We still don't grasp the value of translators

[Ken White]

We were lucky enough to have a DLI-trained Arabic translator assigned to our company for three weeks when we first arrived in Baghdad in April 2003. She was nothing like you're describing. Her Arabic wasn't perfect, but she could communicate adequately for our tactical needs, she was the most culturally aware and sensitive member of the company, and Iraqis were willing to work with her. If she was representative of what DLI is capable of turning out in a year's time, I'd take that any day over what the contractors seem to be providing.

I'm sure most people would be happy to have someone like that. I do note you only had her for three weeks and while I have no idea why that short time, I still contend that the expense of even one year of Arabic without the intermediate and advanced follow-ons is not sensibly risked at Company level.

You guys are saying that we can't adequately hire, train, and retain our own translators. At the same time, the AP is reporting--as is IntelTrooper--that troops in the field say the contractors can't provide satisfactory interpreters, either.

Yep, and as I said, that's been true for many years.

This means we can't do COIN.

Not so. Just means it isn't easy and you have to work harder and get frustrated more often. Gray hair makes guys look distinguished. Gives the young gravitas...

Meinertzhagen:

... there was a much more extensive program to teach Vietnamese during the Vietnam War than we have undertaken for our current conflicts.

There was, aside from DLI at Monterey, Anacostia and Lackland, there were subsidiary schools at Bragg and Gordon (may have been more). All ran short six week courses as well as the major locations running the long courses. All assigned to Advisory duty supposedly went to a twelve week Military Assistance Training Advisor (MATA) Course, six weeks of language and six of advisor training, tactical stuff and so forth. IIRC, about two thirds actually got to the Course and most but not all those did serve as Advisors where the language was helpful. The course was not operating early on, seems like it came on line in 66.

The quality of instruction varied as all instructors are not equal and the quality of graduates varied even more as all persons do not adapt to another language equally well. Notably, as Viet Namese is a tonal language, the native Spanish speakers did better than most anglos. No other local languages were taught to my knowledge except for a little Rhade and Meo briefly at Bragg. As a point of interest, to my knowledge few Infantry Battalions in Viet Nam had or used interpreters (I know of none) but SF, PsyOps and Civil Affairs did. Some turned out to be agents for Clyde but most were straight. Some with the SF teams got to be quite proficient -- they were generally the ones that didn't mind fighting; a trait not all interpreters there shared.

The MATA course was taught at Bragg by the Special Warfare School and they put some great effort into it. They got help from the 82d who only sent one Bde to VN. This time around they're pulling year on an year off like everyone else plus the relationship now is not as good as it used to be.

Today SF / SOCOM still have the FID proponency but they declined to operate any courses for other than SOCOM personnel due to mission pressure. They are providing people to assist at Riley and at Polk

All that was doable then because security clearance procedures could be and were waived, visa issues were ignored and instructors were flown from Viet Nam to the US to teach the classes, pay was outside the norms on the high side and SF fully supported the training mission at Bragg. That and the Army and the government wanted to do it (at least early on). The vastly increased bureaucracy plus current inter agency and inter force parochialism will not allow any of that today. The initial stage of today's wars were not fondly welcomed by the bulk of the USG or the Army; thus VN's 'can-do' was replaced with Afghanistan and Iraq's 'we don't really want to do this' on many levels.

All those factors combine to make a big difference in what gets done and how. Stupid, but there you are.

anecdotal evidence from reading suggests SF teams, advisors, MI personnel, interrogators and a host of other personnel all received training and many became quite proficient in Vietnamese and other local languages.

Be interested to see what you turn up. My recollection is that those with a flair for languages did okay and those the pulled multiple tours where they interfaced with the Viet Namese daily did so as well. For most others, it was a smattering and little more. I suspect your 'host' and 'many' will be overstatements with respect to total numbers deployed to SEA and even to Advisory duty but there's no question that the numbers exceed today's spotty efforts on a per capita as well as a raw basis.

In contrast, I know almost no Army personnel in MI, SF or any other branch that have developed any significant capability in Pashto. I am branch transferring to Civil Affairs this year and Pashto isn't even one of the choices for languages, though we can still choose Russian and Korean.

They're still important.

...suggest to me a singular lack of effort to develop any institutional Pashto capability.

True. Consider what you know of our involvement in Afghanistan and of US history, add to that your knowledge of USG bureaucracy and if you're like me you come up with no excuse, we could've done better but we didn't and I know why and cannot fix it and don't think the Army's going to do so in the time we have left there...

