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Soldiers hope to bridge language divide

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by Teresa Welsh

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Specialist Samantha Diver sat on a sandbag on the back of an open truck, clutching her M-16 rifle as she awaited the end of her two-hour convoy trip from Balad, Iraq, to her base in Takrit, where she was to be stationed at a hospital.

Her only comfort during the terrifying journey was the small Iraqi children on the side of the road, smiling, waving and giving the thumbs-up.

This was her first experience with Iraqi youth, and she knew from that moment she wanted to be able to speak to these children and the other Iraqis she met.

Diver, 25, did a one-year tour of Iraq with the U.S. Army from January 2004 to January 2005.

“You’re [in Iraq] for this war that you don’t necessarily agree with, you can’t really say anything about that,” Diver said. “With those little kids on that first convoy, I started realizing that that’s how I could communicate with people, was smiling and waving and thumbs-up, and that was really cool, but that only takes you so far. I really wanted more than that. I wanted to actually be able to communicate.”

Diver is currently enrolled in second-semester Arabic at the University of Wisconsin. She started at UW in fall 2005 but didn’t find Arabic in the course catalogue until two years later to help her understand what she had gone through in Iraq.

“I guess it’s a need; it’s not really even a desire,” Diver said. “I want the cycle of misunderstanding between these different cultures to stop.”

While in Iraq, Diver worked as a cook and a nutrition care specialist in a hospital on an Army base that treated both Americans and Iraqis. Diver said a few of the nurses expressed interest in learning Arabic to the hospital translator and set up a few classes. She participated until the hospital became so busy there was no longer time for the classes.

Her current Arabic class meets five days a week to practice reading, writing and speaking.

“I feel kind of frustrated sometimes; I feel like it’s going slowly,” Diver said. “I want to speak it so badly that I want it now. I want it to be injected in my brain overnight.”
UW student and Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Gerald Eggleston, 32, is also in second semester Arabic. He spent 10 months in Iraq during his first tour and another year in Kuwait.

Eggleston said he started trying to learn Arabic before he even left the U.S., during his training at Fort McCoy, Wis.

“We had these little packets — it was a different dialect, but it was still some Arabic,” Eggleston said. “So I started reading them and tried to learn the alphabet and some numbers, so I had a little bit better grasp when I got over there than other guys.”

Eggleston spent about five months training the Iraqi Civil Defense Corp in Al-Kut, Iraq. He said he and the other U.S. soldiers would give commands in English, which were then translated into Arabic for the Iraqi soldiers.

“The pigeon Arabic that I could speak was enough; you’d learn how to say ‘push-up’ in Arabic, ‘run’ and ‘faster,’” Eggleston said.

But Eggleston said he still wanted to learn Arabic, since not enough Americans serving in Iraq know the language. His brigade will be deployed to Iraq again in 2009.

Eggleston’s Arabic teacher, Sami Alkyam, said Eggleston is among several very motivated military students he teaches. He said Eggleston has spoken with him about his time in Iraq and why he’s learning Arabic.

“For him, it’s important to understand how the people that he’s dealing with are thinking and how they are looking at him as a guy helping them,” Alkyam said. “[Military students] say that they’re learning Arabic because they use it. It’s helped them a lot, communicating with the people, knowing what they need and building personal relationships with the people.”

Eggleston said he specifically remembers having a problem communicating with an Iraqi during his first tour in Iraq. The man was trying to talk with the U.S. soldiers about securing a road, but Eggleston could only speak a few words back in Arabic.

“I told him I know a little Arabic, please speak slowly, so he started just rapid firing,” Eggleston said. “It was frustrating to have a little Arabic but not enough to know what he was saying. So I want to change that next time.”

Diver is currently in the Reserves and could be called to duty anytime until her obligation ends in 2009. She said she has no idea what the likelihood of being deployed again is, but she hopes it doesn’t happen.

“I do think, regardless of what your beliefs are, if you agree with the war or not, you’re in this other country,” Diver said. “I think you need to understand at least a little bit what’s going on and the people you’re helping.”

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