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(Yelling in Arabic)
Seeking to provide realistic culture based training for their soldiers, leadership of
the fourth 104th division from Moffett Air Field Invited DLI students and teachers to
join them, at the beginning of September, during the training exercise held at Fort Hunter
Liggett.
"Will you help me?... I need you to keep them right here."
Giving these trainees exposure to a different culture and language, especially cultural
do's and don'ts may save their own life and the lives of their comrades in arms.
From a linguist aspect and point of view this exercise is really beneficial. The entirety
and the point of it was to have us working with the civil affairs teams and the psychological
operations teams through a three day scenario, built on itself. We were able to utilize our
language a lot. I feel that we provided a lot of service to these guys and the way that
they incorporated us each day was better and better as they learned our capabilities.
DLI students and teachers roll played villagers and chieftain in a mock village created for
the purpose of more realistic field training explains Brig. Gen. Patricia Heritsch.
The training that we are doing here at Fort Hunter Liggett is civil affairs and psychological
operations training that reclassifies soldiers into those fields and so when we have representatives
here that actually speak the language it adds realism to our course and our students have
a better opportunity to learn what its really going to be like in theater.
I just want to thank the people from DLI all of the instructors and the students that came
out here and supported our exercise. It added an incredible degree of realism to our civil
affairs and psychological operations training for new soldiers coming into the field.
It will absolutely impact their ability to do their job in theater.
The training introduced soldiers to some of the cultural sensitivities commonly found in
the Middle East and the use of translators, who are crucial assets in the field, all with
the goal of winning the hearts and the minds of the local population.