[Surferbeetle]

Gray hair makes guys look distinguished. Gives the young gravitas...

So that's whats helping me get things done these days...

I have worked with Arabic, Kurdish, Russian, and Spanish translators...bottom line is that you get what you pay for. In CA land if you are willing to stick with open-source topics and willing/able to pay top dollar you can do well...at the macro level however you need to be aware of the potential implications of siphoning off highly educated local economy individuals from their day jobs.

Keep in mind that some professional translators, in addition to their language training (4 years +), are carrying masters degrees in translation & interpretation which help them work with business issues and the technology (databases, etc) which often accompanies technical translation efforts.

As a baseline I did the five month SOLT in Spanish; my understanding is fair and my speaking is poor...2/2/2. 3 years of high school German, 3 years of college German, 4 years on the German economy plus some other German experiences and the result is 3/3/3 (haven't taken the new test yet, but I am curious to see what it offers). A professional translator can clean my clock in both languages....and probably English as well.

The 10,000 hour rule of thumb is something to think about when considering the services of a professional. For my nickel, Brandon is on the money with this analysis of our ability to develop in-house talent in this arena:

The supply isn't there because we haven't spent the last eight years training soldiers in critical language skills. Hindsight is 20/20, but in 2001, we could've started offering $60,000/six-year signing bonuses for recruits and soldiers willing to learn Arabic/Farsi/Pashto/etc. We could've bought 6,000 such translators for the price of one F-22. We shouldn’t make the same mistake again, in my view.

Adding a focused Warrant Officer linguist program with opportunities for multiple incentive pay's is probably a realistic long term answer to our current linguist program shortages if we want to have dependable in-house capacity and capability...

[Steve Blair]

Be interested to see what you turn up. My recollection is that those with a flair for languages did okay and those the pulled multiple tours where they interfaced with the Viet Namese daily did so as well. For most others, it was a smattering and little more. I suspect your 'host' and 'many' will be overstatements with respect to total numbers deployed to SEA and even to Advisory duty but there's no question that the numbers exceed today's spotty efforts on a per capita as well as a raw basis.

My research tends to support Ken's observations. There were SOME Americans in Vietnam who did well with the language, but they tended to be focused in very specific areas. I would never say there was a 'host' or even 'many' for that matter, and certainly not in the line units, but there did seem to be a more conscious attempt to put the resources out there.

[pjmunson]

They always sell themselves that way and it is true. They are also negligent in their refusal to properly tailor their curriculum, or at least some courses, to the operating forces.

Whenever you pay people to do language all day long, five days a week for six to eighteen months and provide the greatest collection of native language speakers in one place AND don't give them anything else (college classes, other burdens, jobs to pay college bills) then you are going to have a great capacity to teach languages. That is why DLI is the best in the world and that is also why it is criminal that they cannot do better with what they've got.

One problem is that the school is only aimed at producing professional linguists in one mold and it is assumed that they will be back for following intermediate and advanced courses, dialect courses, etc. Thus, it focuses on learning a language clasically, stressing grammar, writing etc, to the detriment of being able to actually use it to communicate with people on the street. It is also very focused on listening and document reading rather than conversation and spends a lot of time on creating skills, such as detailed transcription, translation, and other listening skills, that not all linguists will need. I do think that we need to have people who have such a good basis, but the school should have stood up a program more focused on interacting with native speakers shortly after 9/11 to run alongside their main courses. So, you've got HUMINT guys and FAOs who are going to do a lot more face-to-face interaction studying alongside folks who are going to spend their careers listening to recordings and the skill sets are different. If you need operational language capability now, you can't wait to train up a linguist through three separate schools (basic, intermed, advanced). You need to focus the training.

