by Ralph Keyes
The wars that followed were at least as shocking, brutal, and stomach turning. No less than during the Great War, evasive language was needed to hide their horrors. World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and both wars in Iraq produced their own euphemisms and plenty of them. Any sophisticated modern warrior realizes that proper choice of evasive words is an essential part of a coordinated military strategy. A crucial entry in any military man’s vita is demonstrated mastery of the euphemisms of war.
Fogging War
When British soldiers were being beaten back by Erwin Rommel’s forces in northern Africa, Winston Churchill received a communiqué from the front lines saying, “Our forces are now engaged in a fluid action.” What they were doing, of course, was retreating. This military action is rarely called by that word, however, at least for public consumption. Instead, modern military forces leaving the field of battle under duress fall back, shorten the line, disengage, or withdraw. An orderly retreat is a coordinated withdrawal. A disorderly one—a rout—is an uncoordinated withdrawal. Outright defeat is a defensive victory, an adjustment of the front, a strategic movement to the rear, or, in sardonic soldierspeak, an advance to the rear. At one time, the American military brass toyed with calling the exit of those who had infiltrated enemy territory exfiltration, but it was a nonstarter.
Try to imagine William Tecumseh Sherman referring to the exfiltration of his troops. Sherman would never make it in today’s military environment where the fog of war refers as much to the way it’s depicted as to the way it’s fought. Every modern war has generated its own euphemistic way of describing soldiers who break down during combat. In World War I, this condition was called shell shock because it was thought to result from shell-generated shock waves traumatizing the nervous system. During the next world war and subsequent fighting in Korea, combat-induced trauma was more euphemistically labeled battle fatigue or combat fatigue. (“They call it combat fatigue,” one of its victims told a reporter during the Korean War. “Combat fatigue, hell, I cracked up.”) Soldiers suffering from this condition in Vietnam were said to have had an acute environmental reaction. Vietnam also gave birth to the related post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a label that persisted through both wars in Iraq. Vagueness escalated as syllables multiplied, and we went from a stark, descriptive phrase to one that was blandly bureaucratic.
The word “war” itself has proved a bit too stark for military euphemizers who today are more likely to refer to armed conflict, military operations, or even special action. The latter was a phrase often used by Nazis to describe their genocidal activities during World War II. Following that war, Soviet leaders who met to discuss the development of chemical and biological weapons said their meetings were about special problems. “Special” is a word much beloved by obfuscating soldiers. If someone in a military uniform ever tells you you’ve been singled out for special treatment, head for the hills.
Since it suits even militaristic regimes to say they’re only defending their populace, yesterday’s “armies” are today’s defense forces. After World War II, the United States changed the name of its Department of War to the Department of Defense (DOD). In 1964, the British followed suit and renamed their War Office the Ministry of Defense.
If Lyndon Johnson had had his way, America’s invasion of Vietnam the following year would have been called an incursion. Richard Nixon used the same word to describe our subsequent clandestine invasion of Cambodia. The war in Southeast Asia, according to war correspondent Michael Herr, “spawned a jargon of such delicate locutions that it’s often impossible to know even remotely the thing being described.” That’s the whole point, of course. Such language has the effect of soothing rather than arousing, of promoting a sense of apathy more than one of alarm. It is verbal Prozac. “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing,” complained an American officer during the Vietnam war. “It’s not bombing. It’s air support.”
In the modern military lexicon, “bombs” have become explosive devices. Cluster bombs that disperse their lethal force among human beings in a broad vicinity are area-denial weapons. Airplanes that drop them are force packages. Nuclear weapons capable of killing millions and devastating the earth are strategic devices. The radiation they give off is measured in strontium units (following a failed Pentagon effort to call them sunshine units).
The greater our capacity to destroy the planet and its inhabitants, the more demand there is for euphemistically bland words to distract us from this reality. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he was less affected by discussions about mass nuclear destruction, with all its talk of throw weights and kill ratios, than by a TV movie of the week called The Day After that graphically depicted the devastation following such a conflict. After he watched this horrifying film, Reagan got serious about forging an agreement with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear weapons.
Reagan’s awakening would not have surprised George Orwell. In his classic essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell pointed out that a key purpose of euphemistic expressions is to provide words for horrific events that make it hard to visualize them. Thus, the bombing of villages, routing of their residents, machine-gunning of livestock, and burning of homes is called pacification. Sending the now-homeless residents elsewhere is a mere transfer of population. Those displaced from their homes who were once known as “refugees,” then “displaced persons,” in the contemporary military lexicon have become ambient noncombatant personnel.
In too many cases, such people are reviled ethnic minorities. This raises the ever-sensitive question of how the majority deals with an undesired minority in the midst of conflict. Certainly, one wouldn’t want to “expel,” “intern,” or “kill” them. But perhaps they could be transferred to another country. Alternatively, an inconvenient minority might be sent to relocation centers, as Japanese Americans were during World War II. (Until the implications became clear, such centers were called concentration camps by Franklin Roosevelt and others.) At an extreme, minority groups could be cleansed, as happened in the Balkans and Rwanda during the 1990s and in Darfur after that. When public discourse involves such terms, neither speaker nor listener is burdened by having to picture what’s actually being done. Those directly engaged certainly can, but the words used by military officers, government officials, and members of the media protect folks back home from the brutal realities they depict.
