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Army stands up first foreign language unit

The Army will officially stand up its first foreign language unit Thursday.

The recently formed 51st Translator Interpreter Company at Fort Irwin, Calif., will provide uniform-wearing interpreters and translators to units deploying to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an Army press release.

The 51st will be manned by soldiers with the newly established Military Occupational Specialty 09 Lima. These are native or “heritage” speakers, meaning they have been speaking a particular language their entire lives, in the home or in school, the release states.

“They’ve grown up in the U.S. … speaking their mother’s tongue, though many have never been to their mother’s nation of birth,” Col. John Bird, director of training development and support at the Army Intelligence Center in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., said in the release.

While not yet fully manned, the unit will eventually include more than 140 native speakers of languages like Arabic, Farsi, Pashtu, Kurdish and Dari, the release said. Right now, the 51st has about 120 soldiers assigned, with about 90 of those working in theater.

Soldiers recruited to work as 09Ls come from places where there are large Arab-American populations: Dearborn, Mich., Washington, D.C., Southern California, Miami, New York, New Jersey, Texas and the Chicago area, the release said.

About 75 percent of them are green card holders, not American citizens. But they still must pass rigorous security and background checks to be accepted into the program, Errol Smith, the assistant deputy for foreign language programs at the Pentagon said in the release.

“First thing is a counter-intelligence screening,” Smith said. “That’s a requirement for the MOS — they have to pass that.”

The creation of the 51st is only part of the Army’s emphasis on foreign language skills. About 178,000 soldiers have signed up to use the Rosetta Stone language learning software available through Army Knowledge Online, the release states.

“We can’t afford to train every soldier in the Army to be a certified linguist, but we can’t afford not to have everybody in the Army understand cultural awareness, and maybe some rudimentary language capability,” Brig. Gen. Richard C. Longo, director of training in the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, said in the release.

“We as an Army are committed to cultural and language programs. What we are looking for is the right blend of culture and language in our units. And that right blend is defined as: some people have to be experts, and everybody has to know something.”