Becoming an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 34-36:

“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.

When I was forced to negotiate with the Charlottesville, VA, Army recruiters (after finding the VA draft board not willing to negotiate) in 1969, I remember taking a vocational aptitude battery of tests. I scored poorly on Morse code, but did well enough on the language aptitude to get a contract to learn Romanian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey before enlisting. Romanian was 7th on my list of 8 languages that I preferred to study (partly because they would keep me in school at least 9 months). I don't remember a follow-up language-aptitude test like the DLAB. My top choices were Korean and Chinese, where my childhood in Japan would have given me an unfair advantage. Being raised abroad may also have impeded my ability to get any top secret clearances that may have been required to actually use my language skills. After doing well in Romanian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, I was assigned to be a translator-interpreter in the do-nothing 95th Civil Affairs Group in Ft. Gordon, GA, where I ended up working as the HQ Company clerk, just using my English and typing skills.