—exhaustion/boredom being a punishable offense—I pass the class. My basic training flight mate does not. I sit around on casuals, aka scut work, aka sweeping and mopping and picking up rocks on sidewalks and shining the pieces of metal on the floor that separate rooms and any other number of meaningless tasks that the Air Force feels we must complete while we wait for our next set of orders. I get my wisdom teeth removed at some point in there.
The fateful day of language assignments arrives. Hayward gets Chinese. Knight gets something called Pashto. I get… Dari? What the fuck is Dari? There’s another airman on casuals working the front desk of our dorm who I hear was in Dari. He informs me that it’s the language spoken in Afghanistan, and that it’s very difficult to learn, as it utilizes the Arabic alphabet, where each letter actually has three forms, but Dari has more letters than Arabic, and I’ll have to learn how to say letters like ayn and ghayn and kaff and qāf and best of luck dude, it’s a bitch.
We, which is to say I and the other linguists at Medina, are informed that the training pipeline is backed up and that we will not be heading to language school now, and will instead be sent to survival school, or SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. SERE is mythical, said to involve broken fingers, dogs hunting you, full-on torture. Many of those who have been to it come out changed; my roommate at Medina had just been there and he’s, let’s say, not quite right. But he won’t talk, and the others who have been won’t provide details beyond the legends we’ve already heard.
SERE involves at least one of these mentioned things. It also involves a lot of other things, the details of which aren’t important, as they all serve the same purpose, testing our will. I mostly whine throughout the whole process, but, again, somehow make it through. We’re told at the end of it that blood tests done on SERE graduates show the same amount of stress hormone as a Navy pilot has on their first nighttime aircraft carrier landing. We are duly impressed by this. Now I just think about how crazy it is that those pilots are as stressed out in ten minutes as I was over nineteen days.
I do non-parachuting water survival training right after SERE. There’s a pool, and a raft, and a firehose. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also only two days. That side of the base has a great dining facility.
And then, finally, I arrive in Monterey. In the year that I spend there, I will drive down Highway One in a convertible with the top down at sunset, lose my virginity, have my first great beer, and make lifelong friends. It will become, and remains to this day, my favorite place on Earth. It is also where I will learn Dari, and in that process, expand the boundaries of my life in ways I never could have imagined.
SAPIR-WHORF, OR NEXT TO MY HEART
THERE IS A CONTENTIOUS CONCEPT in the field of linguistics known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of the interpretations of this hypothesis roughly states that language, native or acquired, shapes how people understand the world around them. Taken to its logical extreme, this hypothesis says that the language you know dictates not just what, but how you think. For some, this means they can differentiate between shades of blue particularly well, as their language has more than one word for the basic color that we English speakers (and many other non-English speakers) perceive as “blue.” For others, their sense of direction is spectacular, as their language doesn’t utilize ideas like turning left or right to go somewhere, but instead requires constant awareness of the cardinal directions. These examples, and others like them, are used to support the “strong” version of this hypothesis.
I wasn’t aware of Sapir-Whorf when I signed up to become a linguist or when I was learning Dari. In my estimation, a language was no more than a collection of words, discrete facts that simply had to be memorized. Yes, there was the grammar with its rules and exceptions to those rules that required a different organization of information, but again, these were simply more facts used to rein in all the other facts that had to be forced into one’s head.
The first time I can remember noticing that I was beginning to think differently was when I sat down to write something in English, and while English came out, I started it on the wrong side of the page. Dari, because its alphabet is based on Arabic, is written and read in the opposite direction of English, that is, from right to left. So the first English words I wrote down, which were some lines of the song “Now That You’re Home” by Manchester Orchestra, appeared on the page like this:
Home you’re that now
It felt strange while I was writing, like something was off, but it wasn’t until I was four words in that I realized why: I’d been doing so much writing in Dari by this point that my brain automatically assumed I should be writing starting on the right side of the page. When I put the words on the left side of the page, in the correct order, they looked weird; when I kept writing in English, it didn’t feel natural. So I just decided to stick to the language that started on that side.
