Published in the Current
Specialist Isa Lomac-MacNair of Scarborough is serving in the U.S. Army, stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, working in military intelligence. She specializes in Russian and Serbo-Croatian languages and is taking a leadership course that will help in her promotion to the rank of sergeant, according to her father, Andrew Lomac-MacNair.
She attended Cape Elizabeth schools through ninth grade, because her father is a teacher at the Cape Elizabeth Middle School. She transferred to Scarborough High School and graduated from there in 1999.
After basic training, she was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Berkeley, Calif., for just over a year, and then went to Schofield Barracks, which is near Honolulu.
She chose languages based on the results of her Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery tests, which indicated that she would be good at language acquisition. “She was very good in languages in school,” her father said. With a good memory and a strong vocabulary, he said, “linguistics was kind of a natural.”
She went directly from high school into the military, having decided that she needed more structure than is available on college campuses. “It was one of the best moves she could have made,” her father said. “She’s a very bright young woman but she needed that structure.”
Not only does she have four years of college language credit, but she also has a lot of money available to her through the G.I. Bill and recruitment incentives, which she can use to pay for college when she gets out of the military.
Her enlistment is up in about a year, and her father said he doesn’t know whether she’ll re-enlist or decide to leave the service. Her experience, he said, puts her in a good position for either continuing in the military or getting a civilian job.
She will be coming home for Christmas, he said, and the family is looking forward to seeing her then.