I’ve seen this article in more than one place today, under several different titles– “Ill-prepared translators struggle in Afghanistan“.
NAWA, Afghanistan – Josh Habib lay in a dirt field, gasping for air. Two days of hiking with Marines through southern Afghanistan’s 115-degree (46-Celsius) heat had exhausted him. This was not what he signed up for.
Habib is not a Marine. He is a 53-year-old engineer from California hired by a contracting company as a military translator. When he applied for the lucrative linguist job, Habib said his recruiter gave no hint he would join a ground assault in Taliban land. He carried 40 pounds (18 kilograms) of food, water and gear on his back, and kept pace — barely — with Marines half his age.
U.S. troops say companies that recruit military translators are sending linguists to southern Afghanistan who are unprepared to serve in combat, even as hundreds more are needed to support the growing number of troops.
OK, this is obviously not good. On the one hand, there is a significant shortage of Pashto speakers– the article goes on to say only 7,700 were noted in the 2000 census– but we’ve got to be able to do better than this. Also, one can’t make any of these people go back home and interpret for us. So even if we have half again as many Pashto speakers, or Dari speakers, or what have you, the ones suitable for this duty might represent only a third of that number at the most. (I distinctly recall the scramble for Somali speakers back in 93/94; what we got was a mixed bag of men and women, many of them DC-area postal workers if I remember correctly.)
However, on the other hand, this is not our best foot forward, especially after eight years of war. We have to do better. The bright side is that VMI’S CLASS OF 89 IS LEADING THE WAY. The contracting company VP cited in the article is (I’m certain) Marc Peltier ’89, former US Army (MI). I think he’s more than capable of handling the press and the problem.
what I find a little bit disingenious is the fact that all translators claimed that they did not know that they would go to the battlefield and that it would be a physically hard job. If the majority of the Pashto- and Dari-speaking people were actually born in Afghan and Pakistan or brought here as kids, they ALL keep in touch with their home country and learn about their home country or the area via parents/relatives’ storytelling, letters, newspapers, phone, tv and such. They KNOW that the country has no infrastructure and there is no way you are staying inside the wire. They saw $210K and now they have a buyer’s remorse.
“… letters, newspapers, phone, TV, and such…”?? Exactly which Afghanistan are you refering to?
While I do not dispute that these terps are ill-prepared for humping it with the Marines, it troubles me that the military still is woefully inadequate when it comes to its language capabilities.
Language training in the Cold War was focused on voice intercept translations and
(obviously) focused on Russian, Chinese, and Korean.
It seems that we still lack a real speaking capability when it comes to language and, we still have yet to produce a good crop of Pashtu and Dari speakers.
So long as the DoD wants to contract out this capability as well, it’s going to keep getting middle-aged naturalized Americans who think they’re going to roll around in HMMWV’s.
I am referring to Afghanistan where my compatriots had spent 8 years fighting in the same places we are fighting now.
And during those 8 years we, Americans, had been training people to speak in Pashtu, Dari and Uzbek so my current compatriots could help the locals to fight my former compatriots.
From the article, the majority of terps the military contracted with are people who were born in the region.
And being a naturalized American, I can tell you that every person who was not born in the States or was born to a newly immigrating parents keeps tabs on the home country so they are well aware of the conditions and developments in the country/region. For example, if I decided to contract to work with the Marines training Georgian troops (country, not state), I would know that I will not be spending time in Tbilisi but in the country and even in Tbilisi I would need to bring and carry my own roll of toilet paper… so I do not believe the terps’ claims that they did not know the terrain required precluded rolling in a Humvee as a king. They saw the $210K and that made them feel “special” enough to believe that they would be accomodated even if they were not capable of humping it on foot in Kandagar and there was no extra Humvee around.
That’s not to say that we do not need to speed up the teaching process and get our own terps overthere
Saw the same thing when I was in Iraq dealing with linguists there. Some thought they were special and deserved to be treated that way. Camp Bucca had some many older linguists, it was known as “the retirement home”. A few prima donna’s balanced against those who did their job to one Iraqi-American whose convoy had been hit by an IED and even though wounded, disregarded his own safety and managed to pull one soldier out of a burning humvee. We do need to push language training. Pay military personnel extra and they will learn it and become proficient.
The Army would do better by looking up Afghan restaurants in the phone book themselves, then hiring half the cooks and proprietor’s family.
I’d be more than happy to carry that load for the translator and myself at half the pay if they would just hire me.