Josh Foust wrote about it in the NYT two years ago, noting that the hired local translators weren’t exactly used with maximum efficiency, either. It’s expensive, but quality doesn’t come cheap. At least then it would get native speakers, who would have a fluency I probably can’t match. Spanish and French linguists ought to be assigned to, say, Latin America or NATO units, where they’d be useful.īut, hey: if the Army would rather spend hundreds of thousands on contractors to do the job it trained me for, maybe it should just contract out all its language positions. Our skills are specific: there’s no reason Korean speakers should be in al-Kut and not Korea. Many end up failing their yearly recertification exams.Īt the least, the Army needs to stop treating linguists like we’re interchangeable. Honing language skills falls far down the priority list. Meanwhile, linguists who actually go to warzones spend their time at home in a routine of garrison duties and unrelated training, no different from the rest of Big Army.
Some defense companies are even working on techy ways to remotely connect linguists far from the front lines with combat troops who need quick translation help. Their missions continue every day, allowing them to maintain language proficiency. Unlike their counterparts overseas, these soldiers routinely work with their adoptive languages while still directly supporting deployed units from afar, like writing reports on collected communications and feeding databases. Those of us who don’t go to warzones mostly work at intelligence centers like Maryland’s Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency. If that’s the way the Army wants it, maybe linguists like me shouldn’t actually deploy at all. Meanwhile, the military linguists on my team simply sat to one side, numbly monitoring equipment and our computer screens for uneventful hours on end. Rumor was he made over $200,000 - easily five times my paycheck. A native of Mosul, he was one of two contractors who would complete every language-related task required for the rest of our deployment. When I arrived for my first shift in-country, I quickly saw who would be turning those purloined insurgent communications into English: a large, middle-aged Arab dude, not me. It was my first sign that the deployment wouldn’t be the one I trained for. It turned out that our five-man team had as many Korean speakers as Arabic ones - you know, for all the Korean spoken in the Iraqi desert. So imagine my surprise when my new team sergeant picked me up at the airfield and mentioned he was a Korean linguist. I figured I’d be translating captured Arabic communications to alert combat troops of danger. In March 2009, I stepped off of a Blackhawk at Forward Operating Base Delta, a large base near al-Kut in southeastern Iraq. Over two years of training followed, both in Arabic and the specific intelligence duties I’d need to perform in-country. In the fall of 2006, I enlisted in the Army as a cryptologic linguist, one of the soldiers who translate foreign communications.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, private-sector linguists are largely replacing their military counterparts rather than augmenting their numbers, an expensive redundancy. At the same time, it uses costly contractors to work the same jobs for which its own linguists have trained. The Army spends years and hundreds of thousands of dollars training each of its foreign-language speakers. They need to be completely revamped.Max Rosenthal explains “ How The Army Wastes Linguists Like Me.” It is a terribly disorganized "organization" that has all of their priorities mixed up and should take good long look at themselves. The army has a terrible retention rate and suicide rate and I don't wonder why. 95% of the army's leaders could care less about their soldiers. The promotion system is based on points which are earned through arbitrary tasks that have nothing to do with leadership, job experience or job relevancy. I have seen individuals that are not qualified whatsoever to be in a leadership position being responsible for soldiers because they happened to get promoted before another individual who was much more qualified for that position. The work hours are ridiculous and the promotion system is extremely broken. Most leaders only care about numbers that make them look good and whether that affects you, your family, or your career does not matter to them. The benefits are great in theory but soldiers' health is not prioritized whatsoever and if it is not a life or death situation soldiers have to fight to get the care that they need.
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