As the name suggests, SNAFUBAR is a show about strategic and moral military errors and mishaps, and the myths that both lead to and then justify them. The histories they look at will make clear the degree to which the U.S. is a warful nation, contrary to the myth of a peaceful nation regularly compelled, against its will, to go to war.
The show unpacks how our culture romanticizes and fetishizes the military - while not always providing the support it needs to carry out its intended (or stated) goals, or to meet veterans’ needs when they return from combat. Originally a podast, the program will air on KHSU Sundays at 1:00 p.m.
To set the stage for this series, SNAFUBAR explores militaristic language that you might not know you're using. Hart and Crane are diving into the topic of military lingo: a way of speaking that is embedded into everyday life for former and current military personnel, as well as for civilians.
SNAFUBAR began as a podcast and is now part of the Cal Poly Humboldt Podcast Network and is hosted by veteran Dr. Jeff Crane (Environmental Historian and Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) and Dr. Sara Hart (Chair of the department of Applied Humanities).
Works Cited in this episode:
- The Language of Naval Fighter Pilots
- Every Brief Ever
- Military Review
- War in Plain Language
- When Understanding Goes MIA
Research and writing for the show is done by Liam Salcuni and Roman Sotomayor.
SNAFUBAR is produced by Abigail Smithson and brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Music by BreakzStudios.
TRANSCRIPT:
>> You are about to embark upon the great crusade.
>> The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.
>> Only the dead have seen the end of war.
>> We will accept nothing less than full victory.
[ Music ]
>> You're listening to SNAFUBAR at Cal Poly Humboldt.
>> Hey Sara, so do you consider yourself a member of the coalition of the willing?
>> Coalition of the willing? Always. Yes.
>> You have your boots on the ground.
>> Very. Boots are on the ground, yes.
>> Do you occasionally bring shotgun on?
>> Well, you know, when I can.
>> Okay, because today we're talking about military language and its uses among civilian populations and the military community.
>> Yeah, I mean this is going to be interesting, right? Most civilians sort of by definition don't have a ton of military experience, but we've got all kinds of military vocabulary in our regular day-to-day usage.
>> Yeah. Do you know some examples?
>> What are some examples?
>> Well, let's think of some. How about we're in the trenches working on a difficult situation, academics like to say. In fact, recent Council of Chairs, one of the chairs that I -- We're in the trenches here. There's always a chance that the really spirited fellow, or woman, or quarterback just goes over the top about this or that. If they get really feisty and cause a scene or at the completion of an operation, we might all need a hot wash afterwards to get a handle on what happened. If it's really complicated, we might need a full debrief. And when it's over, we get to a sticky situation, get to relax, maybe it's all done with a cup of joe. Or take the night off and go see the newest blockbuster, which we all know that as a box-office success, usually a Marvel movie, but it originates with the large-scale bombing campaigns of World War II. Blockbuster. Doesn't take a mathematician to figure that one out. We can then really take it easy while we're watching our blockbuster, knowing that if we all just keep our powder dry, we can handle the loose cannons in our lives.
>> Loose cannons everywhere. That's what I'm familiar with.
>> We are academics [laughs].
>> Academics. We're all in the trenches with a bunch of loose cannons.
>> Ouch.
>> [laughs] Okay. So we've got examples everywhere and we've got them, as we know, in the title of our show.
>> Yeah. So let's unpack SNAFUBAR, right? Our podcast name is a combination of military acronyms and so much lingo. We love our lingo, don't we? SNAFU meaning, of course, remember?
>> Situation normal, all effed up.
>> Yeah, that's right. There's another one I love. When I was in graduate school at Washington State University, it was a historiography class. It was one of those classes where the professor didn't teach, you know, and they made it like it's supposed to be about the students. So we did all the work and she sat there and occasionally corrected us. And it was a particularly bad -- Remember the book, Time on the Cross, which was like an economic rationale for slavery?
>> Oh. Okay.
>> Terrible book. So it's historiography, so we're learning to critique, right? But it was just a bad discussion. And there was a -- one of the new grad students was a -- he just left the army. He was a captain. And he's looking around like, what the hell have I gotten myself into?
>> Right. What am I doing here?
>> So I just wrote CF on a piece of paper and held it up, and he died laughing. And of course CF means, in military, the phonetic alphabet, Charlie Foxtrot, which in the military stands for cluster F bomb, right?
>> Cluster fudge.
>> Yeah.
>> So that would have been like a little bit of an in-joke between the two of you in a real Charlie Foxtrot situation.
>> Everyone looked around, why are they laughing? We had to explain it. And I do take pride of the fact that I think everywhere I've gone, I've taught everyone to say Charlie Foxtrot.
>> Charlie Foxtrot, man.
>> I taught it to Shawna Young here, the Dean of CPS, early on in my --
>> College of Professional Studies, folks.
>> She laughed. You know how she laughs, she laughed so loud the building shook. Yeah.
