From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 49-52:
At the end of my year at DLI, I could debate the merits of divorce and its effects on children in Dari, discuss politics, and attempt to answer the question “What is love?” (This was the last question I was asked in my speaking exam. I would like to think my inability to answer was more due to my being twenty than my lack of language skill.) I could tell jokes, explain the meanings of proverbs, and generally shoot the shit with most any Dari-speaking Afghan. I thought in Dari, dreamt in Dari, and often found it easier to express myself in it. This is true for lots of recently graduated linguists; when we met a newly minted Arabic linguist at survival school and asked him what DLI and learning a language so fast was like, he said it’s cool, but it can mess with your thinking a little bit. A couple days later he was telling some story, when he stopped halfway through a sentence, with a dazed look on his face. “Wait, shit. What’s the word for that thing you eat cereal with?” “A spoon?” “Yeah, that’s it, a fucking spoon. Fucking Arabic.”
Like any skill, language can atrophy. After I left DLI, and went to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, for cryptology school, I wasn’t expected to speak Dari seven hours a day and I didn’t. While we were there, my friends and I still used our Dari, the whole secret language thing feeling like a superpower on occasion, but it wasn’t quite the same and so I forgot some words and a few complicated grammatical structures. But after Goodfellow, I wasn’t spending time with a group of other Dari linguists. Everyone else in our class had been assigned to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, to fly on the Rivet Joint, or RJ, a billion-dollar spy plane with a half dozen plus linguists listening to multiple languages flying on it during any given mission. Back then, if you enlisted as an airborne linguist, this was essentially what you signed up to do; new linguists could only get assigned to Offutt, or so we were told. But something had changed, so I, and just one other student, Taylor, had been assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) at Hurlburt Field, Florida (affectionately known as Hurby, Hurlburt being annoying to say). This meant that we had to travel separately from our friends, as we had to get different training than them.
Taylor and I did not like each other when we were at DLI. We were both arrogant, confident that we were better at learning languages than our classmates. This confidence was encouraged by our teachers, who weren’t paid to teach us how to be good humans, just good linguists. But Taylor’s surety had never really been challenged; I doubt anyone had ever told him that he was “the most insecure narcissist I’ve ever met” (this was said to me by my best friend’s mother when I was in high school). If anything, someone had probably told him he was the most secure narcissist they ever met, and he had said “Thank you!” with a gleam in his eye and some Cheshire cat in his grin....
He didn’t even need to enlist, as he’d secured all the letters he needed to attend the Air Force Academy. He had just decided that he didn’t want to deal with all the bullshit that goes on there.
When we got assigned to Special Operations, told that we were going to become DSOs, the most elite of airborne cryptologic linguists, Taylor fell for the mythology (a mythology that he knew virtually nothing about) hook, line, and sinker. He managed to keep it to himself when we were at Goodfellow with our RJ-bound classmates, but once he and I went our separate way, on to parachute training before heading back to survival school for Advanced Beatings class, he would tell anyone who would listen what badasses we were, or at least had been chosen to become.
When he would tell some other random airman, “Yeah, we know three languages—Farsi, Dari, and Tajik,” I’d supplement this—not complete untruth, but not total truth—with “Well, they’re really the same language, but with different accents.”
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