With regard to Arabic, a major stumbling block is that despite the pleas of operational linguists, highly experienced military language instructors, some native instructors that worked as terps or in their own militaries, and even language academics at other premier institutions, DLI institutionally refuses to move away from the complete Modern Standard Arabic model they've run for years and move toward what many call "Educated Spoken Arabic." Basically, all literate Arabs know how to read MSA and understand it spoken, so it is the language of the press, official forums, etc. If you can speak MSA, almost anyone will understand you. Problem is, most people will respond to you in some mix of dialect. DLI says we can't teach all the dialects, so we won't try at all. However, other schools and agencies recognize that there is a core of common words that a lot of the dialects share and that you can teach a "standard dialect." DLI will have none of it. So, if a DLI grad from the Arabic basic course is stellar and attains a 3/3, which is on the order of less than 10% of the graduating population, from my limited experience, they still won't understand when an Arab in any city says "What are you doing here" because all the words in that sentence differ from MSA to dialect, but they are relatively common between dialects. To give an indication of the problem, the words that vary between MSA and dialect are basic, critical words: to do, to see, to look, to go, question words, negation, now, today, tomorrow, left, go straight, man, woman, etc. If one learns the standard dialect, Arabs will still be able to go deeper into their local dialect and not be understood, but if they want to communicate with you, they will be able to. Not all Arabs can easily speak to you in MSA though, or will try to.

If the right pressure was brought to bear, the school could be training at least some of your linguists, intel types, and FAOs to speak this standard dialect and could emphasize speaking conversationally over transcription, translation, and other more technical linguist skills, but to date the bureaucracy has successfully resisted.

[davidbfpo]

Given that there are refugee / expatriate communities from around the world in the developed / Western world, why can't we recruit from them? I read elsewhere today that 40k Afghans reside in the Ukraine, as a settled community; I concede they may not be Pathans - the current need.

A colleague who served in Kabul a few years ago referred to working with Swedish-Iranians (as Farsi was close to Dari) and another that Canada has Canadian-Afghans who wish to serve.

Just seems from this armchair that the responses have been 'stovepiped' and lack imagination.

davidbfpo

[IntelTrooper]

A colleague who served in Kabul a few years ago referred to working with Swedish-Iranians (as Farsi was close to Dari) and another that Canada has Canadian-Afghans who wish to serve.

We don't really have a lack of Dari speakers. We need Pashtu speakers, who are more difficult to find. Specifically, Pashtu speakers who are also US citizens.

[carl]

The most distressing thing about this thread is that the "can do" "we'll figure something out" attitude of yesteryear has been replaced by a modern attitude that can't get anything done, even if everybody acknowledges it to be important. And I don't mean the guys commenting on this thread, I mean the gov and military as a whole. There is always a good reason why they won't do it.

I know this will never happen, but what if you just made a program whereby any soldier who demonstrated a certain level of language proficiency were given a huge monthly bonus, say $2,000? Let the men figure out how they learned on their own. The idea is to motivate the language "naturals" into action. Would that kind of thing be at all practicable, aside from the bureaucratic reluctance?

Since the F-22 has been mentioned, if you ever really need an F-22, 20,000 world class terps could not substitute. I know the point is about spending money wisely and the F-22 is a shining target but there may come a day...and there will be NO substitute.

[Uboat509]

I suspect that part of the reason that the military does not have more terps in house is that the military takes a long view of the whole thing. Sure, we need a lot of Pashto speakers now but, eventually, we will leave there. In today's contentious political climate you never know if that might not be sooner rather than later. If that does happen, what do you do with all the extra Pashto speakers? That's why the military likes contractors for a lot of things. If we don't need them tomorrow, we just don't renew their contracts. Whereas if we fill those needs in house and the requirement goes away or at least gets reduced a lot then we still have all those bodies that we can't just get rid of. Now we have to either retrain them, which after all the resources spent on training them in the first place is not particularly attractive option, or we have a draw-down, which is also expensive.

SFC W

[pjmunson]

They did considerably up the language proficiency pay, although not nearly as much as you suggest, Carl. The max is far less than that figure, although nothing to sneeze at, but in order to get the max, you have to be professionally proficient, or nearly so, in three testable languages. Add to the problem the fact that the Defense Language Proficiency Test has nothing to do with your ability to rap with someone in Dari, Pashtu, or Arabic, but has everything to do with whether you can read newspaper and magazine passages and listen to Syrian soap operas and al-Jazeera and then answer questions meant more to stump the chump than to test your comprehension. So our metrics are off because they do not test the skills we need to employ operationally. For those who might think this sounds like sour grapes, I get 3/3 on the Arabic test, so I'm not mad that I can't pass it. I'm mad that the system is so broke and no matter how hard you try, the arrogant "academics" at DLI and the inertia of the bureaucracy there stymie all efforts.

