Ryan Ginstrom wrote:

> "Declan Murphy" <declan_murphy@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:415E37F9.8010409@hotmail.com...

>>Speakling of purely selfish notes, I hate it when posts like that reveal
>>someone to be slightly younger than me.
> 
> You know what's kind of funny? When the first gulf war came around, I
> volunteered to retrain into Arabic. At the time I was in military school for
> an advanced Spanish course, and I thought they would be needing a lot more
> Arabic speakers.

I wonder what would have become of you if they had said, "yeah, OK". A 
cousin of mine (US Army Major, until recently an Apache test pilot) was 
sent to California to learn Arabic a few years back. After training, he 
expected he'd be sent to Egypt. He and the wife are instead off to 
Turkey. I guess its close enough or something.

> The sergeant in charge of training told me that the military still needed
> Spanish linguists, and anyways by the time I was finished with training (15
> months) we would be out of the gulf and not needing Arabic linguists any
> more.

Given that something like 1/4 of US infantry are native Spanish 
speakers, more than a few of whom have a tenuous grasp of English, maybe 
it wasn't such a bad decision.

> Just goes to show that lack of a clue amongst the military is neither of
> recent origin nor limited to the upper echelons.

Twas always thus.

-- 
"A large number of aliens have been applying themselves to studying in 
various areas inclusive of studying Japanese" - Masuda Nobuya, Director 
General, Immigration Bureau.