In 1970, I attended the MATA Senior NCO Course at Fort Bragg. Besides training us to be Advisors, the course included 24 weeks of Vietnamese (12 weeks at Bragg and 12 weeks at Biggs Army Airfield, El Paso, TX).
In those days, the majority of Senior NCOs had been stationed in Germany and had a working knowledge of German. When we were reciting our "dialogs" in the mornings of our Vietnamese course it was easy to insert a German verb or noun into a Vietnamese sentence. The odd thing was almost everyone in class understood what we were saying except for the native Vietnamese instructor.
When I arrived back in Vietnam, I continued to slip every once in a while and I would use German in a sentence with the indigenous people. I was amazed that they could understand until one day an ARVN Dai Ta explained that the local area had been a French Foreign Legion post and most of the Legionaires had been former Wermach soldiers.
