CAA (that's me!) continued his response to Jeff Emanuel's post at RedState:, responding to Marcus_Traianus's comment of Thursday, February 9th at 8:52 AM EST(link).
Marcus_Traianus said:
"No salad bar? That’s medieval . Wait…what does that make living on some remote FOB and only eating MRE’s? Question for another day.
Personally I skipped out on a career in DoS after a friend of mine spent half his life becoming fluent in German only to get posted in Peru and spending years dodging the Sendero Luminoso. I think he said at the time if he wanted a career where he constantly git sent to remote countries where people were trying to kill him, he would have joined the military.
Note to DoS; an embassy is no substitute for a military base. No matter how appealing it sounds on paper."
My response:
"Congratulations! You are one of the few people who’s ever actually met or known a U.S. diplomat. (There aren’t that many of us,)
Having spent as much time at remote bases eating MREs in Iraq (in uniform) as I’d care to, I would note that they’re not intended for long-term diet. Eating them daily for the duration of a 12-month diplomatic assignment, while it might provide entertainment value for snarky folks far from the warzone, leads to malnutrition.
German is a tough language, I’ll admit. I had a very tough time learning it. On the other hand, I didn’t spend half my life doing it in the expectation that the State Dept. was only going to station me in Germany.
There’s this thing called “Worldwide Availability” in terms of FS assigments. So those folks who learned French aren’t guaranteed careers shuttling between Paris and Brussels. They can expect West Africa and places where they may need to learn another language entirely, like the Philippines."
No comments:
Post a Comment