Axelrod - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot : the Real Language of the Modern American Military

ALAN AXELROD

Copyright 2013 by Alan Axelrod

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Axelrod, Alan, 1952

Whiskey tango foxtrot : the real language of the modern American military / Alan Axelrod.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-62087-647-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Soldiers--United States--Language--Dictionaries. 2. Sailors--United States--Language--Dictionaries. 3. English language--United States--Slang--Dictionaries. 4. Military art and science--United States-Dictionaries. I. Title. II. Title: WTF, the real language of the modern American military. III. Title: real language of the modern American military.

PE3727.S7A95 2013

427.973088355--dc23

2013011431

Printed in the United States of America

For Anita and Ian

G eneral George S. Patton Jr. once observed that, next to war, all other human endeavors pale into puny insignificance. Actually, it might have been George C. Scott playing Patton in the 1970 biopic directed by Franklin Schaffner. Doesnt matter. For one thing, Scott played Patton better than Patton ever played Patton, and, for another, the statement is pretty nearly true no matter who said it. For what is more costly, in money, materials, effort, pain, and life, than war? What requires a greater degree of coordinated energy? What else so tasks the hearts and minds of so many? What other human endeavor encompasses such a range of undertaking, from acts of deepest secrecy and darkest crime to the grandest mobilization of entire peoples, with vast armies shaping and reshaping the world?

And what else produces so many words, acronyms, and utterances than fighting wars and preparing to fight wars?

There is no grander or humbler stage for the enactment of language than war. War leaves untouched no aspect of human activity and emotion. Words born of the profession of arms describe the most exceptional, extreme, exalted, daring, and horrifying deeds as well as the most mundane: laboring, eating, eliminating, washing, cooking, fornicating, sleeping.

Over many years, soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen have built their own language to express everything from the raw emotion to the complex technology in the lives of a group of professionals whose vocation is to kill people, break things, and, afterward, come home alive. They labor in a trade freighted at the highest levels of politics and command with words intended as much to conceal and deceive as to reveal and illuminate. At the lower levelthe level of the eleven bang-bang, the ordinary seaman, the grunt gyrene, and the balls-to-the-wall pilotit is a job just as focused on seeing through and cutting through the nonmeaning and nonsense emanating from the Five-Sided Squirrel Cage (i.e., the Pentagon).

The sources for the words and phrases in this book include such official authorities as the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms (www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/) and S. F. Tomajczyks magnificent Dictionary of the Modern United States Military (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), but the most compelling elements of military language have no official sources. They come from the bottom up. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The Real Language of the Modern American Military is devoted to the linguistic world of that lower level, a world alternately hot, cold, horrible, glorious, squalid, adrenaline-charged, worked to exhaustion, lifted by comradeship, desolated by loneliness, and bored to desperation, a world in which words must be as sharp as bayonets.

The military is both a distinctive way of life and a community, and a command of what we might call the communitys folk speechits slangis essential for admission to full membership within the group. Some military folk speech is familiar almost exclusively to the troops. A shit screen, for example, is a fall guy, the person who takes the blame for some foul-up or infraction. A jarhead is an enlisted marine. Other elements of military vocabulary, as you will see, have become part of our general folk speech, military and civilian. In both its exclusively military and more general military-civilian forms, the real language of the modern American military embodies a uniquely American attitude and an exuberantly colloquial, unwaveringly honest, and enduringly American grace under pressure.