MSI Press Blog

Tentative release date: November Book Description What happens when you don't plan to travel the world—but the world keeps asking you to come? From a barefoot childhood on a farm in rural Maine to unexpected assignments across the globe, Betty Lou Leaver has spent five decades answering one recurring question: Can you come help us? And so she went. She trained astronauts and cosmonauts, taught teachers in Brazil, rescued a dying child in Siberia, worked with diplomats in Central Asia, and built educational bridges across Cold War divides. Along the way, she encountered remarkable people, navigated unfamiliar cultures, collected unlikely souvenirs, and discovered that the most memorable journeys are rarely the ones we plan. In In with the East Wind: Unexpected Journeys , Volume 1: ABC Lands , the first volume of a five-volume international memoir, Leaver takes readers from her childhood roots in Acton, Maine, to Afghanistan, Armenia, Austria, Bahrain, Belarus, Brazil, Cambodia, Cana...

  The U.S. military did not always speak in the language of LREC . For decades, language training existed, regional expertise was scattered across specialized communities, and cultural understanding was treated as a soft skill rather than a strategic asset. The modern concept of LREC — a unified triad of Language , Regional Expertise , and Culture — emerged only when the military recognized that technological superiority alone could not guarantee mission success. Early Roots: Who Started Talking About LREC, and When? Although the U.S. military has trained linguists since World War II, the integrated idea of LREC began gaining traction in the early 2000s, especially during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Commanders and policymakers increasingly recognized that understanding local languages and cultures was not optional — it was operationally decisive. By the mid‑2000s, the Department of Defense began formalizing this recognition. The Defense Language Office (DLO) and senior lead...