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?
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?
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