The Uses of Vietspeak

Q: When is a war not a war? A: The fighting in Viet Nam is referred to as an "international armed conflict," according to the Judge Advocate General's Office. --Army Digest, April 1968

EVERY war makes its peculiar contributions to the language. There was still a sense of heroics in the neologisms of World War I: over the top into no man's land. World War II created a new terminology of mass death: fission, fire storm, and the final solution. From Korea, the first confrontation with Asian Communism, we acquired the widespread use of gooks and brainwashing.

The most vividly iconoclastic new words generally come from the G.I.s, and so, in Viet Nam, the grunts spoke of slants and slopes, of Charley (Viet Cong) and Yards (Montagnard tribesmen) and White Mice (white-uniformed local police). Where they were was "the boonies of Nam"; everything else was "the world." Officials spoke windily of "winning hearts and minds," but the G.I.s shortened that to WHAM. To the airmen, the jungle was Indian Country, where you might end up either in the Hanoi Hilton (prison camp) or Buying the Farm (dead).

Killing was the reality for which the G.I. invented the largest number of euphemisms: zapping, fragging, offing, greasing, waxing, hosing down a village (or using a Zippo Squad to set it afire). When Lieut. William Galley testified that he had been ordered to attack My Lai, he did not say that he had been told to kill but to "waste" everyone in sight.

In devising such brusque euphemisms, however, the G.I.s hardly matched the ornate creations of their superiors at headquarters. Specimens:

> Air raid--Limited duration protective reaction strike

> Artillery fire--H & I (harassment and interdiction)

> Murder of an enemy spy--Termination with extreme prejudice

> Defoliation--Resources control program

>Refugee camp--New life hamlet

"War does things to the language," New York Times Columnist Russell Baker once wrote, "and the language in revenge refuses to cooperate in helping us to understand what we are talking about." In Viet Nam, it was all too unpleasant to "understand what we are talking about," so even when the U.S. finally decided to start withdrawing its troops it created a new word to disguise reality one last time. It called the process Vietnamization.

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