That's where, as you said pretty much, "can do" runs into a brick wall. For a number of reasons, from the agencies where DLI's money comes from, to the cultural factors that affect how the native instructors want to teach their languages, to the fact that they're trying to teach last year's high school grads how to understand passages in a foreign language that cover college level topics (for instance an article about pegged and floating currencies... it made no sense to them, even once translated), the ship there has a broken rudder. And even when they have forums to try to get input, responses range from defensive counters to every point to DoD officials telling students and instructors who try to bring up valid points that they are out of line because they're not saying that DLI is doing great. Eight years and really all they've done beyond some curriculum reorganziation and cramming an extra semester in on the students' backs is to hand out iPods, and I think now laptops, to every stud. As is typical anymore, technology money rains freely down, but if you try to suggest substantive improvements it is too hard or off base.

[Tukhachevskii]

With regard to Arabic, a major stumbling block is that despite the pleas of operational linguists, highly experienced military language instructors, some native instructors that worked as terps or in their own militaries, and even language academics at other premier institutions, DLI institutionally refuses to move away from the complete Modern Standard Arabic model they've run for years and move toward what many call "Educated Spoken Arabic." Basically, all literate Arabs know how to read MSA and understand it spoken, so it is the language of the press, official forums, etc. If you can speak MSA, almost anyone will understand you. Problem is, most people will respond to you in some mix of dialect. DLI says we can't teach all the dialects, so we won't try at all. However, other schools and agencies recognize that there is a core of common words that a lot of the dialects share and that you can teach a "standard dialect." DLI will have none of it. So, if a DLI grad from the Arabic basic course is stellar and attains a 3/3, which is on the order of less than 10% of the graduating population, from my limited experience, they still won't understand when an Arab in any city says "What are you doing here" because all the words in that sentence differ from MSA to dialect, but they are relatively common between dialects. To give an indication of the problem, the words that vary between MSA and dialect are basic, critical words: to do, to see, to look, to go, question words, negation, now, today, tomorrow, left, go straight, man, woman, etc. If one learns the standard dialect, Arabs will still be able to go deeper into their local dialect and not be understood, but if they want to communicate with you, they will be able to. Not all Arabs can easily speak to you in MSA though, or will try to.

I agree with the above comments 100%. I went to Yemen back in 2007 because, apparently, the MSA taught their was the clearest to understand (and classes were cheaper than Egypt). I soent nigh on 9 months comming to grips with Arabic and, thanks more to my tutor than to planning, picking up valuable Yemeni dialect as we wen on our travels. Yet, for all that study (I grapled my way to upper intermediate before I had to leave) I remember travelling to the Hadramout region in the South Eastern portion of Yemen with a German friend of mine who had served in the NVA (East German/DDR) only to arrive and not undertsand ONE word that was spoken there. Often described as Yemen's "Wild West" (and that's saying something) we found ourselves dumbstruck. Even the healthy dose of dialect we had picked up only turned out to be Sana'anian dialect which is essentially "city-speak". In fact, even travelling to the next governorate found our usefully deployable vocabulary drop by fifteen percent. A one week holiday in Lebanon found me similarly at a loss when I encountered what sounded like Arabic spoken in French accents by people who wondered who the hell the village yokel was attempting to communicate with them (Yemeni, it turns out, is about a desirable an accent to have as gonnorehea).

[Someguy]

I'm in the Pashto program at DLI. It has a terrible graduation rate from start to finish, less than 40%. The curriculum was written by non native English speakers without college degrees and the person with the education degree native language is Japanese. As a result, a student in the course will learn to say "I fly a kite" before he can count past 100.

On 1 Oct it goes to Cat IV and 63 weeks.

[Presley Cannady]

My experience is that considerable immersion is essential to develop minimally useful language skills. So how do you teach proficiency in a language typically encountered only in a warzone?

Hint, there's no Little Afghanistan in Monterey. So why is the program located there?

[40below]

I was often asked by gearheads about the best piece of kit the Canadian Forces had in Afghanistan, whether it was the LAVs or the C7 or the Griffons or whatnot, and I usually responded by saying the most valuable thing they had in the field were the terps. Without them, you're nothing, all you can do is shoot.

They were local hires who put themselves at great personal risk – the rules said you couldn't take their photos or include them on video you shot there, and I note with approval that the Canadian government has offered fast-track immigration to Afghans who ordinarily wouldn't qualify for citizenship if they have worked extensively with the CF and their lives are subsequently in danger.

Also, a surprising number of the soldiers had taught themselves a little Pashto, not much more than restaurant French, from a series of web-based language programs floating around. They weren't fluent but on dismount patrols, a corporal could at least say hello to the locals in the streets, and the locals seemed impressed that a soldier could at least try to address them in their own language.

