Air Force Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper

Remarks to the National Language Conference, Adelphi Md., June 23, 2004

Good morning and thank you very much, David (David S. C. Chu, Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness), for that kind introduction. It is a pleasure to be here. The ceremonies that you mentioned, and I see many uniformed officers here, I'm sure many of them have taken place in the same ceremony. It's curious that the guest is required to utter these phrases in Turkish and the Turkish formation responds with one simple shout of "Saool' about four times, so their part is very, very simple and the guest part is very difficult.

Even better than that, though, David, you know in the world of Airmen we all sort of have a common understanding and we all try very hard to, in international circles, to sort of out-range one another. In Bahrain they're particularly adept at this. You go to the officer's club at the fighter wing in Bahrain and they will host this wonderful lunch where you sit around in your flight suits, but they formally parade in the slaughtered sheep, lay it before the guest of honor, take the head off and place it in front of the guest of honor--of course they're all chuckling in the background because they know that this is sort of anti-culture to us. You sit there and you eat this lunch with this cooked animal's head in front of you, complete with eyeballs, tongue, and the whole nine yards, and I apologize for doing this this early in the morning.

In the end the guest is instructed on how to take apart the head of the animal and distribute the delicacies therein, and this is a great honor, of course all done with great tittering in the background. You're instructed how to break off the jaw and pry open the eye socket and let the eyeballs fall out, pull out the tongue, extract the brains, put them all on a plate, and send them around.

Well my habit was when I was the 9th Air Force Commander and in charge of, I was the component commander for Air Forces in the area, my habit was to always take with me two wing commanders whose forces were deployed into the area. I'd sit one to my right and one to my left. I would complete the ceremony, pass the plate to the right, and say none of this had better ever get around to me again as it went around the table.

But the stories are still told today among them, they were then wing commanders, now they're general officers, of eating the eyeball of the goat.

It is a pleasure to be here and just to be able to talk to you very briefly this morning about how we in the military need to view this world that we live in. Certainly there's a technical aspect of it that has to do with languages, but the part that's more compelling to those of us in uniform and I think to Dr. Chu who leads this crusade, is to expand our cultural sensitivity towards the places where we go in this world that are extremely different than we are. And certainly there's a cultural aspect of this, there's a lingual aspect, there's even a political aspect to it, and it's different than the world that I as a senior officer dating back to the days of Vietnam, it's different than the world I grew up in.

I can remember as a 2nd lieutenant in Vietnam. We were there, we were confined to a large group of Americans. We were not encouraged nor compelled to become familiar with the language or the people. We were part of an operation and we were personally invested in it to the extent that we were part of military units doing a mission, but not to the extent we truly understood the people and their plight at the time.

On into the days of the Cold War, we were all stationed in Europe, especially the Army officers, and the audience I'm sure have had several tours in Germany, all of them, and it was different there, too. We all learned what I called menu quality German and menu quality Italian and French, but we had a cultural baseline. The religions were the same. We fundamentally had the same foundations of civilization. We understood one another, even if the language was different. And of course, the problem with especially a person like me is that everybody wanted to learn to speak English so you'd utter your simple phrases, and immediately they could speak English much better than you could speak their language and you broke into English.

I say particularly challenging for me certainly because I was an electrical engineering major at the Virginia Military Institute and I was born in Paris, Texas. I'm the furthest thing from a culturally sensitive officer you've ever seen.

I got introduced to it, as I was the Senior Military Assistant to Secretary Cheney. And as Desert Storm kicked off, I got a brand new job down in the Joint Staff, in the J5, which has to do with international affairs. Now how I got that job--I'm a fighter pilot from Paris, Texas, electrical engineer. I have no idea how I got that job, but there I was.

My wife jokes that when I got that job she bought me a handkerchief with the world imprinted on it and all the capitals of each of the countries, and she tells that the first six months I had that job they thought I had pneumonia because I had that handkerchief.