Those of us who don't go to war zones mostly work at intelligence centers like Maryland's Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency. If that's the way the Army wants it, maybe linguists like me shouldn't actually deploy at all. Often, we waited for something to go wrong with our expensive communications-collections gear, and called the guy whose job it was to maintain the equipment if a glitch required more than flipping a reset switch. Whether assigned to military intelligence units or attached to infantry brigades, linguists found themselves in any capacity but their own. Problems like that were common to all deploying units that my fellow linguists and I knew of. But what did he spend his tour doing? Busywork, mostly, interrupted by watching his buddies play World of Warcraft. If he had been translating insurgent communications, it might have come in handy for his team, given the extent of Iranian infiltration into Iraq. In one case, a soldier stationed in Amarah, near the Iranian border, spoke excellent Farsi. I got through 35 books in an eight-month tour, including Tom Ricks' Fiasco. At many others, the daily routine was one of whiling away a shift with correspondence courses or a good paperback.
At some sites, linguists functioned as analysts to make up for shortages or operated secret intel equipment that required high-level clearances. The situation was similar across our unit, the 504th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade. Meanwhile, the military linguists on my team simply sat to one side, numbly monitoring equipment and our computer screens for uneventful hours on end. Rumor was he made more than $200,000 - easily five times my paycheck. A native of Mosul, he was one of two contractors who would complete every language-related task required for the rest of our deployment. When I arrived for my first shift in-country, I quickly saw who would be turning those purloined insurgent communications into English: a large, middle-aged Arab dude, not me.
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