[gallilaw]

I also got my training at Fort Bliss. There's a short chapter in the book about language class -- dunderheads playing Frisbee soccer in the halls -- that inludes this:

By the time the course ended, none of them could really understand their Vietnamese teachers, but they could all understand each other in a language they had never spoken 36 weeks before ? and hated, to tell the truth ? but there it was on their lips: El-Paso-Texas-Army-Vietnamese, a polyglot porridge of twangs and mucusy coughs in which they were all fluent with each other although none of them sounded the same.


Best wishes.