There’s a cryptological museum at Fort Meade in Maryland. It’s actually more interesting than I expected it to be.
One display was about three linguists. They sounded like absolute linguistic idiot savants. I’m guess they found these guys in some institution and not through a newspaper ad.
One of them, in the late 1950’s was reading about some action in Vietnam and thought that the US might be getting involved there. So he went home and taught himself Vietnamese one weekend so he could translate intercepts.
Were they cunning linguists?...............
—” They sounded like absolute linguistic idiot savants.”
I served with a guy that was a Post Doc in Egyptology, worked in the pyramids... fluent in over FIFTEEN LANGUAGES.
He thought OCS would be better than being a draftee???
He said it was easy for him?
Other than that an everyday normal guy.