They always looked at me in a strange way when I was at DLI, because I would read the poetry, no one else. Most people, most students stuck to the military terminology, the weapons systems that they had, the guns that they had. I never did that. My research paper was on the Albanian Renaissance, the poets and the writers. I knew that I knew the military language just as well as anybody. I could speak about and understand the military just as well as anybody. But I also did non-military things like the arts, the sciences, the languages, and that’s what I did a paper on. We had to write a paper. I did a paper on the literature of the Albanian Renaissance. Turns out that they were sort of centered around the 1880s for their renaissance. And I think that helped me understand them better. It gave me an insight into the culture and who it was on the other side of that radio call.
