How Learning Languages Turned Die By Wire's Heroine Into A Sniper
"Love tulips, puppies, long walks on the beach, fine wine, foreign travel and killing bad, evil mofos." — From Mira Longbow's profile at her Guardian Sniper blog
Without a gift for languages, Mira Longbow would never have become a Guardian Sniper, and would never have been the heroine and star of Die By Wire. When we look back, we can all see that the trajectories of our all lives have their arcs nudged and altered by actions and events beyond our control. We can turn these to our advantage only by recognizing them.
The following excerpts show the series of linguistic events that led Mira Longbow to the present day.
WHY SO MANY EXCERPTS FROM SO MANY CHAPTERS?
Too much explanatory material slows down the action. Plus, it would read like a resume, not a thriller.
The trick is to keep the explanations short and to work them into the action, in a context that makes sense.
Alas, favorite parts often run too long and have to be edited out. In the very last part on how Mira learns languages, I have followed the final text from the book with the full text in the previous draft. The objective in the edits is to cut in a way that retains the a sense of the character.
Finally, these excerpts are, obviously, without context. I have added some context by [putting words in italicized brackets.] One other bit of important context that has nothing to do with foreign languages: Mira grew up in the Finger Lakes region of Western New York State and learned deer hunting from her father. Mira had a reputation of being a dead shot even then. She graduated from Corning Community College with a degree in criminal justice and had been accepted to the New York State police academy. She enlisted in the U.S. Army on 9/12.
MIRA'S JOURNEY: EXCERPTS FROM
DIE BY WIRE
[Hero Jackson Day's terse assessment of Mira:] "Languages. A dead-on sniper. A philosophy degree. A military cop who could kick your butt up between your shoulder blades. WTF?"
WHAT GOT MIRA INTERESTED IN LANGUAGES? FROM THE PROLOGUE
Two years into her enlistment Mira had been buried with public affairs assignments — women's work — until the night she took down bad-ass Master Sergeant Dan Brown who'd been big, bad and disorderly. She single-handedly dropped him in a matter of seconds with her bare hands: no baton, no pepper spray, no sidearm.
Respect came immediately. Some joked about the Xena in their midst. But Mira was no Amazon, just an intensely motivated, highly fit, five-foot-nine redhead. She ran, worked out, fought smart and did her best to keep her generous curves out of the equation.
Shortly after taking down Master Sergeant Brown, company brass attached her to Day's squad. Not a member of the squad. Just attached, tolerated to handle the culturally explosive task of searching Iraqi women.
Day had quickly let her know that, given a choice, he'd certainly have nothing to do with women in the infantry. "Follow my orders to the letter. Try to keep up with us. Don't do stupid things that'll get people killed."
Mira quickly discovered an innate ability to pick up Arabic. That quick fluency connected her with the women she searched. They women confided in her, told her the locations of weapons caches, men, booby-traps. And that they hated al-Sadr and his jihadi perverts.
WHAT DID MIRA DO WITH LANGUAGES AFTER THE ARMY? FROM CHAPTER 1
Evil was a certainty she could believe in. And something worth further study. So she transferred her college credits [from Corning Community College] and uncanny language skills to Cornell and completed a bachelor's degree in Near Asian languages and a doctorate in philosophy.
WHAT ENABLED MIRA TO PROGRESS WITH LANGUAGES? FROM CHAPTER 7
Derek Stocker [A Dutch Army doctor, now an intelligence officer that Mira met in Iraq] quickly became her mentor, interested in Mira's ability to produce actionable combat intelligence and her proficiency with foreign languages and a rifle. After her discharge, he hired her to help train DSI snipers. That income had helped her keep body and soul together.
HOW MANY LANGUAGES DOES MIRE SPEAK? FROM CHAPTER 24
The owner greeted her [Mira] with a smile and her first name in some strange tongue.
They followed him toward a table.
"Indonesian?" He [Day] asked her.
"What does that make? Sixteen languages? Seventeen?"
"I never counted," she said. "And that was Bahasa, a form of Malay."
The owner seated them outside at a table near the door.
"There's actually no such language as Indonesian."
WHY HAD DAY BEEN SENT TO RECRUIT A RELUCTANT MIRA LONGBOW? FROM CHAPTER 26
[Jackson Day to Mira:] "The people pulling in a steady salary from Uncle Sugar have a certain basic competence, but lack your gift to think simultaneously in a lot of different languages, to cut through dialects, to make connections."
HOW DOES MIRA LEARN SO MANY LANGUAGES? FROM CHAPTER 19
Moments later, she picked her way across a confusion of tracks where two major tram lines intersected, then plunged into a sea of humanity jamming the Leidseplein. She opened her mind to the polyglot filling her ears. Mostly Dutch, but a lot of English right now along with some German, French, a dusting of Arabic.
Languages came to Mira like deconstructing a sweater: find a thread, pull it.
With Dutch, the alpha thread came through geography: straat meant street, gracht was canal, a plein was a plaza, steeg was alley. Put them together with another word — Prinsengracht: Prince's Canal — and the new word was easier to remember because it hung onto a familiar one.
Mira navigated the funky miasma in front of the Bulldog Cafe and skirted the crowd taking in a juggler in front of the Burger King. She checked the Droid again.
Nothing. She left the square behind and strode northwest.
FROM UNCUT DRAFT: HOW DOES MIRA LEARN SO MANY LANGUAGES?
Moments later, she made her way across a confusion of tracks where two major tram lines intersected, then plunged into a sea of humanity jamming the Leidseplein.
She opened her mind to the polyglot that filled her ears. Mostly Dutch, but a lot of English right now along with some German, French, a dusting of Arabic and the tonal sing-song of Chinese which eluded her completely. She was yet to find a thread to pull.
Languages came to Mira like deconstructing a sweater: find a thread, then pull it.
With Dutch, the alpha thread came with geography: -straat was "street," -gracht was "canal," -plein was "plaza," -steeg was "alley" and -kade meant "avenue." Put them together with another word — Prinsengracht: Prince's Canal — and the new word was easier to remember because it hung onto a familiar one. It helped that she had studied German at Cornell. To Mira, Dutch lay at the intersection of German and English just as Italian seemed, to her ears, a miscegenation between Spanish and French.
Dutch then.
Rather than translate back and forth to English, Mira slipped into the Dutch conversations around her as she pressed past a crowd that had gathered to watch a juggler performing in front of the Burger King. From the far right side of the square, the funky spice of marijuana drifted over from the Bulldog cafe.
As Mira reached the Leidsestraat, the crowd eased. She checked the Droid again, then picked up her pace, heading northwest. She walked faster, outpaced the heat of her anger.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I really like this previous scene.
I've always been pretty good with languages (never as good as Mira, obviously.) At one time, I was fluent in French, near-fluent in Puerto Rican Spanish, conversational in German and struggled with Italian and Dutch. I even wrestled with Polish, but it kicked my butt. Not incidentally, the way Mira learns languages — the sweater — is how I do as well.
