15 Min Language Story | Scott Womack

When Language Becomes Leadership

Because sometimes the most powerful stories are not about conflict —
they are about understanding.

Lean in.
And consider how language has shaped your own journey.

This special 15-minute conversation is an excerpt from Scott Womack’s earlier visit to It’s About Language — Episode 98: The Power of Intercultural Understanding.

From a young cadet at West Point discovering German as more than a requirement…
To serving across Africa as a Foreign Area Officer…
To negotiating safe passage during a civil war without a single shot fired…

Scott’s story reminds us that language is not just academic. It is operational. It is relational. It is human.

He shares:

• How immersion changes the way we see the world
• Why intercultural competence often matters more than perfect grammar
• The connection between language, empathy, and leadership
• A defining moment when listening and negotiation prevented violence

At the heart of this conversation is one simple truth:

Two eyes.
Two ears.
One mouth.

Listening can carry you further than speaking.

This excerpt captures the essence of Episode 98 in a way that is reflective, personal, and deeply human — the kind of story that stays with you long after it ends. Listen to Episode 98 – The Power of Intercultural Understanding: Scott Womack

---

Transcript

Scott Womack (00:05)

I grew up being very passionate about history.

I applied

And was accepted to West Point, which was a surprise to me and everybody else around me. And bless their hearts, I was proud to be there and proud to be a graduate. I majored in history, but was very attracted to foreign languages because we had to take two years of a language while there, and I took German. I had done Latin in high school, which served me well for a foundation. And my two favorite German professors.

Norah Jones (00:11)

Hehehe

Scott Womack (00:31)

A German and the other an American who had spent a lot of time in Germany. And their perspectives about not just the language but how the language was like a key that unlocked the door to German culture was very interesting to me. So I ended up minoring in German and was eventually posted there. And we just lived in a little village off post and I got pretty because I was immersed in it. And I found that living overseas, kind of immersing myself in the culture, shopping at local stores rather than on base, registering my car with the German economy rather than to the Army, all these kind of daily quotidian things just showed me such a new way of doing things.

About my eighth year of service, I changed to what’s called civil affairs. And the job of civil affairs officers is to take small teams wherever there are Americans deployed.

Impacting the civilian population to the extent possible and also to keep the civilian population away from the military operation. And in that mode, this was the 90s, mostly what we were doing was humanitarian things like humanitarian demining, some refugee repatriation in Rwanda after the genocide in 1994, a bunch of people came home in 96. And so I was working constantly mostly African interlocutors, African military officers, civilians, and some UN people. And found the work totally fascinating, but I was very hampered because I didn’t speak French at the time. And seemed like every country I went to was a francophone country. So when I came back, you know, towards the end of that tour, I looked around and asked the Army to switch me to another career field called Foreign Area Officer,

Norah Jones (01:49)

Hmm.

Scott Womack (02:01)

You the language training in your region specialty. So not surprisingly, I became an Africa Foreign Air and Officer. And from that point on, devoted the last 12 years of my career to African Affairs, spending half of that time living in Africa, and using French every day and dealing with my African counterparts every day is just a part of life. My children luckily were able to move over there with us, me and my wife and kids.

They went to French schools, so they got ahold of the language, had local friends, got a hold of the culture, and it was a great experience for everybody. During my time in Africa, as that specialty, I ended up being assigned to West Point to teach French, and at the time, the Iraq War had changed, which had started 20 years ago this year. The second Iraq War had changed from a kind of conventional, you know, a kind of a traditional Army on Army battle to an insurgency, and the Defense Department and Army discovered we weren’t really equipped to deal with civilians in that setting appropriately. And it was very tragic. A lot of things could have been headed off, maybe if we had kind of taken the time to figure that out. So a lot of money got put into how do we help leaders especially, but also soldiers not only learn the language, but figure out how to deal with it.

Norah Jones (02:53)

Mmm.

Scott Womack (03:08)

With foreign cultures in a positive, productive way, engage with them rather than judge them. And that was the time I hit West Point as a professor. So we started an organization called the Center for Languages, Cultures, and Regional Studies. That was exploring the relationship between language proficiency, intercultural competence, and regional knowledge, knowledge of the region, what’s going on.

there’s a lively debate in academic circles about those three topics and how they interplay with each other. Since I was kind of approaching it from an operational standpoint, we kind of looked at a spectrum or continuum, and the more profound leaders engagement with the local population,meant the more language proficiency, regional knowledge, and cultural competence that leader would need. So as a Foreign Area Officer where I’m dealing, frankly, with kind of diplomatic, strategic level things, I need to be quite, if not fluent, extremely proficient in French.

