Dustin Sexton, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by John C. Worsencroft, September 12, 2009: Saving the Legacy tape no. IA-5

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DU TIN E TON MB R 21 2009 don t want to go north because that s dangerous. Well we get in with this ta i driv r Misha was his name, and he was like, "I want to take you north. We re like uh, oh (laughs). He just started driving and two hours later we're still driving. We're like oh, we 're screwed. We thought we were going to die. But he took us to this old town that had one of the first churches from John the Baptist and went in there. It was under reconstruction. We got to see a bunch of underground tombs and, oh, it was awesome. They'd never seen Marines, chances are they 'd never even seen Americans before, and everybody was super nice and super happy to talk to us. They took us to this old style Russian camp where Stalin had camped before and fed us out of the cabins that the soldiers had slept in in this Russian style camp. We just had a great day off. It was awesome to go out and experience this culture. It was amazing. JCW: Did you have an interpreter with you? DS: No, we didn't. JCW: Did you find people that could speak English, though? DS: No. I had learned, this was late in our. .. we'd actually gotten left there. The Air Force fucked up and lost our transportation. I don't know how you lose transportation for all these individuals. There were a thousand people there, but whatever. So we couldn't leave and we'd gotten an extra day off or whatever and this was during that time, so our translators weren't getting paid anymore, so we didn't have our translators. But I had learned enough. I'd been there long enough that I'd learned enough to kind of stumble through it because I'd never, like when I was in high school or whatever, I took Spanish and took language classes, but I never really wanted to learn. But this language I wanted to learn. So I really worked with my interpreter and was able to kind of stumble along, 7