حالا که در خانه استی مه را خواهد میبوختی؟ جدی کشش میکنم که دوباره خوب بودن باشم
When I say I’d been doing so much writing in Dari, I mean it. The Defense Language Institute (DLI) is probably, on the whole, the best place in the world to learn a new language. Located in Monterey, California, it churns out hundreds of newly fluent speakers of dozens of languages every year. Class is five days a week, seven to eight hours a day, split between the three modalities of reading, listening, and speaking. Nearly all the instructors are native speakers of the language they teach (there are also some obligatory military vocabulary lessons taught by DoD linguists). You can expect at least an hour of homework on weekdays and multiple hours on weekends. And while you are a student, you’re also a soldier, sailor, marine, or airman, and the military is paying you to be there (not much, but still, it’s something). Sick days require a visit to medical, tardiness is taken seriously, and failure can mean getting kicked out of one’s respective branch.
I was, at best, anomalous in my unassigned writing of Dari. Less generously, I was, as always, a big ole nerd; there were enough assignments at school that sitting down to translate song lyrics would have been anathema to most of my classmates, or at least extra work. But everyone practiced their speaking outside of school, whether they thought of it as work or not.
This was in part due to one of the “rules” of DLI: No English in the schoolhouse. This is treated as more of a guideline by students and teachers alike, as when students are first starting out this would essentially demand mutism. But as you get more comfortable with the language you’re learning, it’s not such a hassle to forsake English. A visitor to downtown Monterey on a weekend night might encounter hundreds of young, white (linguists are overwhelmingly white, even more so than the rest of the military) men (idem) speaking languages from the world over. Sometimes, they’re using this newfound skill as way to talk shit about the people standing next to them or to complain about the food without their waiter knowing. Practical things. But most of the time, they’re just having fun.
It’s fun to speak in a secret language known only to you and your friends. While there might be a few hundred Chinese speakers wandering around the bars, the members of a given class, say fifty people, will likely have developed a group dialect. Even if a native Chinese speaker were in earshot of these pullulating polyglots, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t understand what they were hearing, as all these young men (and a few young women) would be switching back and forth between their native and new languages in fluid patterns that would only make sense to them.
A native speaker who tried to keep track of all this nonsensical shuffling of speech would be further confused by the interjection of seemingly random phrases into the conversations they were eavesdropping on. An Arabic speaker might be sitting there enjoying their dinner, listening to the petty gossip of the soldiers and sailors the next table over, wondering why they kept hearing the words “only discipline” repeated over and over again, accompanied by so many chortles and cackles. There would be no way for them to know that in the Arabic schoolhouses, some of the instructors had turned this phrase into a refrain, reminding the students that Arabic is difficult (and it is, particularly for English speakers), and that only discipline would allow them to succeed (natural ability plays in too, I suspect, but what do I know). Unfortunately for those instructors, “only” in Arabic sounds a whole lot like “fuck it” in English. And “discipline” is all but indistinguishable from “in ze butt.” Together, “only discipline” combines into the wondrous command to “fuck it in ze butt.” It isn’t all that hard to imagine a bunch of drunk twenty-somethings relishing the use of this phrase.
About three months into our school year, my classmates and I had gotten to this point. We routinely spoke in a sort of pidgin conglomerate of Dari and English, creating our own verbs where need be, flouting grammar rules when they were inconvenient, using English for the Dari words we hadn’t been taught (or more likely hadn’t yet studied hard enough to learn).
This substitution of Dari (or whatever language) for English starts to go both ways. It’s initially simple, and purposeful, the peppering of the new tongue into the mother, the substitution of the word dummy or ass or gay (there being an inverse relationship between originality and usage of insults—as well as a direct relationship between offensiveness and usage—among young men). But like most subconscious thought, it eventually becomes more complex and less controlled. In Dari, verbs are more or less obligated to occupy the last spot in a sentence; sentences like “I’m going to the store later” would be literally translated into English as “Later, to the store I’m going.” And so, as time went on, my friends and I found ourselves applying Dari grammar to English. This meant that for months, we often spoke our native language like some sorts of young Yodas. This is pretty funny at first, until you’re out at a store with a date you like and when she asks you if you like the jeans you’re looking at you reply, “Yes, buy them I will.” (Okay, still funny, but less so to nineteen-year-old me.)
