Examsare stressful, regardless. Now imagine being graded while gunfire cracklesoutside, your boss is counting on you to look good as well, and the questionsare in a language few Americans can master: Arabic.
That's what infantryman Yefim Kelmanskiy is facing as native speakers portrayan Iraqi mayor, police chief and tribal elder. He translates their questioninto English for his commander, "How would you help us with this?"Then, he has to translate the reply, "First I would like to know, are theIraqi police and the Iraqi army working together?"
Kelmanskiyhas had 10 months of intensive Arabic lessons at Fort Lewis. His platoon is ona simulated mission to find al-Qaida infiltrators in this mock village.
He isone of more than a hundred soldiers from his brigade to volunteer to bereassigned from regular training to learn Arabic. It means this brigade willhave the highest number of Arabic speakers of any Fort Lewis unit to deploy. Inthe Army at large, only military intelligence and special operations would begood bets to stack up as favorably.
LieutenantColonel Jonathan Neumann says the Army will still employ Arab-Americans andlocal Iraqis as translators. But working with them during his tour of Iraq in2004, he noticed, "whether it's patriotism or whether it's go get evenwith the old regime, everybody kind of had a prejudice of some sort." Hesays it would be nice to have a second set of ears of unquestionabletrustworthiness.
The decision to send more ordinary soldiers to language school came frombrigade commanders, Neumann says, not from the Pentagon. "Unless you hadan interpreter, you were absolutely helpless breaking down the barrier with thepopulation. Now, young soldiers will figure out a way. They'll learn localstuff and just a way to talk to people, but you've got to have thatinterpreter."
Learningto be that interpreter is hard work.
TheFort Lewis language school crams two years of Arabic coursework into tenmonths. Recent graduate Raul Montano says it was challenging. "I knew itwas going to be hard. And it is as hard as it looks!"
On an earlier deployment to Iraq, Sgt. Montano recallslearning no more than 20 words of Arabic... words like hello, stop, and putyour hands up. Now, he's not completely fluent. But he is conversant and sayshe's learned the additional skill of how to improvise in Arabic to get hispoint across.