Why not speak French?

I’m once again going to use real life experience to reply to this discussion. I was lucky to be deployed and assigned to the NATO mission of Operation Joint Forge in Bosnia N Herzegovina. I worked with nationals from all over Europe. I had British and Canadian communications people. There was a funny Scotsman public affairs officer. The operations commander was Spanish. On many of my missions we had Italian or Bulgarian security. The first thing we are told is that we are American Ambassadors and not to make the US look bad. I love learning new things and I immersed myself in many cultures.  Each nation had a brake room that anyone could visit and learn about them. I would introduce myself at each one, inform them I was there to learn about them and answer questions about Americans if they had any.

The Germans were very welcoming, very friendly and a lot of there off time has beer involved. Lets just say never play the game of Nails, drunk with Germans, you will just lose badly. 

The Canadians are very much like us, but unless you can hold your own, don’t tell them that Hockey is an American sport.

The French are very quiet and reserved, and either they didn’t like Americans or just me.

The Italians had their own camp, and I would go to dinner with them a lot. I made friends with several of the Carabinieri, the countries police, who didn’t speak any English and I don’t speak Italian. Even through the language barrier we became great friends and they educated me on their food and wine, which is a big part of their culture.

When it came to the Bosnian’s and the Serb’s I took a different approach. Most of the time I played the role of silent observer and watched what they did, what they ate, how they went through life. If I could ever get an interpreter with me I would try and communicate with them. I tried to learn the language and even had a misunderstanding. I thought the word ‘dobra” was hello. The local women who cleaned my building heard me great her with “dobra” she looked at me and said “good?”

She then went on to explain to me that dobra would be added to morning, day, night.  Boy was I embarrassed.

One more story, to show the problems with language in the NATO environment.

I was once in this big meeting with several countries. This French officer stood up and said,

“Why are we not speaking in French, since French is the language of diplomacy?”

Across the room I watched this senior British NCO chuckle and then responded;

“Because mate if it wasn’t for us and the Americans, you would be speaking German”

Which the German officer sitting next to me busted out laughing and the French officer sat down.