The
Army Language School (ALS) sat on a vast bluff on the central coast of
California overlooking Monterey Bay. Subsequently renamed the Defense Language
Institute (DFI), the school still sits high on that bluff above the now
revitalized Cannery Row. When the writer John Steinbeck roamed the area during
the Great Depression, the canneries along the waterfront below thrived on the
catch of the sardine fishing fleet.
Much
later in the mid-‘50s when I was assigned to ALS for language study, the
sardine fisheries had collapsed, and the canneries had gone into decline; it
was a ramshackle scene notable only due to Steinbeck’s novel Cannery
Row (1945). After I graduated, the street of defunct canning factories
was officially renamed in honor of the novel and its famous author who a few
years later was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The
language school was first established in ’41 for training GIs in Japanese.
After the war, ALS moved to its present location, the Presidio of Monterey, an
old Spanish fort. The school’s curriculum grew rapidly apace with the challenges
of the postwar international situation. When I studied at Monterey, over 25
languages were being offered by native speakers from various countries. By the
end of the ‘50s, more than 20,000 military personnel had passed through ALS.
Not
surprisingly, given international tensions, the school emphasized the intensive
training of service personnel in the languages of the United States’ Cold War
adversaries and their client states as well as instruction in the languages of
our allies in the global struggle. Russian was by far the largest language
program then, followed by Chinese and Korean. Collectively, the various
languages of the USSR’s Baltic and East European satellites also enrolled a
large group of military students.
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Given international tensions, the
school emphasized the intensive training of service personnel in the languages
of US Cold War adversaries as well as in the languages of our allies in the
global struggle.
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Smaller
numbers of soldier-students studied Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Burmese,
Indonesian, and Thai as well as several West European and Scandinavian
languages. During the year I spent at ALS studying Czech, one of my college
friends was learning Persian across the post.
When
I revisited the school several years ago the curriculum had changed radically
since the end of the Cold War and onset of the war on terrorism. The barracks and
classroom buildings where the East Europeanists had lived and studied still
stood, but had been repurposed. With the liberation of the former Soviet
Union’s satellites and the inclusion of most of the now-independent countries
in NATO, the study of their languages was no longer essential.
Instead,
my old billet and neighboring barracks had been converted to additional
classrooms for the hundreds of men and women soldiers training for America’s
contemporary challenges – studying among others two of the heretofore secondary
languages of the ASA/DLI curriculum -- Arabic and Farsi (Persian) – as well as
new additions such as Pashto, a language of Afghanistan, and Urdu, spoken in
Pakistan.
In
the ‘60s, my brother Jeff Sharlet followed me to Monterey as a GI student of
Vietnamese. In ’62 a low intensity ‘hot’ war was underway in South Vietnam, and
the Pentagon was steadily but quietly building up its cadres of translators and
interpreters. As the war heated up, Jeff and most of his ALS cohort ended up in
Vietnam.
Vietnamese
had first been taught in the US during WWII. A special program for a small
number of GIs was created at University of California – Berkeley and University
of Wisconsin – Madison. Later during the Cold War ‘50s, Vietnamese was added to
the roster of languages taught at ALS. Vietnamese native speakers joined the
school’s faculty in ’54, the year of France’s defeat in the first Indochina War
when the US began to assume its fateful responsibility for the newly created
state of South Vietnam.
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In the course of the second Indochina
War – the American war –
20,000 military personnel passed through the gates of
the Defense
Language Institute and its regional branches
to study Vietnamese.
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In
the course of the second Indochina War – the American war – 20,000 military
personnel passed through the gates of the Defense Language Institute and its
regional branches to study Vietnamese. The great majority were sent for a short
course (8-weeks) designed for officers and non-commissioned officers headed to
Southeast Asia as military advisors to units of the Army of the Republic of
Vietnam.
A
much smaller contingent, including Jeff and his buddies, spent 11.5 months in
the classrooms of the Monterey Presidio being trained as translators and
interpreters. Most of the long-term students were part of the Army Security
Agency (ASA), an autonomous communications intelligence outfit, or they were
assigned to the Military Intelligence (MI) branch of the Army.
Unlike
my generation of Cold War GIs who, because of the Iron Curtain could at best
only observe the countries of the Soviet Bloc from afar, Jeff and his fellow
linguists lived and worked in a Vietnamese language environment. As a result
they were able to hone their language skills with some of them becoming quite
fluent in Vietnamese.
Of
my fellow linguists of the European communist states who continued using their
languages after leaving the military, a number became academics, specialists on
the countries whose languages we had learned and worked in for a couple of
years of our military tour. Jeff and his group also parlayed their language
skills as well as the Vietnam experience after the service, but in more varied
ways.
At
least two became academics, one becoming a distinguished scholar of Vietnamese
politics. Another stayed on in Vietnam, and yet another returned as a civilian
employee of a US company that constructed infrastructure for the military.
