Refugee helping U.S. military

BOISE, Idaho – Pfc. Marc Armbruster of Meridian is used to seeing his fellow Idahoans serving in the National Guard at Fort Polk, La., as they trained for deployment to Iraq.

But seeing a civilian co-worker from Idaho caught him off guard.

Armbruster was working a traffic control checkpoint last month during his training at Fort Polk when he needed an interpreter to talk to one of the Iraqis on base.

Up walked Salah Mustafa of Boise.

“I was like, `Hey, Salah, how you doing? Small world,”’ Armbruster said. “It was a big surprise — someone in Meridian who worked with me at Wal-Mart being over here as an interpreter.”

Armbruster is among 1,600 Idaho citizen soldiers in the 116th Brigade Combat Team. Along with 2,400 soldiers from six other states, the team is expected to be serving in northern Iraq by the end of the year.

The Fort Polk experience was even stranger for 38-year-old Mustafa. Not only was he meeting Idahoans he knows, but also many people he knew from his native Iraq.

“I’ve got so many friends here from my old city,” Mustafa said.

About seven years ago, Mustafa lived in Dohuk in northern Iraq near the Turkish border. He worked for the United Nations and the United States as an interpreter in both northern Iraq and Azerbaijan, a former Soviet country along the Caspian Sea between Russia and Iran.

He later emigrated to the United States because, after working for the United States and U.N., it would have been too dangerous for him to stay in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was still in power, he said.

In 2000, he moved to Boise from Dallas and has been in Idaho ever since. Boise, he said, looks a lot like Dohuk. He loves floating the Boise River and camping in Cascade.

When he heard from a friend that Iraqi interpreters were needed, he immediately signed up with the private contractor that supplies interpreters for Fort Polk.

“I said, ‘I’m going to come and help,’ ” he said.

Mustafa took time off from his job at Wal-Mart in Meridian to interpret for the U.S. troops training in Louisiana. He speaks English, Kurdish, Arabic, Farsi and Azeri.

I want to help these soldiers to learn,” Mustafa said.

In addition to serving as an interpreter, he teaches soldiers how to interact with Iraqis and understand their culture.

Mustafa said he is impressed with the training the soldiers received at Fort Polk, the home of the Joint Readiness Training Center and its demanding and realistic training regimen.

It is where many of the U.S. troops bound for Iraq are getting drilled on Iraq-specific tactics before they deploy. At Fort Polk, Iraqis play the roles of villagers in a mock-up of an Iraqi city. Soldiers must learn to tell friendly Iraqis from hostile ones. They can never make assumptions – a welcoming village leader one day may be portraying an enemy the next day.

Soldiers training at Fort Polk must deal with everything from Iraqi citizens who sell cigarettes outside the Army post to insurgents who shoot at soldiers and plant bombs in the villages.

“It’s almost real, man, except you don’t really get killed,” Mustafa said. “It’s kind of like a movie.”

At Fort Polk, Mustafa lived a few tents down from the Idaho soldiers. Living conditions for both citizen-soldiers and citizen-trainers are a far cry from the local Hilton. There is no running water and no hot showers. Soldiers and interpreters eat precooked meals in the mess tents and ready-to-eat rations in the field.

“I knew what I was getting myself into,” Mustafa said.

Mustafa will return to Boise in mid-November and resume his job at Wal-Mart. He remained at Fort Polk after the Idaho Guard members finished their training to continue interpreting for Army troops.

Armbruster said he appreciated seeing Mustafa in Louisiana.

“He’s doing a great job, and I’m happy he came down here to help us,” Armbruster said. “He didn’t have to, but he did it anyway. He said he felt obligated to do it.”