Mr. Dooley and the Russians.

• Author: Bridges, Peter

In my earlier years I studied several languages, including Russian. During my decades in the U.S. Foreign Service I even served for a time as an interpreter in Russian--an interpreter with serious faults. As will be told, beyond my own faults I blame, a little, Mr. Dooley.

My path to interpreting was a long one. Before I got to Russian I had studied Latin and Spanish. Then at nineteen I became fascinated by Russian novels, and by that exotic country. I studied the Russian language for nine hours a week at Dartmouth College, spent a summer at the Middle-bury College Russian school--where we were obliged to speak only Russian except in local shops--and began graduate study at Columbia University.

My two years at Columbia turned me away from an academic career. My advisor, Professor Ernest Simmons, had written books on Tolstoy, Chekhov, and other old greats, but he insisted I do a master's essay on contemporary Soviet literature. In the 1950s Soviet novels were Stalinist trash. I read a hundred of them for my essay, got my degree, quit the Ph.D. program, took the Foreign Service exam, married my love, and went into the Army to do my two required years of military service before going into diplomacy.

Curiously, my Russian got me to France. Halfway through basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, our company commander announced that any private who knew a foreign language could take a test in it. I took the Russian test, got a perfect score, and was called in to see a Personnel corporal.

"We will send you," he said, "To an intelligence unit in Germany. But basic's just eight weeks and you need sixteen weeks' training to go overseas. We'll give you eight more weeks here at Leonard Wood. It's just a formality, so we'll put you in combat engineer training, with the boys who frankly aren't bright enough for the infantry."

The additional eight weeks were as tough as the first had been. We marched long miles, and in teams of six lugged 500-pound prefabricated pieces of Bailey bridges down to the Big Sandy River to make a structure that could carry tanks. Finally we boarded a troop train to go east to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then sail out of Brooklyn to Europe. At Dix I got my assignment--to the 97th Engineer Battalion, headquartered not in Germany but at Verdun, in France. They had neglected to put the Russian test on my record but listed the engineer training. I shrugged and said C'est la vie, which exhausted my French.

We landed at...