Shielding civilians from the specifics of combat and desensitizing them to war’s horror are the paramount goals of warrior euphemisms. But such language also serves an important internal purpose. As in any profession, the evasive speech of military officers—including the commander in chief—is an important bureaucratic CYA (“cover your ass”) tool. When the barracks of troops Ronald Reagan sent to Lebanon in 1983 were bombed, the president ordered them to withdraw. Reagan said this constituted “redeployment of the marines from Beirut airport to their ships offshore.” This depiction of our departure from Lebanon was successful enough that redeploy was used by the New York Times to describe what departing U.S. Marines had done. British troops, on the other hand, had pulled out of Beirut. Or so said the Times.
After U.S. troops landed in Grenada in 1983, Reagan reprimanded reporters for calling this act an invasion. He wanted them to call it a rescue mission. (The Pentagon preferred a predawn vertical insertion.) With his show-business background, Reagan was unusually deft at this type of verbal buck and wing. At the president’s behest, his administration renamed the multiwarhead MX missile—capable of destroying multiple major cities and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of civilians—Peacekeeper.
The ubiquitous euphemizing of war talk places an added burden on veterans. It’s not grunts who speak in euphemisms but officers, spokespersons, reporters, and folks back home who adopt the verbal gruel they’re fed. The savagery soldiers witnessed, and took part in, is depicted by military officials and bureaucrats in soporific terms that deny the experience of those involved in combat. One reason vets have so much trouble
discussing war with civilians is that the two groups speak different languages.
WHAT’S FNG MEAN?
When John Kennedy was accused of calling John Diefenbaker an SOB, he told his friend Ben Bradlee that he didn’t actually think the Canadian prime minister was a son of a bitch. He thought Diefenbaker was a prick. Bradlee made no apologies for the president’s potty mouth, saying that combat veterans like them were steeped in the notoriously profane lexicon of soldiers. “There is nothing inherently vulgar in the legendary soldier’s description of a broken-down Jeep,” said Bradlee. “ ‘The fucking fucker’s fucked.’ Surely, there is no more succinct, or even graceful, four-word description of that particular state of affairs.”
A curious inversion in language taboos occurs on the battlefield. There, profanity is the norm, “fucking” being used so routinely as an intensifier that its absence indicates gravity. Thus, if a sergeant says, “Get in fucking formation,” things can’t be too serious. But if he barks, “Get in formation!” they must be.
What to do back home, though? On the one hand, veterans brought back their propensity to cuss. On the other, they knew they couldn’t use the language they’d used in barracks in their parents’ parlors. The result was verbal schizophrenia. After World War II, Britons liked to tell of a veteran who was charged with assaulting his wife’s lover. He defended himself by explaining, “I come home after three fucking years in fucking Africa, and what do I fucking-well find? My wife in bed, engaging in illicit cohabitation with a male!”
In The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s 1948 novel based on his combat experience, Mailer was forced to euphemize the GI’s constant use of “fuck” as fug. (After being introduced to the young novelist at a party, Dorothy Parker said, “So you’re the man who can’t spell ‘fuck.’ ”) Transitioning from combat profanity to civilized discourse took practice and still does. Ex-soldiers learned to tell civilians that SNAFU was short for “situation normal, all fouled up.” Viet vets did not admit to just anyone that FNG stood for “fucking new guy.” Or that the I & I they enjoyed on their R & R was “intoxication and intercourse.” GIs called the vehicle they used to clean latrines an SST, “super sonic transport” to you; “shit-sucking truck” to them.
Light ’Em Up and Buy the Farm
Each war generates new euphemisms for risking death and losing that gamble. American soldiers entering combat during the Civil War said they were going to see the elephant. Today, they might say they’re being put in harm’s way. In a more valiant age, soldiers who actually died made the ultimate sacrifice. They laid down their life. For centuries, those killed on the battlefield fell. Fallen in battle is a longtime euphemism for dying during combat, but its conversion into the fallen first occurred during World War I when a euphemistic noun was needed to refer to the masses of dead soldiers.
As the carnage of war increased, along with the cynicism of those fighting, euphemisms for combat deaths underwent a change of flavor. Doughboys in World War I adapted an American Indian expression to say that casualties had gone west. Alternatively, they bought it. In Vietnam, casualties bought the farm. (Various explanations for this euphemism include the fact that owners of farm fields where mid-twentieth century jet pilots crashed were compensated by the government. Since the amount farmers received could be enough to pay off a mortgage, pilots who died when their planes went down were said to have “bought the farm.”) The most barren euphemism of all is KIA, “killed in action.” To the Pentagon, soldiers who were KIA became combat ineffective.