Another GI linguist, for whom the romance of Vietnamese culture was strong,
became a student of Oriental languages back in the States as well as a poet of
the Vietnam experience.
Doffing
the uniform, a couple of others became players in the Vietnam War writ large. One
young ex-Vietnam GI became station chief for the National Security Agency (NSA)
in Saigon, later rising to the number two position in the agency back in
Washington.
Then
there was brother Jeff who founded the first GI-edited underground antiwar
paper directed to serving GIs and in the process became an early leader of the
emerging GI opposition to the war. *
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Among Jeff’s generation of Vietnam
GIs, one young ex-Army Security
Agency linguist took the unusual step
of becoming a Buddhist monk.
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However,
among Jeff’s generation of Vietnam GIs, one young ex-Army Security Agency
linguist took the unusual step of becoming a Buddhist monk. Steve Shlafer had
completed a couple of years of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
(RPI) when he dropped out and enlisted in ASA. Like Jeff, Steve was sent to ALS
for intensive language training in Vietnamese and upon graduation deployed to
South Vietnam for classified work.
Steve Shlafer
(r) at an ASA base outside Saigon, 1963
During
the requisite 12-month tour in-country, Steve Shlafer became not only an
outstanding linguist, but also deeply interested in Vietnamese Buddhist
culture. After completing his military obligation, he returned to Vietnam,
enrolling at Saigon’s Van Hanh University in – a Buddhist-run school – where he
studied Buddhist theology as well as Chinese and Vietnamese literature.
Finishing his studies in ‘67, Steve was hired by an American subcontractor to a
Washington agency to research and write an in-depth study of a particular Buddhist
sect.
In
early December of ‘67, he submitted an extensive report on the Hoa Hao religious
tradition. Hoahaoism is a relatively modern version of Buddhism with a populist
and social welfare orientation. The movement, which today claims two million
adherents across Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta, focuses mainly on peasant
farmers, emphasizes Buddhist lay worship at home and in the fields rather than
primarily in temples, and favors aid to the poor over pagoda-building and
expensive rituals.
Three
years later, Steve Shlafer’s nearly 300-page study was cited in a State
Department training manual for Foreign Service officers assigned to Vietnam.
Cover page of
Foreign Service Institute manual on Vietnam (1970)
A
few days after handing in his manuscript, Steve Shlafer completed final preparations
for becoming a Theravada (also known as Southern Buddhism, the most prominent form in Southeast Asia) Buddhist monk, an extraordinary commitment for a
foreigner in general and an American ex-GI in particular. After performing the
ritual of walking three times around the pagoda, he entered and took his vows. With
shaved head he donned the traditional saffron gown with yellow sash and was
assigned a cell in the pagoda. Almost immediately the new monk became the
center of media attention back in the States.
Steve Shlafer
making the ritual walks around the pagoda, 1967
To
further characterize Steve Shlafer’s dramatic act in the midst of the Vietnam
War, the Associated Press (AP) highlighted that he was Jewish. Of course, for
the American public it would have been hardly less remarkable if a Vietnamese
speaking ex-GI of the Christian persuasion had been inducted into the Buddhist
religion.
Steve Shlafer
(l) taking his monastic vows, 1967
At
a mini-press conference in his pagoda cell, Thich Thien Hien, aka Steve Shlafer,
told the newsmen that his parents back home were aware of his plans, and he had
just written them that he had taken the step. He fended off questions about his
parents’ reaction, saying – perhaps with a smile, “They probably think it’s
another one of my wild schemes.”**
Simultaneously,
the New York Times interviewed his
mother in New Jersey who expressed skepticism of her son’s whole venture.
Saying that she had tried to “kid him out of it,” his mother speculated that
Steve would give up the idea of being a monk in a few months and return to
college in the States.***
Not
long after the solemn ceremony – in late January ’68 when the Viet Cong and
North Vietnamese Army launched the Tet Offensive throughout South Vietnam –
Steve in his religious regalia reportedly took temporary cover with his old
unit out near the airport. Given the fact that Saigon was a battle zone, it was
probably a wise decision notwithstanding his new status and appearance as a
monk – especially as a rather conspicuous American Caucasian Buddhist.
In
the end Mrs Shlafer was right since Steve eventually did give up monkhood.
However, that wasn’t and still isn’t unusual in Buddhist practice where men
have been known to enter the pagoda for a period of time and then return to
their previous lives. In any event, Steve Shlafer married and spent a dozen
years in Sweden from 1974 to 1986 where he completed medical school at the
University of Goteborg.
Returning
to the States, he did his medical residency and became a physician. Many
decades on since wartime Saigon, Dr Stephen Shlafer has long been a respected
pediatrician in the Pacific Northwest.
*For
an account of the GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, see http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/
**AP story run in the New York Times, 4 December 1967
**New York Times, 4 December 1967
