Iraq Journal: Filtering language in Fallujah
FALLUJAH, Iraq—One of the biggest challenges for U.S. military advisers is communicating with the Iraqi soldiers they are supposed to be training. Most of the small "firm bases"—the forward military outposts where Iraqis and Americans live and work—have translators stationed at them, though many of the translators have only a rudimentary understanding of English.
There is a case to be made that the marine advisers and Iraqis are better off with no translators than with bad ones. With bad translators, the Americans are unable to convey much nuance in their conversations, but because the translators are there, they lack the urgency to learn Arabic.
In Fallujah, most conversations between the Iraqi jundi, the Arabic word for soldiers, and the marines take place in broken English. But at the one northwest Fallujah outpost, Staff Sgt. Tom McCarty has learned to speak to the Iraqis in broken Arabic. For the first two months with his Iraqi company, there was no interpreter and that forced him to learn how to say about 60 Arabic phrases. And he says he can understand a couple of dozen more.
As a result, McCarty is one of the more talkative marines on patrol. He tries to chat up the residents he sees, and does the best he can. And his is a distinctive patois. McCarty is an Irish-American, but he grew up on the Navajo Indian Reservation—his mother was a Bureau of Indian Affairs schoolteacher—and occasionally the cadences of Indian country sneak into his sentences. "I can communicate with the jundi but not with the civilians," McCarty says. "I say, 'Salaam alaikum [peace unto you],' and they look at me like I have a [vulgarity] growing out of my head."
Which is not actually true. Recently, as the patrol he was overseeing came to a halt, an Iraqi boy came up to him and asked for "chocolate," one of three English words every Fallujan child knows. (The others are "mister" and "gimme.") When McCarty gave him a Tootsie Pop, a man in a car a few feet away started yelling at the child and waving his arms. The child cowered and then ran across the street. The patrol had halted in a particularly unfriendly part of the city where the marines say they get "the stinkeye" a lot. But as the patrol began moving again, McCarty walked up to the man in the car.
"Afwan [excuse me]," he said.
The man smiled and unleashed a stream of Arabic, far too fast and complicated for McCarty to understand. And then a word McCarty does understand: "Shukran [thank you]."
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