Job one of soldiers is killing other soldiers, of course, and trying to avoid being killed. Training recruits to kill is harder than getting them to risk death. Some never learn and persist in shooting their guns over, around, or beneath their targets. This reticence could explain why Roget’s Thesaurus has more synonyms for killing than for dying. Among soldiers, such synonyms are heavy with bland and slangy terms that describe what they’re up to. They don’t kill other people so much as off, ice, burn, dust, dispatch, eliminate, liquidate, nullify, take out, blow away, do in, finish off, whack, wax, waste, grease, smoke, or zap them. The verb “liquidate” could refer to unloading excess merchandise or to killing someone (or many someones). This makes it an ideal euphemism: ambiguous, multipurposed, context specific. “Neutralize” is another such term. Describing how they’d dealt with several Somali pirates who had seized a French yacht, a French government representative said their forces “neutralized them.”
In modern militaryspeak, to attrit enemy forces involves killing as many of them as possible (think attrition). Degrade means the same thing. During the first Iraq war, a Boston Globe cartoonist created a “Gulf War Word Quiz.” This included a list of words in one column—pounding positions, softening up, collateral damage, saturation strikes, carpet bombing— that were to be matched with their actual meaning in a second column. That column had a single word: “killing.”
“I prefer not to say we are killing other people,” an American artillery captain said during the Gulf War. “I prefer to say we are ‘servicing the target.’ ” When using drones to do this during the second war in Iraq, members of the military said these unmanned aircraft made it easier to dynamically address enemy forces. In the midst of that war, two American gunships confronted what they took to be a group of insurgents on the ground. After radioing headquarters for permission to shoot them, crew members were told, “You are free to engage” and “Just open ’em up.” On a leaked video of this exchange, one crew member can be heard saying, “Light ’em all up.” Seconds later, another reports, “All right. We just engaged eight individuals.”
A classic modern euphemism for killing is terminate with extreme prejudice. This one came from America’s Central Intelligence Agency. Members of the CIA display a certain mordant wit in this area, as when they called a group formed to determine eligible targets for assassination the Health Alteration Committee. Extralegal killings such as these were sometimes called executive actions. Members of the Nixon administration once considered eliminating Panamanian General Manuel Noriega through total and complete immobilization. In spookspeak, such covert lethal activity is called wet work.
CD and BOB
In modern bombing, a distinction is made between hard targets (buildings) and soft ones (human beings). Bombardment in advance of a ground operation involves softening up soldiers and civilians alike. Civilians are not usually targeted, of course, but often get hit by bombs that miss their mark due to navigation misdirections. These wayward bombs are called incontinent ordnance.
Civilians killed by mistake in Vietnam were sometimes referred to as regrettable by-products. More commonly, these victims were regarded as collateral damage, a euphemism that first appeared in the American military lexicon during this war and remains in use today (sometimes shortened to CD). Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh characterized the hundreds of innocents killed by his bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City—including children at a day-care center—as “collateral damage.” An Air Force publication defines “collateral damage” as “unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces.” Since military officers assume that collateral damage is inevitable in any large-scale operation, they sometimes talk of conducting fast CD, a computer-aided assessment of possible unintended effects.
Over time “collateral damage” has lost its blandly euphemistic flavor as it’s become clear what this phrase actually refers to: killing innocents. The same thing is true of friendly fire, a term shortened from phrases such as “friendly artillery fire,” for the accidental killing of fellow soldiers. (“Friendly” is longtime soldierspeak for one’s own forces and ordnance.) Other ways of describing the same event include fratricide, nonbattle casualties, and amicicide, a term coined in 1982 by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles Shrader for the accidental
killing of fellow troops. Even though Colonel Shrader’s term met two criteria for successful euphemisms—being multisyllabic and neo-Latinate—it didn’t catch on.
Blue on blue is another euphemism used when soldiers accidentally fire on their own. This originated either with American police slang for one blue-uniformed officer inadvertently shooting at another one, or because British officers designated the locations of their forces in blue on maps. Take your pick.
To Baghdad and Beyond
When U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush echoed Lyndon Johnson by calling this act an incursion or an intervention. American personnel there included what used to be known as “mercenaries” or “paramilitary forces” but now were called civilian contractors employed by security firms (such as Blackwater).
After three detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay hanged themselves, the camp’s commander said it was an act of asymmetric warfare, a tony synonym for unconventional warfare that became popular during both Iraq wars. Among other things, this euphemistic phrase—first recorded in 1991—allowed American and British spokespeople to avoid referring to an insurgency. In Unspeak, author Steven Poole called “asymmetric warfare” a “term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot.”
When George W. Bush proposed sending thousands of additional troops to Iraq in 2006, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) referred to the “escalation” of our presence there. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded, “I would call it, Senator, an augmentation.” National Public Radio at first called this augmentation an “influx,” but that term didn’t catch on. Like most media outlets, NPR eventually adopted the Bush administration’s preferred term—surge— making the massive influx of fresh American troops into Iraq sound like a sports drink. (From 1996 until 2002, Coca-Cola sold a drink by that name.) Surge actually euphemized the more controversial but accurate term “counterinsurgency.”