“The soldiers’ vernacular must provide words for things that civilians don’t need to describe, like grades of officers and kinds of weapons. But it has deeper purposes too.”
“What does this say about Israel’s military? Perhaps something about the agricultural preoccupations of the kibbutz and of the socialist militias that spawned the army in the early years of the state.”
“Even after he became the country’s most famous general and the defense minister in the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan used to say his profession was “farmer,” the point being that war was to be treated as something you were forced to do though you’d rather be plowing.”
“This is still close to what I experienced as the Israeli military’s ideal approach to soldiering or command. The brigade where I served, the Fighting Pioneer Youth, was once responsible for farm work as well as military missions, and though this isn’t true anymore the brigade’s emblem still features a sickle and a sheaf of wheat.”
“According to the Israeli linguist Ruvik Rosenthal, author of a recent book on military language, the floral euphemisms reflect the fact that while Israelis recognize the necessity of war, they don’t celebrate it and would rather not think about it.”
“The fact of the country’s mandatory draft means that people are too close to the army to wax romantic about the institution or what it does. There are no military parades here and haven’t been for years. So though as soldiers we did violence and had violence done to us, we were armed with peaceful language. A forward operating base sounds dangerous; a “pumpkin” doesn’t. And what harm could be done by something called an “artichoke”?”
“The jargon I spoke during the years of my service differs from what I know of the language of American troops, some of which seems to embrace, rather than obscure, the violence required of them.”
“This is a different but very reasonable way to deal with it. Brian Castner’s memoir The Long Walk, which recounts his time defusing bombs in Iraq, features squads with call-signs like “Cougar,” “Bayonet,” and “Psycho”—names that make their members feel scary, which is preferable to feeling scared. At the same time, some of the more perilous and awful parts of the soldiers’ lives are concealed under acronyms of bureaucratic triviality: a “VBIED” sounds a lot safer than a car bomb, for example. A “KIA” might be a tax form rather than a human being killed in action.”
““So it’s ‘Charlie Alpha 6243 is T1,’ not ‘Tom’s lost his legs,’” Campbell said. “You need the jargon so that an 18-year-old can say it and not be overwhelmed by what he’s saying.””
“As Campbell’s fictional soldiers embark on an operation against insurgents, the commander insists “on a bit of Britishness in the proceedings,” so the phases of the operation are named “Bow,” “Arrow,” “Spear,” “Chariot,” and “Sword,” the weapons from William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem.””
“This is an example of how language can add some dignity to grim business, and by doing so becomes an intangible but important weapon in a soldier’s mental arsenal.”
“The body had sandbags and the soul had words, and together all of it would get you through to the other side.”