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Point of View
Words may be weapons, but their points are often dulled
By Carl Heintze
The late George Orwell, the British novelist and essayist whose most famous work is 1984, invented a language called Newspeak. He apparently got his inspiration from the fractured and bent words used for many years by Time magazine: "Today as it must to all men, death today came to ..." "Backward reeled the mind..." etc. Time has rejoined the English language and diction of late, although it has hardly improved the magazine.
Orwell's point was that words, especially as used in politics and the media, get so misused that they often take on the opposite meaning. Big Brother, the dictator in 1984 who bore a close resemblance to both Hitler and Stalin, came up with oxymoronic slogans of this kind: "Ignorance Is Knowledge," "Weakness Is Strength" and so on.
You had to read between the words to find out what really was happening. The same disorder, it seems to me, has taken over our military. During the recent confrontation over Kosovo, our secretary of defense, the commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and various other military spokespersons and officers kept talking about "robust response," "using our assets," "collateral damage" and other bits of jargon.
While jargon has always been a part of the military life (take for example G.I., which in World War II meant anything from enlisted man to diarrhea), it's only since the Vietnam War that we have begun substituting outrageous language for plain fact.
"Robust response," for example, means we're going to bomb them as hard as we can. "Collateral damage" means our bombs or missiles hit something they weren't supposed to hit--the Chinese embassy, for instance. And "assets" means troop or weapon strength.
Why do soldiers do this? Why do they bastardize the language with these phony, meaningless words? Well, I suppose one reason is that, like all professionals, they love jargon. Everybody does. Doctors love to obscure symptoms and treatment with fractured Latin and Greek, inventing words that must make Greeks and Romans roll over in their graves.
Even newspapermen and women have fallen prey to this hazard. Do you know, for instance, what a trolley car, a banner, a thumbnail, a hed and a lead are? Not all newspeople seem to any more.
The trouble with the military using their own language is that they are obscuring, whether intentionally or accidentally, what they are really doing. Fighting a war is a deadly business, but if you make it sound innocuous enough, you can remove a lot of its hurt. And we want to believe that war no longer hurts. It may be surgical or healing or even beneficial, but it's no longer real war.
Thus, "assets," which can mean human beings dressed in uniforms and carrying weapons, are "reduced," meaning a lot of men (and these days sometimes women) can be killed or wounded--or as the military likes to say, "wasted."
"There was some collateral damage" means a missile accidentally hit the Chinese embassy, or a train filled with non-combatants, or a hospital. Non-collateral damage presumably would mean hitting the target one was supposed to hit.
And a "robust response" means a lot of damage to the enemy, his buildings, bridges, factories and population. Somehow, if you just say "robust response" it sounds like you're playing a kind of game. "The Sharks gave the Flyers a robust response."
I can't help but think it hasn't always been this way in warfare or in the military. Wasn't it Ulysses S. Grant who said, "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," and Gen. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell who walked out of Burma and said something to the effect that "we got the hell beat out of us." (He probably used a less polite word, but this is a family newspaper.) Or Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who got D-Day in motion by telling everyone, "Okay, let's go."
Technological warfare, alas, seems to breed technological jargon. Grant should have said, "This summer we will make a robust response." Admiral Farragut would not have cried, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead," but instead would have shouted, "Do not mind their assets, proceed with all possible speed to destroy everything, but without collateral damage."
No one, of course, could improve on General William T. Sherman, who said it best: "War is hell."
And that's the way we ought to talk and write about it.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
