• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2486 0

the term that justified these gargantuan outlays, has often been attributed to the newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. In fact, the expression was first used by the statesman Bernard Baruch at a speech in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947, though credit for its coinage belongs to his speech-writer, Herbert Bayard Swope.32 Out of the cold war came two other durable expressions – iron curtain and the domino theory. The domino theory – the idea that if one nation fell to Communism others would topple in its wake – was first used by the newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop in 1954, though it didn’t become popular until the Vietnam War a decade later. Iron curtain is commonly attributed to Winston Churchill in an address he made in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, but in fact the term had been in existence in the sense of an imaginary barrier since 1819, and had been used in political contexts since the 1920s.

The cold war, or more specifically the Cuban missile crisis, also brought to prominence hawk and dove, though again both had been around for some time. Dove had been the symbol of peace for centuries, and hawk, in the context of military belligerence, had been coined by Thomas Jefferson in 1798 in the expression War Hawk. What was new was the conjoining of the terms to indicate a person’s militaristic leanings.

On the field of battle, the Korean War pitched in with a number of terms, among them demilitarized zone and its abbreviated form, DMZ (originally signifying the disputed area along the 38th parallel dividing Korea into North and South), brainwash (a literal translation of the Mandarin hsi nao), chopper for a helicopter, honcho (from Japanese hancho, ‘squad leader’) and hooch (from Japanese uchi, ‘house’), which was at first used to describe the place where a soldier kept his mistress.

Several of these words were resurrected for the war in Vietnam a decade later, though that conflict also spawned many terms of its own, among them free-fire zone, clicks for kilometres, grunt for a soldier (first used dismissively by Marines, but taken on with affection by infantrymen), search-and-destroy mission, to buy the farm, meaning to die in combat, to frag (to kill a fellow soldier, usually an officer, with a hand grenade or fragmentation device; hence the term) and a broad variety of telling expressions for the Vietnamese: slope, gook, dink, zip, slant, slant-eye and Charlie, though many of these – like slant-eye and gook – were older terms recently revived. Charlie as an appellation for Vietcong arose because VC in radio code was Victor Charlie.

Among the more sinister terms to catch the world’s attention during the war in Vietnam were Agent Blue, Agent Orange, Agent Purple and Agent White (for types of defoliants – another new word – used to clear fields, destroy crops and generally demoralize and destabilize inhabitants of hostile territory), and napalm, from naphthene palmitate, which had much the same intent and effect. Though it first became widely known during the Vietnam War, napalm was in fact invented during World War II.

The military affection for clumsy acronyms found renewed inspiration in Vietnam with such concoctions as FREARF (for Forward Rearm and Refuel Point), SLAR (Side-Looking Airborne Radar), FLAR (Forward-Looking Airborne Radar) and ARVN (pronounced ‘arvin’) for the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. One of the more arresting, if least reported, of the Vietnam era acronyms was TESTICLES, a mnemonic for the qualities looked for in members of the Second Ranger Battalion, namely teamwork, enthusiasm, stamina, tenacity, initiative, courage, loyalty, excellence and a sense of humour.

But where the war in Vietnam really achieved semantic distinction was in the creation of a vast heap of euphemisms, oxymorons and other verbal manipulations designed to create an impression of benignity and order, so that we got pacification for eradication, strategic withdrawal for retreat, sanitizing operation for wholesale clearance, accidental delivery of armaments for bombing the wrong target, to terminate with extreme prejudice