It’s no secret that the U.S. Army has a language barrier to overcome in Iraq and Afghanistan. A decade of war has led an English-constrained military to seek all kinds of quick fixes, from translator gadgets to private contractors — something Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lamented this week. But more galling is the fact that the few soldiers who do speak Arabic, Pashto and Dari are still being wasted, even in the warzones where they’re needed the most. I know — because I was one of them.

The Army spends years and hundreds of thousands of dollars training each of its foreign-language speakers. At the same time, it uses costly contractors to work the same jobs for which its own linguists have trained. In Iraq and Afghanistan, private-sector linguists are largely replacing their military counterparts rather than augmenting their numbers, an expensive redundancy.

In the fall of 2006, I enlisted in the Army as a cryptologic linguist, one of the soldiers who translate foreign communications. A year of college Arabic hadn’t been enough to persuade intelligence-agency recruiters of my James Bond potential. The military, spook agencies assured me during a string of polite job-fair letdowns, was the place to start getting real-world experience. So off I went to boot camp.

Over two years of training followed, both in Arabic and the specific intelligence duties I’d need to perform in-country. In March 2009, I stepped off of a Blackhawk at Forward Operating Base Delta, a large base near al-Kut in southeastern Iraq. I figured I’d be translating captured Arabic communications to alert combat troops of danger.

So imagine my surprise when my new team sergeant picked me up at the airfield and mentioned he was a Korean linguist. It turned out that our five-man team had as many Korean speakers as Arabic ones — you know, for all the Korean spoken in the Iraqi desert. It was my first sign that the deployment wouldn’t be the one I trained for.

When I arrived for my first shift in-country, I quickly saw who would be turning those purloined insurgent communications into English: a large, middle-aged Arab dude, not me.  A native of Mosul, he was one of two contractors who would complete every language-related task required for the rest of our deployment. Rumor was he made over $200,000 — easily five times my paycheck. Meanwhile, the military linguists on my team simply sat to one side, numbly monitoring equipment and our computer screens for uneventful hours on end.

The situation was similar across our unit, the 504th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade. At some sites, linguists functioned as analysts to make up for shortages or operated secret intel equipment that required a high-level clearances. At many others, the daily routine was one of whiling away a shift with correspondence courses or a good paperback. I got through 35 books in an eight-month tour, including Tom Ricks’ Fiasco.

In one case, a soldier stationed in Amarah, near the Iranian border, spoke excellent Farsi. If he had been translating insurgent communications, it might have come in handy for his team, given the extent of Iranian infiltration into Iraq. But what did he spend his tour doing? Busywork, mostly, interrupted by watching his buddies play World of Warcraft.

Problems like that were common to all deploying units that my fellow linguists and I knew of. Whether assigned to military intelligence units or attached to infantry brigades, linguists found themselves in any capacity but their own. Often, we waited for something to go wrong with our expensive communications collections gear, and called the guy whose job it was to actually maintain the equipment if a glitch required more than flipping a reset switch. (Which it mostly didn’t.)

If that’s the way the Army wants it, maybe linguists like me shouldn’t actually deploy at all. Those of us who don’t go to warzones mostly work at intelligence centers like Maryland’s Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency. Unlike their counterparts overseas, these soldiers routinely work with their adoptive languages while still directly supporting deployed units from afar, like writing reports on collected communications and feeding databases. Their missions continue every day, allowing them to maintain language proficiency. Some defense companies are even working on techy ways to remotely connect linguists far from the front lines with combat troops who need quick translation help.

Meanwhile, linguists who actually go to warzones spend their time at home in a routine of garrison duties and unrelated training, no different from the rest of Big Army. Honing language skills falls far down the priority list. Many end up failing their yearly recertification exams.

At the least, the Army needs to stop treating linguists like we’re interchangeable. Our skills are specific: there’s no reason Korean speakers should be in al-Kut and not Korea. Spanish and French linguists ought to be assigned to, say, Latin America or NATO units, where they’d be useful.

But, hey: if the Army would rather spend hundreds of thousands on contractors to do the job it trained me for, maybe it should just contract out all its language positions. At least then it would get native speakers, who would have a fluency I probably can’t match. It’s expensive, but quality doesn’t come cheap. And redundancy is expensive too.

Pick your solution. As long as the Army keeps mismanaging its linguists, guys like me will stay lost in translation. At least until the military finally goes the Federation route and develops a Universal Translator.

Photo: Flickr/ISAF