[Schmedlap]

It amazes me that Congress -- the real culprits -- are willing to trust the Schmedlaps to take the sons and daughters of their voters into combat but do not believe they can be trusted to hire interpreters, pay informers or pay for minor projects.

Oh, I was trusted to pay them... with my own money.

Thanks to our dicked up priorities in April 2003, the powers-that-were ensured that BIAP had a Burger King and PX and that each BDE was able to dole out casual pay by the end of April ($200/month, max). Casual pay was to OIF I what CERP money is to operations today - except there was significantly less paperwork involved.

At first, I thought it was pretty stupid that we had the ability to draw casual pay (and even drive to the airport and stand in line for a Whopper) when we had no system to resupply us with such trivialities as AA batteries or potable water. But then I saw the brilliance of this. By drawing casual pay, I could buy my platoon's supplies on the local economy and do other things like pay interpreters. OIF I only cost me about $1400. It probably would have cost Uncle Sam 100 times that, due to the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy. The only downside was that batteries that you buy in Iraq are garbage. They will power your NVDs for about 30 minutes. I think they contained mercury, too.

I often blamed the mercury in the batteries when thinks didn't make sense (which was pretty much everyday). For example, our Bradleys were rolling around with track pads worn down to the metal and we were cannibalizing vehicles due to a lack of parts because the parts flow from Kuwait was cut off on the assumption that the war was over. But we could get Whoppers and DVDs if we drove to BIAP. That was just too stupid to be believed. So I would always rationalize that "we can't be that stupid. I must simply be going crazy due to exposure to the mercury in these cheapass Hajj batteries." Same thing when we were ordered to send our Bradleys back to Kuwait in May. They were racing to turn the AO into a garrison wonderland, oblivious to our continuous drumbeat of intel from the locals that "bad people are gathering in Fallujah" and "Ali Baba says that he will kill me if I talk to you" and "please stop coming to my store - I'm being threatened." I thought, "boy, the intel guys can't possibly be this thick-skulled to ignore this avalanche of corroborated, multi-sourced intel. I must be going crazy. Maybe I should stop being so cheap and pony up the extra dough for the imitation Duracells."

[Brandon Friedman]

Oh, I was trusted to pay them... with my own money.

Thanks to our dicked up priorities in April 2003, the powers-that-were ensured that BIAP had a Burger King and PX and that each BDE was able to dole out casual pay by the end of April ($200/month, max). Casual pay was to OIF I what CERP money is to operations today - except there was significantly less paperwork involved.

At first, I thought it was pretty stupid that we had the ability to draw casual pay (and even drive to the airport and stand in line for a Whopper) when we had no system to resupply us with such trivialities as AA batteries or potable water. But then I saw the brilliance of this. By drawing casual pay, I could buy my platoon's supplies on the local economy and do other things like pay interpreters. OIF I only cost me about $1400. It probably would have cost Uncle Sam 100 times that, due to the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy. The only downside was that batteries that you buy in Iraq are garbage. They will power your NVDs for about 30 minutes. I think they contained mercury, too.

I often blamed the mercury in the batteries when thinks didn't make sense (which was pretty much everyday). For example, our Bradleys were rolling around with track pads worn down to the metal and we were cannibalizing vehicles due to a lack of parts because the parts flow from Kuwait was cut off on the assumption that the war was over. But we could get Whoppers and DVDs if we drove to BIAP. That was just too stupid to be believed. So I would always rationalize that "we can't be that stupid. I must simply be going crazy due to exposure to the mercury in these cheapass Hajj batteries." Same thing when we were ordered to send our Bradleys back to Kuwait in May. They were racing to turn the AO into a garrison wonderland, oblivious to our continuous drumbeat of intel from the locals that "bad people are gathering in Fallujah" and "Ali Baba says that he will kill me if I talk to you" and "please stop coming to my store - I'm being threatened." I thought, "boy, the intel guys can't possibly be this thick-skulled to ignore this avalanche of corroborated, multi-sourced intel. I must be going crazy. Maybe I should stop being so cheap and pony up the extra dough for the imitation Duracells."

