Language warriors.(Scan)

You might almost think you were on the campus of some community college. But no ordinary college has mandatory urinalysis for drug use--one strike and you're out--or has a signpost reading "BAGHDAD 11,158 MILES," or all students in uniform. But the prime difference is the young faces. The ones here are more earnest than those generally seen on college campuses.

We're at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. It's the world's biggest language school, and it's run by the U.S. military. Thanks to the ripples of 9/11, it's getting even bigger. One sees new dormitories under construction across the campus, amidst young men and women shuttling to class or mandatory PT. They're unmistakably an intense group.

The DLI was born weeks before Pearl Harbor, when the Army started drafting Nisei to translate documents, eavesdrop on radio communications, and prepare to interrogate prisoners in case of war. After World War II, the DLI began training military linguists in Russian and other Eastern European languages, as well as Korean and Vietnamese. In the 1990s Serbo-Croatian was the most-taught language. Today it's Arabic, followed by the other tongues and dialects of the Muslim world like Farsi, Uzbek, Dari, Pashto, and Urdu.

And so you find 18-and 19-year-old American girls and boys from the Army, Navy, Mr Force, and Marines, volunteers all, working very hard ten or more hours daily. It takes 63 weeks to get a certificate of basic proficiency in Arabic--which (along with Mandarin and Korean) is ranked a "Category IV" language, meaning it is very hard. There are 750 civilian instructors teaching 2,500 students for the Department of Defense. Most DLI faculty are drawn from the vast stateside pool of immigrants representing most of the ...