Employment 6 part 9

Al's really was (is) a great language school. By Thursday of our first week we were already in  "Dictation Lab" listening over earphones to intentionally garbled

voice traffic and writing down, on paper with pencil, what we thought we were hearing. Hearing, it turns out, is the main job of those of us in Russian 6. Our M.O.S.# (Military Occupational Specialty) number 656, Voice lntercept Operator,

really says it all. The MOS that Russian 12 students will most likely work in, will

have to do with face-to-face conversations with Russians. In Russia, or some country where Russian soldiers might be stationed. Those soldiers need to know

Russian customs, laws, history and much more as well as speaking the language

flawlessly.Just from my own experience, l'm convinced it's possible; R 6 grads'

would leave school with the Russian grammar and a 20,000 word vocabulary.

Our pronunciation wasn't as good as the R 12 grads, but it wasn't bad; after my

class was graduated, l was riding the train,returning to ASA at  Devens, l met a group of Russian men in the club car, introduced myself to them and spoke

with them (in Russian, of course) for something more than an hour. They didn't

take me for a Russian and corrected my pronunciation a few times as we talked

but they were all amazed that any one could speak as l did,after only six months of instruction. They were probably spys, just trying to get on my good

side and maybe score some of the secrets l didn't know yet,but they left the train at Winnemucca.

Students at Al's are not assigned to work details. We were to keep our personal

areas (bed, foot locker and wall locker) "ready for inspection" but the common areas were maintained by soldiers from the support company, That so we had plenty of time for our studies, much of which was practice speaking. All the students in a given barrack are studying the same language and while there, or in class, we avoided English. No student at Al's ever had to peel a single potato

or swab a dining hall floor or shovel a half-ton of coal into the furnace at Colonel

Manymedal's near-mansion. (The three jobs l'd had at Devens before getting the permanent Day Room Orderly job). We took full advantage of the situation,too. My friend Bill's parents lived in San Mateo (about a two-hour drive to  Monterey). He had no car but did have a near-new,1956 Norton 500 cc off-

road motorcycle that he sometimes rode between school and San Mateo on Weekends. You could drive that Norton up dry (or near dry) creeks in complete

control and it was just as comfortable cruising the highway at 70MPH. Bill's folks
had a late-model Buick and an XK120 Jaguar,with which, where Bill was concerned, they were very generous; during our time at Al's, he donated the use of one or the other of them more than a couple of dozen times
. 
ln high school l had a friend named Dulce. While l do remember a couple of pointless kissing matches, it never went beyond that. lf asked, l'd say our rela-
tionship was close but platonic. We had a study hall in common three times a a week. There were a few small rooms in the study hall area that could be accessed by those who wished to study together and whose back-and-forth would be disruptive to those in the main study room. ln the two-or-so-years we
we were spending three hours a week alone together, we covered a lot of ground. We got to know each other very well, but outside our little room, we
seldom encountered each other. We never "dated". We were a school year
apart, so that when l left high school, she still had a year to go.

By the time l arrived at Al's, Dulce had graduated high school. A couple of
months later she enrolled at Mill's College in Oakland, Ca. Soon after, l got a letter from my mom, informing me of Dulce's college choice. (Mom always
liked Dulce). The letter contained her contact information and before long l
was thinking about  contacting her. Since our relationship was mostly 
about voice communication, l decided to make a voice tape for her. Hey, l
was studying voice inercept operation, at the time,ok?  

Employed 6 part 8 Al's Fans

Some background on Al's: In 1941, the U.S. Army established a secret school at the Presidio of San Francisco to teach Japanese. Classes began on November 1, 1941, with four instructors and sixty stu-
dents in an abandoned airplane hangar at Crissy Field.
During WWII, it was named the Military Intelligence Service Language School,  (MISLS) and it grew dramatically. The Agency moved three times to accommodate growth before it was moved to it's present location at the Presidio of Monterey in 1946 and was re-named Army Language School. Going into and thru the Cold War there is more expansion and
more changes. By the early nineties, branches were added in other U.S. cities, including Washington D.C., and for a while there was a plan that would have moved the Monterey facility to D.C. Many Monterey citizens voiced their disapproval of that plan and managed to bring the matter to a vote.Something like 95% of the Facilities Board voted to keep Al's at the Presidio of Monterey
after they had heard from a large delegation of townspeople. At or near that time, the school's name was changed to Defense Language Institute. 

When l was a student there, l was one of 3000. Or so have l read. But, it seems
impossible:There aresix students in each of 6 classrooms. Thruout the sixmonth
course, the six students are the same six individuals. The six teachers are also
the same six individuals. Each of the six students will attend  all six hours of instruction, while each of the instructors will spend just one hour per day in each of the six classes  they teach. So, each day six instructors teach 36 stu-
dents. One instructor for each six students. At that rate you need 500 instruc-
tors for 3000 students. To me, the place didn't seem that busy.

