The New York Times (Sunday) Magazine has as one of its regular columns “The Ethicist,” where readers can pose questions as to whether something they, or others, have done or said is ethical—or not.
I have had a question nagging me for about 50 years now, but the issue is too nuanced, too long and too dated (the statute of limitations has hopefully expired on this one) for me to be bothering Randy Cohen with it.
However, since I have a more or less “captive audience” here at TMV, let me do a full catharsis here and let the chips fall where they may.
As a young immigrant to the United States—I had just turned 18 at the time—I decided to serve my newly adopted country and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force.
During basic military training, my Training Instructor (T.I.) soon—about one minute into our mutual acquaintance— noticed that English was not my native tongue. During one of those few-and-far-between “intimate” T.I.-trainee moments, he “suggested” that I take some of the Defense Language Proficiency Tests, since at the time the Air Force was in need of linguists.
A few days later, I was taken to the testing center. I had indicated fluency or proficiency in four languages (English was not one of them), and had been given the choice of the order in which to take the tests.
I chose the following order: Dutch, Spanish, German and French, mainly because that was a descending order of proficiency.
Now, at the time I was truly fluent in Dutch and Spanish and quite proficient in German and French.
If I recall correctly, the testing took two days. I had absolutely no problem with the Dutch test and passed it with flying colors.
The next test was Spanish. To my surprise, both the spoken and written parts were pretty much the same as the Dutch test. That is, the short stories one had to answer questions about, the phrases one had to translate, etc. were the same, except for the language. Again, I passed it with flying colors. I thought that the fact that both tests were the same was just a coincidence
I could not believe it when, the next day, the stories, phrases, etc. in the German and French tests were also the same or very similar—again, except for the language—as the Dutch and Spanish tests.
Because of the similarity, I probably scored a little better in these two languages than I otherwise would have.
The test results indicated fluency in Dutch and Spanish (which I did have) and a very high level of competency in German and French—a little higher than I deserved.
As it turned out—and as it is sometimes typical in our military services—, the Air Force never took advantage of my languages fluency or proficiency. Rather, they spent a good amount of money training me as an aircraft crew member and later as a “communications-electronics staff officer.”
Therefore, “no harm was done.” However, the question that has been nagging me (don’t worry, I don’t lose sleep over it) for 50 years is whether I should have alerted the testing officials to the fact that all four language tests I took were the same or very similar.
Now, to put the purists’ minds at ease, I took some of the language tests again about ten years later and apparently somebody had gotten the word to the test developers that there were service men and women who could in fact speak more than one foreign language.
The question to the “ethicists” among you is: What would you have done as a young recruit when faced with such a dilemma? Have you been in similar situations?
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.