Here's a horror story, Schmedlap: As contractors were ferrying in Burger King, etc. to the Green Zone in late summer 2003, my guys were wearing out their boots in northwest Iraq. As XO, I was working all the time trying to come up with replacements for nearly an entire infantry company. When my supply sergeant and I finally scored a delivery of several dozen boxes of desert boots, we were thrilled. Except when we opened them up for inspection, about a quarter of the boxes contained old, used pairs that had belonged to the slugs down at the BSB who'd swapped out the new ones for their old ones before sending them our way.

I can't remember exactly, but I think that was the day I decided the Army wasn't for me anymore. Thanks for helping me dredge up all these awesome memories.

[Schmedlap]

When my supply sergeant and I finally scored a delivery of several dozen boxes of desert boots, we were thrilled. Except when we opened them up for inspection, about a quarter of the boxes contained old, used pairs that had belonged to the slugs down at the BSB who'd swapped out the new ones for their old ones before sending them our way.

We went a month without potable water. We literally lived off of the land - accepting any water from locals that was offered to us, buying water and ice thanks to the casual pay advances, sometimes driving to BIAP to steal from Division (they had not only water, but freezers, gatorade, etc). We kept griping to battalion about it. Battalion pointed out that if the FSB didn't push it, then there was nothing to give us. One day we visited the FSB. And we found our water. They were using it to do their laundry, to make water balloons, to bathe, and to clean their HMMWVs. We were black on water for nearly a month and they were using bottled water to wash their vehicles. With most of us experiencing frequent diarrhea from tainted water that seemingly no amount of chlorine or iodine could purify, I can't fully explain how angry we were upon discovering this. We asserted ownership of a pallet of bottled water and began loading it into our vehicles. A few FSB personnel - shirts still wet from a water balloon fight - protested and some unpleasantries were exchanged. My NCOs, about ready to explode, literally drew down on them with locked and loaded M4s. I jumped in between them - honestly thinking that my NCOs were going to shoot them. It was ugly.

[Ken White]

as it should. You shouldn't have to do that and I have to wonder with the boots and the water, what the NCOs and Officers of the units responsible were doing -- obviously not watching what their troops were doing....

Happens in every war, though. My dad was a USN Supply officer in WW II, one day he was sitting in his Quonset on Guam when three Marines walked in with a requisition for something; a little Storekeeper 3d started giving them static and one of the Marines cranked back the bolt on his M1. Storekeeper; "Sir, he's threatening me!" Dad; "Probably ought to give him what he wants and in future avoid smarting off to armed Marines."

Not being an Officer and thus constrained, I've backed down an Ordnance Battalion XO in one war and a COSCOM 1LT and CSM in another with an implicit but not certainly not voiced threat of unseemly and inelegant firearms use in a rear area. So if it's happened in the current wars, it seems to me a permanent affliction. My solution to the problem is to eliminate those kinds of Commands. Note that both I mentioned are gone.

My plan is working. Now, for Sustainment Brigades...

[Brandon Friedman]

We went a month without potable water. We literally lived off of the land - accepting any water from locals that was offered to us, buying water and ice thanks to the casual pay advances, sometimes driving to BIAP to steal from Division (they had not only water, but freezers, gatorade, etc). We kept griping to battalion about it. Battalion pointed out that if the FSB didn't push it, then there was nothing to give us. One day we visited the FSB. And we found our water. They were using it to do their laundry, to make water balloons, to bathe, and to clean their HMMWVs. We were black on water for nearly a month and they were using bottled water to wash their vehicles. With most of us experiencing frequent diarrhea from tainted water that seemingly no amount of chlorine or iodine could purify, I can't fully explain how angry we were upon discovering this. We asserted ownership of a pallet of bottled water and began loading it into our vehicles. A few FSB personnel - shirts still wet from a water balloon fight - protested and some unpleasantries were exchanged. My NCOs, about ready to explode, literally drew down on them with locked and loaded M4s. I jumped in between them - honestly thinking that my NCOs were going to shoot them. It was ugly.

For he today who fought the FSB for supplies with me
Shall be my brother;

I have walked in your shoes, dude. My first platoon had to steal water from the Air Force in Jacobabad, Pakistan. When my battalion failed to secure cots for my company at Camp New Jersey, my second platoon had to tactically acquire unused cots from Camp Doha (during a planned raid) to take with us into Iraq. And, as XO, I distinctly remember restraining myself from buttstroking a 626 FSB captain when he told me that my company couldn't be re-supplied (with things like water, etc.) because his guys didn't "work on Saturdays." It never ended. Those are just a few examples that I'm sure you can match or beat. Good fun.