Now, getting back to our first day at Al's and the visitors with whom we shared
lunch. Ah yes, Rita and Sandy! Up to that time (fully eighteen years old)l don't think l had ever seen one woman, as beautiful as both those ladies were. As
well as very articulate, funny, self-confident. l don't know what the term for that level of pulchritude was in that day but now they'd be called "trophy wives". lt
was their high contrast to the surroundings at Al's (including our uniformed soldier selves) that had me wondering what their game may be. At Devens,
those of us who would go to Monterey were told" it is a great place to be stationed: the bay, the forested hills, the warf,Carmel by the sea, and the people there love the people at Al's. Mostly, that is. Some people, for whatever
reason (maybe jealous of your situation or blames you for a loved one's loss to
one of US's wars or the only work they have is selling you a fine piece of blue sky. They're few and far between but it only takes one to totally ruin your day"

So we keep our thinking going even as we are almost bowled over by the act. l
wondered about Rita and Sandy because they were so far from ordinary and so
far out of my league,that their just being nice enough to hang out with us, like old friends, for an hour or so, was enough to make us wonder.

On the second day at school l told my new friend, and fellow classmate Bill about my lunch on Monday and he said he didn't believe it. When l told him l
expected Rita and Sandy to return in a day or so, he sort of  invited himself
to have lunch with us later in the week. Just for purposes of verification. He
actually was there Tuesday (better safe than sorry) but the girls weren't.When
Rita and Sandy did show,(Thursday) there were four guys at our table. Both
ladies seemed happy to see us all, they smiled,waved and drove past the grotto
directly to the barrack of the person  sought the day before. They smiled and
waved as they disappeared into the barrack. They had not reappeared when we returned to class

Employed 6 part 7 School assignments

Penny and Sarah made a delightful dinner for the family and us soldiers in mid-
afternoon so we could get back to Ayer in the early evening. Sgt. Manning was in the dayroom when we arrived, having taken over for the guy that filled in for me Friday and Saturday, but failed to show on Sunday. The Sgt. had received the results of the first round of testing;Jerry and l would be going to Monterey whileCarl would be going to NSA for more testing and probable assignment there. Jerry and l would have one more test to help determine which language would best fit our individual aptitudes.

At the second language test we were invited to chose three languages from the list of available languages and put a "1" before our first choice, a "2" before our second and a "3" before our last. Our choices, we were told, may or may not
influence our assignment. My choices were 1 German 2 Russian 3 Korean. The
assignment is,of course for only one language and my assignment was Russian;
more precisely Russian Six. Most courses at Al's come in two sizes;six months and twelve months, except Chinese, which is available in twelve and eighteen
month courses. Those scoring highest in testing are assigned to the longer
courses. Not being offered my first-choice language and being assigned to a
six month course to boot indicates that,even though l passed the tests, l did
not pass by much. My friend Jerry wound up assigned to a Russian 12 course.

Within a few days of receiving our assignments, a plane-load of us was flown
to Monterey and began classes the following Monday. Each day consisted of six
one-hour classes with a two-hour lunch between the third and fourth classes.
There were just six students to a class and six instructors; one for each hour of
class. Most of them had fled Russia around the time that it became the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (they had been part of the  monarchy that existed before the revolution) One of the teachers in the Korean department had been
a jet fighter pilot in North Korea before accepting Uncle Sam's offer of $100,000 to any pilot who would surrender himself and his Mig-15 fighter to U.S. forces
during the Korean War. It was said that most, if not all of the teachers at Al's,
were paid that much and more per year. In 1950's dollars!

That first day (June 4, 1956) we (the whole class of six) took our bag-lunches
to what was called Shady Grotto, where the Army had provided picnic tables
and a water fountain under the trees for days when eating outside was best.
We had barely begun lunch, when a new Hudson sedan carrying two beautiful
young ladies stopped near our table. The ladies dismounted, walked to our table
and introduced themselves (Rita and Sandy).They asked directions to a barrack
that was located just a few hundred feet up the road. Directions were given to the barrack, quickly followed by an invitation to have lunch with us. They accepted and while one of the guys went to the mess hall for a couple more bag
lunches, l made sure we had all the relevant data for Rita and Sandy. While l might have thought there would be some resistance to giving me their phone
numbers, there wasn't. ln fact, before we parted that Monday, Sandy and l agreed we'd talk on the phone before Friday. l couldn't help but notice, when the ladies left us, they left the post without stopping at the barrack for which
they had asked directions.

l was puzzled most of the week about our encounter with Rita and Sandy. First,
if they had some reason to visit the barrack, why did they not? lf the barrack had nothing to do with their visit to the post, why were they here? They left
at about one p.m. Maybe  one of them had an early afternoon appoint-
ment and had spent so much time with us that she had to skip whoever was
waiting in S-12. One of the things learned about Al's while in testing at Ft. Devens was about it's relationship with the people of Monterey. People of
Monterey (especially the merchants) love Al's students:For some reason, some
merchants, back near the time of the school's origin, got to know some of the students,liked them and thought they would be good credit risks. From what
l've heard, the results have been stupendous;some merchants report NO
delinquent accounts associated with Al's. Some report "one or two but with an
explanation." l go into this now because while merchants and other townspeople
see Al's students in a positive light as customers that can be trusted to pay their bills, there are local folks who see Al's students as easy-going, self-confident
marks lulled by the local gladhands to believe everyone is on their side. And,
while almost everyone IS;others are looking to ruin your day. So, for most of the week, l tried to come up with a scenario that might fit the  circumstances
of the 4th of June.