As mentioned in my previous post, I worked as part of a force protection team during Cobra Gold 2013 in Thailand. What that means in simple terms is that we were the liaison between local officials and the US military units participating in the exercise. We were the first point of contact for the Thai police if any US service member did something dumb in town. Consequently, we had a local interpreter assigned to us that was vetted and hired by the US Embassy since neither myself or my partner could speak Thai.

Meeting Somchai (not his real name) for the first time was an experience. Imagine the Thai version of Eustace Bagge from the Courage the Cowardly Dog cartoon, down to him only having four teeth and being slightly hunched over. He didn't inspire much confidence in me in our first meeting as he struggled through a basic introduction. But hey, the Embassy hired him, so he must have met some sort of minimum qualifications, right? Wrong.

The first day of work in Phitsanulok we meet him at our hotel at 0800 to head to our first meeting with the head of the local Royal Thai Police Special Branch Bureau office. Somchai is drunk. Not a good way to make good first impressions. Luckily the guy we were meeting with spoke fluent English so Somchai could sleep it off in the van. That meeting goes well and we get a lot of good information and contacts for additional meetings around town.

The next morning we had a bit of free time until our first meeting at 1100, so I walked around the downtown area with Somchai. We stopped at a rather large statue of a man riding a horse with an equally large plaque next to it. I asked Somchai about the statue, who it was, and why was he famous. After several minutes of staring at it, he turns to me and says "I don't know. I can't read it." Yup, I had an interpreter that was functionally illiterate in his native language. Great job Embassy staff. Turns out the statue of was of King Rama I, the founder of the current Thai monarchy and a very famous historical figure.

But wait, it gets worse!

A few days later we're at a meeting with the 1 star general in charge of base security in Phitsanulok who is already in a bad mood because his boss (the Commanding General for the 3rd Army Area) ordered him to meet with us instead of the request coming up through his subordinates. Thai men with lots of power or high ranking positions seem to always have fragile egos - but that's a discussion for a different sub. We get into the meeting and Somchai starts introducing us to the general and then starts talking about his military experience. Somchai was apparently a Thai volunteer for the North Vietnamese during the war working as an artillery officer. He still carried his NVA military ID with him! That meeting was a complete clusterf***. We were practically banned from the base because of him and my dumbass coworker who implied that the general was doing a bad job with base access control procedures.

Overall, he was far and away the worst interpreter I've ever worked with, and that includes the interpreter that started masturbating during an interrogation at a detention facility. I interacted with several other interpreters hired by the embassy during the exercise who were all very good at their jobs. The interpreter, a young and attractive female, that was assigned to work with a US 2 star general may have been the one that filed the complaint which helped lead to his eventual dismissal from command (I don't know if I'm allowed to reference his name, though there are several articles about it) but I was interviewed by investigators after the exercise.

A few months later one of my coworkers was in Thailand for a different exercise and was given an Embassy assigned interpreter who turned out to be a retired 2-star general who headed intelligence operations for the Thai Army at one point.

I don't know what the Embassy's vetting procedures were at the time, but I hope they have improved in the last decade. To allow a former NVA soldier and a former intelligence officer to work in a trusted position like an interpreter seems a bit of a failure from my viewpoint. Somchai's lack of ability also was a key factor in me deciding to focus on language acquisition and cultural studies so that I wouldn't have to rely on someone as bad as him in the future when working in foreign countries.

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Glossary:

Royal Thai Police Special Branch Bureau: Think of them as a bit like the Thai version of the FBI.

Third Army Area: One of the four regional Thai Army commands. It is responsible for all military units in Northern Thailand and is headquartered in Phitsanulok. It is a 3 star command.