El Paso Dozen, from Russian to Vietnamese
Published on 24 Apr 03, with permission from Ken Allison, member of R-9-4, Russian class of May 59.

It was 1970 and Vietnam was raging. My command, USAF Security Service, put out a call for volunteers to study Vietnamese and be assigned to flying duty. For a myriad of reasons, twelve USAFSS NCOs put up their hand. Grades ranged from E-9 to E-4, all LIFERS and all linguists (mainly Russian). Myself, and two guys who worked for me were included in what we came to call the El Paso Dozen. Primarily, we came from overseas assignments. In my case, I wanted to avoid a pending east coast assignment (NSA) and felt it was the proper thing to do since for all intents and purposes we were at war. We were just finishing a great 3-year Berlin tour but my wife and two children were ready to return to the ZI. She couldn't believe that I was volunteering for this program and, to tell the truth, I wasn't so sure at times, either. But I kept hearing one of my best friends (a super lingie) saying "you can't call yourself a linguist until you speak at least one Asian language!"

So in mid 1970, there we were, 12 USAFSS lingie-NCOs at Biggs Field, DLISW, EL Paso, TX, ready to begin a 12-month Hanoi dialect course offered by a contractor Sands Language Institute. Needless to say, this was a significant departure from what the native Vietnamese instructors had to contend with- first term Army troops just out of basic. They were terrorized by us and we tried to maintain that fear as a means of survival in a completely foreign environment. We finally made peace and managed to graduate in a curtailed 9-month course. We were overjoyed when the 3-month curtailment was received. Our perspective of the language was that there was no grammar or rules to hang onto just memorization of a never-ending stream of vocabulary. Besides, we agreed that any language that you had to sing in order to speak was not our cup of tea. This was our GI attitude and, certainly, not reflective of the beautiful Vietnamese language. How the instructors put up with us, I'll never know but with patience and diligence we all survived but we still shudder to remember the Friday tests when they would insert a Saigon dialect speaker and just wipe us out.

So, we were off to real training-Physiology training (altitude chamber), Escape & Evasion plus POW camp training at Fairchild AFB. Then a couple months of airborne intercept training at Goodfellow AFB and, finally, overseas to the PI (Clark AFB) for Jungle survival rigors. The most welcome training, water survival in Fla, was skipped because we were needed operationally ASAP.

We arrived at our Okinawa base, Torii Station on Kadena AB and were introduced to the actual OJT. We all flew 18-20 hour SAC missions against Vietnam for a year, some of us then went to Nakhom Phonom, Thailand to continue our operations while others pulled a full 3 years flying out of OKI.

I would say that the USAF got a good return for their training dollar with the El Paso Dozen. We, in turn, had experiences and made lasting friendships that would never had occurred but for volunteering. As the French say, a fair exchange is no robbery.