I was watching a show recently and there was a scene where my brain screamed, “Inzar Qital” at me.\u00a0 Huh?\u00a0 It’s “battle alert” in Arabic. The hero was going into a bad situation and my brain was screaming warnings.\u00a0 In Arabic.\u00a0 All the really bad\/dangerous things I experience, as well as normal stuff like weaponry and aircraft, pop into my fevered little head in Arabic first.<\/p>\n
Would you like to guess where all my “Spidey Sense” is rooted? They did a mighty fine job at Defense Language Institute and my other schools.\u00a0 My Sea Daddy Pete also encouraged me to think in Arabic. We all did it. It made us better linguists. Better spooks. Better warriors.<\/p>\n
So, 23 years after I last put on the uniform (right about this time of year!) I’m still processing all the heavy stuff in my language.\u00a0 I think that’s pretty cool. Please excuse me if it slips out of my mouth. I will translate if you ask.<\/p>\n
That is all. Return to your duty station. Yella! (move it!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was watching a show recently and there was a scene where my brain screamed, “Inzar Qital” at me.\u00a0 Huh?\u00a0 It’s “battle alert” in Arabic. The hero was going into a bad situation and my brain was screaming warnings.\u00a0 In …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,3],"tags":[487,415,488,167,485,162,489,491,490,486],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military","category-pure-blather","tag-aircraft","tag-arabic","tag-battle-alert","tag-commotion-in-the-pews","tag-defense-language-institute","tag-joseph-courtemanche","tag-spooks","tag-uniform","tag-warriors","tag-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":594,"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commotioninthepews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}