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NATO, former Soviet bloc foes wage joint exercise (This is a pool report from reporters travelling with the U.S. Defence Department)

FORT POLK: Troop planes, helicopters and trucks lined up on Friday to ferry 1,200 NATO and former Soviet bloc foes into one of their most realistic joint military exercises yet in a programme that is to lead to some of the old foes' NATO membership.

The former adversaries are training together in the sixth major Partnership for Peace military exercise, the first to be conducted in the United States.

The troops from three NATO countries and 14 former Soviet bloc countries were to be flown and truck-convoyed into a supposed buffer zone between two hostile countries on an Atlantic island.

Fort Polk has one of the most realistic training programmes in the world and actors were on hand to play angry mobs and badly wounded civilians. U.S. soldiers were assigned to be snipers and bandits.

Colonel Ray Fitzgerald, one of the officers in charge of the exercise, said the troops flying in went through an airplane safety drill on Thursday and he saw so many blank stares of non-understanding that a second drill was ordered.

That is because the biggest problem the Partnership for Peace military exercises have encountered is the obvious one: the language barrier. Translators in each platoon have to repeat every order.

A Canadian officer said the problems in conducting fast- moving military operations in so many languages have not been solved and said there is occasional friction between soldiers from countries with age-old hatreds.

But a group of British soldiers took the language problem in stride.

"It's a little slower but we get there in the end," said Private Paul Brazier, 24.

He said he saw conviviality, not hostility, among the troops from so many countries -- "swapping T-shirts, things like that."

The soldiers are from the United States, Britain, Canada, Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, the Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Partnership for Peace troops are to participate only in peacekeeping operations. But NATO is to formally decide in the next few months whether to accept some of the former Soviet bloc countries into NATO and the timetable and conditions for doing so.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are widely regarded to be the first of them to become NATO members. Hungary's Prime Minister, Gyula Horn, has said he believes it will become a NATO member in 1997.-Reuter