But also,it’s a diplomatic function also with the intercultural competence piece. If I can’t see their point of view, if I can’t have some empathy for where my counterpart’s coming from, I will not be able to be effective as a negotiator with them. And then the regional knowledge kind of ties into that. Those are the travel tips, the facts, you know, about which hand to use and, you know, things like that. And you need a lot of that at that level.

On the other hand, I’m a sergeant manning a checkpoint. I still need all three, I just don’t need them maybe to the same profound level as I would in a more complicated environment. So we were trying to figure out at what level do which leaders need how much language, how much cultural competence, and how much kind of regional knowledge facts. And kind of came down on the one that needed to be competence part because so much of that is observing using your two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two hands to intake information rather than your one mouth to constantly be putting out information. You can go a long way even if you don’t speak the language at a high level or you don’t know a whole lot about the history of the place you are in.

Norah Jones (04:53)

Interesting.

Scott Womack (05:12)

The fairy tales start with Once Upon a Time, and war stories start with There We Were. So There We Were. I was the US Defense Attaché assigned to Njamena Chad, and also covered the neighboring country of Central African Republic. And at the time, Central African Republic had a civil war going on.

And a group of armed rebels from the northern part of the country were moving south towards the capital. And I got a phone call one Sunday saying, you need to get here because the fighting is reaching the outskirts of the city. And we need to figure out what do we do next? Do we stay? Do we leave? What’s the plan? And as a defense attache, my job was threefold. I was an advisor to the ambassador.

On all matters military, both ours and the host countries. I was an advisor to the host country on what kinds of cooperation with the United States makes sense for them and for us, where’s the common interest and what things make sense. Kind of an implementer, if there was a military assistance program, I was the guy that made sure it got going and was working smoothly. And then I was a reporter, you know, just keep people informed what’s going on in the political

In my two countries. So I got on a little private plane that we could charter sometimes and by a French guy and he wanted to go there anyway, he had a stranded mechanic. So we flew down there and it took some daring to get there because the airport was closed due to the proximity of the rebels, the airports outside the capital. The president at the or had to ask Muammar Gaddafi, the then leader of Libya, to send troops to guard his airport. So it was guarded by Libyans, a few hundred of them with armored vehicles, and they wouldn’t let anything come or go.

So landing there was out. So we detoured to Congo and then crossed the river in these little canoes to get to Bangui. When I got to the embassy, yet but they were in the suburbs and the president of the country had not paid his army nor were they equipped properly so they basically stayed in their barracks and sat it out so he asked a group of Congolese rebels from northern Congo under John Pierpemba to come help them obviously for pay probably in the form of diamond mining rights because of CAR has diamonds available.

So there was these rebels. So you had the airport, then you had a belt of Congolese, and then the president’s security guard had remained loyal and active, so they were with him actually in the city. Through teleconferences from the embassy, we kind of proposed, had a conversation with both the State Department, who was in charge of these kinds of things, any sort of evacuation that might have to happen. And the initial reaction was typical. Let’s do something.

Let’s seize a corridor from the airport to the embassy and get people out that way. Or let’s float people down the river, the rivers that are back, down to a safe location and disembark them off of rafts or inflatable boats in a safe place in Congo they could pick them up. And the trouble with those was, of course, the first option was going to be costly, financially costly in lives. The second option, by then we had agreed to take the Japanese and the British and the Canadians with us.

A couple of them were elderly and just couldn’t see putting them in a zodiac boat for that long of a ride. So we kind of, the ambassador and I asked our respective leaders if we could have some time, a couple of days, days to just negotiate an exit with the various people between us and the airport if they just let us go without having to do any big deployments. And to Washington’s credit, they said, yes, let’s give it a try.

So Ambassador Sharpless went off and talked to the president of the country and the prime minister to deal with the political fallout from this. And I went and talked to the gunslingers, which were the presidential security guard who were regular trained soldiers.

The rebels who were definitely not, and the Libyans who were also trained soldiers. And at every stop, I had to recalibrate both my level of French and how I approached these guys culturally. And I don’t mean cultural as in the culture of Congo, culturally as who they represented. So the soldiers, the security guards knew soldier speak and were disciplined, soldier. The rebels were mostly teenagers with guns. That’s a different conversation. And then the Libyans were at the time pretty hostile to the United States. And that was a third different conversation to have. And thanks to my training and experience, and I just just kind of a willingness to be quiet and listen and observe, we were able to make deals departure, we rolled straight through, no gunfire, no crazy things. To a C-130 aircraft landed from the US Air Force, picked it up and flew us to Cameron, and it went off without a hitch. It’s one of my proudest moments just because the alternatives would have probably been financially and morally expensive, and we just didn’t have to go there.

Become a Sponsor