The following excerpt from the letter "California 2005" is being published with permission from its author, Kihm Winship.  Kihm's letters, and the entire version of this letter can be found at: http://home.earthlink.net/~ggghostie/california2005.html

                  The Presidio of Monterey - 2005

   For those of you who have not been listening to my stories for 30 or more years, I will recap. In 1968, after Basic Training, the United States Air Force sent me to Monterey, California. The Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey was an astounding contrast to Basic Training at Lackland AFB, Texas. A good contrast, if there's any question. From a flat, barren land where we wore flat, barren expressions, to a green hillside overlooking a blue bay where seals and otters frolicked, and the light returned to our eyes. My assigned language was Serbo-Croatian. I had studied Spanish and French, but never anything like this. Our instructors were civilians and native speakers, all from Yugoslavia. We gradually, sometimes painfully, learned to speak and understand Serbo-Croatian, but we were also invited into another world, another culture, into Mr. Jeffrey's boyhood during World War II where he survived by eating garlic, into Mr. Dimitrievic's time in a prison camp in Italy, into Dr. Stude's interrogation by the Gestapo where they pulled all his teeth, and, most amazingly, into Dr. Wessel's Sarajevo boyhood, where he, at 14, witnessed the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the start of World War I.

   In 1992, I was sent to Asilomar for a conference, and returned to the Presidio, walking around the grounds with no questions asked. But when I first brought Laurie to Monterey, a few weeks after September 11, 2001, the base was barricaded, and we were not welcomed. And as we turned the car around, an army lad with an M-16 stepped out from behind a tree, giving Laurie an unexpected first-time view of the business end of an automatic weapon. It was quite a thrill for her, and I wondered if she would ever get to see the site of so many of my stories, or if I would ever set foot there again. But then Dan Donehey, a fellow student in 1969, found me via my Web page about DLI, and told me that there was an alumni coordinator now, and we would be welcomed. Dan gave me her name and e-mail address, and before long I was in touch with Natela Cutter, who said that indeed we were welcome and she would be happy to show us around.

   We drove over from Asilomar on Monday morning, and after 20 minutes at the gate with a beleagured security person who was processing a long list of workers from a moving company, Natela was called, appeared and wisked us on-base. "I'm the Alumni Queen," she told the security guard, who had suspected we weren't with the moving company, and who now had us figured out to his satisfaction.

   We parked our car and Natela drove, taking Avril Lavinge out of the CD player and putting in folk music from Yugoslavia. "If this starts to make you crazy, just let me know," she said. In addition to being the Alumni coordinator, she was also a former Serbo-Croatian instructor and the wife of the currrent department head. This was a match made in heaven.

   And I was in heaven, seeing my classroom again, and the chapel where Jim Starr got married and I took all his wedding pictures out of focus because I was drugged to the gills for pain after a wisdom tooth extraction, and the movie theater which had five movies a week for 25 cents each and we saw every one of them. And the gate with Dee's just outside, except it's not Dee's anymore. And the NCO Club, where workmen had just gutted the interior to make room for classrooms, and the Officers' housing where an officer's wife had once waved to me while gardening.And the Tin Barn, the name of which I had completely forgotten, the ark where we occasionally assembled, a long walk uphill in low quarter shoes. It's still there. But our barracks, B-13, is gone; if you stand on third base of the baseball diamond, you're about there.

   Gary is still there, too, having returned to Monterey in 1972, landing a job in the library/warehouse, distributing language texts and tapes to students. We visited his domain, just across the street from the gas station where I bought my first set of tires and gassed up my 1966 Volkswagon. Gary and Natela presented me with a "Survival Guide in Serbo-Croatian" and flash cards which will help me with phrases like "Lie on your stomach" and "Don't be afraid." I can't wait to try them at the next cocktail party I attend.

   And then Natela took Laurie and I up to the current Serbo-Croatian department, where I sang a few bars of "Tamo Daleko" for the department head, who wasn't expecting it at all, at least not before noon, and we met many of the teachers. Only one of my instructors is still alive, living nearby, now in his nineties. So it was all new faces, and it dawned on me that the pupils today were not born yet when I was a student. But I did not feel old. I felt terrific.

   Natela said we could sit in with a class, and because Laurie is a good sport and I could not get enough of this experience, we were happy to take a seat. The instructor was a striking blonde woman with a lot of attitude and great shoes. I adored her immediately. The students were Army, Navy, Air Force, young men and women.

   In 1968, we learned with an easel holding line drawings from our text book, pointing at the relevant frame of the dialogue with a wooden pointer. "Dali ste vi unchenik?" "Da, ja sam uchenik." Today, they have "smart boards" running off lap-top computers. And when the smart board went dark, the instructor reached around and slapped it, shocking it back to life.

   "Chutite" the instructor said to an airman who was momentarily off-task. "Be quiet." I hadn't heard that since 1969, but I knew what it meant. You don't forget something you've heard a hundred times. And the airman, wounded, said, "Zhao me je." I hadn't heard "I'm sorry" in Serbo-Croatian since 1969 either. I was as happy as a hog in a wallow.

   A sign on the wall read, "Imate slobodu izbora, mozete razgovarati ili na srpskom ili na hrvatskom." -- "You have the freedom of choice, you can speak either in Serbian or in Croatian." It was such a contrast to the nationalism of my era, the Serb vs. Croat tensions that were apparent among the faculty, a microcosm of Yugoslavia in 1968.

   "Ko zna? Ko zna?" the instructor snapped, after asking a question. Who knows? Who knows? I wanted to shout, "Ja znam!" But I didn't know, because I was only getting about one word every twenty. "Ja ne znam" was more appropriate. Then the class did an exercise where a pizza delivery person destined for Carmel was lost in Seaside, and they had to role-play the delivery person and the would-be pizza consumer, giving and taking directions. After about five minutes, one student said, "Pizza je hladna" and my brain ground out "hlado = cold" and suddenly I got a joke in Serbo-Croatian. It was so funny I am still smiling.

   After class, we met Ben De La Selva, the head of the alumni association and former dean of DLIWC. He had been a student at DLI in the 1960's, like me, but his life had taken a different path, one that went through Vietnam and back to Monterey, where he learned more languages, taught and eventually led the school. We had lunch together, in a chow hall that belonged on a campus rather than an Army base. We had a great talk. I would have stayed all day, had not the beach at Asilomar been calling me. But I hated to leave. I hated to leave in 1969, and I hated to leave now.

   Seeing people in the classroom who weren't even alive when I studied Serbo-Croatian at DLI, I felt, for the first time, a part of something much larger than one language class, a member of a family of people who have shared the experience, who recall the beauty of Monterey and the wonder of another culture opened up to us, by native speakers, one verb and one memory at a time.

   When it was time to go, I still remembered how to say thank you for everything, "Hvala vam na svemu," but I couldn't say it enough. I did understand the "Nema na chemu" that followed. "Don't mention it."

   We drove out the upper gate so I could see my apartment at 2040 Prescott, next door to Campagno's Market. Took a leisurely drive back through Monterey and Pacific Grove to Asilomar, deciding which houses we could live in (most all of them) and then meeting Jeff and Millie and Erik on the beach for kite flying, stone stacking and long walks.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Faithful Readers
© 2005 by Kihm Winship