>> It's good. We're spreading the -- We're on a mission here, spreading some good, solid lingo language, lingo term. So, okay, situation normal, all effed up. Effed up beyond all recognition. We're playing on this in our own title. And this week here in the SNAFUBAR, we take a deep dive into the world of military language, the lingo that is used within the military and shared with the civilian population and how that affects us all. I am Sara Hart. I teach Religious Studies here at Cal Poly Humboldt. I'm the daughter and the granddaughter of a Marine combat veteran.
>> Yeah. And I'm Jeff Crane. I'm the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Cal Poly Humboldt. I'm a historian of the environment. Also a peacetime veteran of the U.S. Army. Also my father served in Vietnam and other issues, conflicts in the Navy. We won't be exploring a specific SNAFU in this episode, but instead, we're exploring a meta point that will appear throughout so many episodes and I think already has, and this is military language or lingo. What is lingo? Lingo can be defined as a local language or specific dialect of a certain group. The group dialect we are interested in this episode derives from, but is not limited to, the military community. So some questions we are interested in exploring in this episode are, what are some examples of military language that civilians, or as we say, non-military folks use in our everyday lives? Why, like, emphasis on why, do Americans with little to no military background or experience have such a robust vocabulary of military terms and phrases? It's always awkward if a professor or admin says, stay frosty. Right? What does military language tell us about the military community? A really important point there. What does the strong presence of this lingo in our day-to-day communications mean about the myth of the peaceful nation versus our obsession with the military? When an academic administrator of high rank, who I won't say, who I like quite a bit and have no problem with, says boots on the ground and coalition of the willing, and I shudder, both phrases arise from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What does that say about military metaphors framing our way of understanding and working in the world?
>> Right. I mean, I think it says a lot. Our day-to-day language as Americans is just peppered through with military lingo. And so the question we're asking today, like you've mentioned, Jeff, is just what does this say about American culture, American values? How does it help us to understand the myths that we hold together as a national community? So we're going to look a little bit at how they appear in our language, you know? And the ways that these military metaphors can -- understanding them can help us to understand ourselves. And so we've got an example here that's sort of outside of the military lingo world, but a way to get into the metaphors of our common shared language and how those metaphors can help us understand ourselves. We say, oh, I see, when we mean I understand something, right? And this kind of tells us -- this shows us how visually oriented we are as a culture, how much the visual impacts our sense of self-understanding knowledge, right? We say, I see, whether or not that thing has a visual tether. And that goes way deep. It goes way back to the Proto-Indo-European root, "weid-", which means both to see and to know. So those two things are kind of linked in a way that turns into a metaphor that we now look at with -- we don't even think about, right? So wisdom, video, all have the same ultimate root. Knowledge and vision is connected. Seeing is believing.
>> With wisdom, video, being the same root makes me feel better about how much time my children spend watching videos.
>> That's right. [laughs] This is an apologetic --
>> And I should say, they do learn a lot watching them. So, yeah.
>> All screen time, yes.
>> I'm just such a book person, right? But anyways.
>> Well, I mean, this is a real transition for us all, right? And I don't know that we would have gone to videos or screen time in the same way had we not been so visually oriented as a culture. There would be other mechanisms, right? Okay, maybe another episode.
>> Give me a good paper book any day.
>> Give me a good paper book. It makes me think of the AI world that we're all entering. But right now, seeing is believing, there's really a lot of metaphors, let's stay focused here, that we live by and we don't spend a lot of time thinking explicitly about. And so the question for our audience that'll run through this one, you know, like, and think about this, folks out there: Do you ever consciously catch yourself using a metaphor to describe your emotional state or current activity? And maybe we notice it, maybe we don't. You know, do you -- How often do we understand the metaphors that we use or their origins?
>> Can I jump in really quick?
>> Yeah.
>> A challenge to the audience is when you're in meetings, you're talking to people, listen to the metaphors, pay attention to the metaphors, because it is fascinating. Yeah. And why people choose certain metaphors.
>> And it tells us something about them and also about the kind of unthought cultural norms that we all share. So, we're suckers for etymology over here in the SNAFUBAR. We're drawn to and interested in the history of words and phrases and how these histories can help us to understand ourselves, our communities, the context we live through. If you pay attention to the metaphors you use to describe everyday tasks, it might surprise you that many of these phrases and figures of speech derive from military scenarios and historical moments. SNAFU is a great example of that. Everyone uses it, almost nobody knows where it comes from. You know, unconsciously we use these metaphors --
>> And I do test people on it all the time.
>> And are you finding, do people know --
>> Almost never do they know. They know FUBAR because of 'Saving Private Ryan' sometimes.
>> But SNAFU kind of gets out of it. They know what it means. They just don't know the acronyms, roots, or what it stands for. Right? So this is really unconscious. We use these metaphors and phrases, you know, all the time. We apply them to contexts in our lives that are decidedly non-militarian. That's what we're looking at today.
>> In our peace-loving society.
>> In our peace-loving society.
>> Yeah. So metaphors we live by, live through. Better living through metaphors.
>> [laughs] Better living through metaphors. Thank you.
>> So we're looking at that today, especially in terms of military metaphors, right? Military language is intrinsically a part of the American civilian experience. So working on the podcast, teaching and deaning, we're always rushing to meet, quote-unquote, "deadlines", getting our work done on the double, even when we might rather kick back and get some R and R, which means rest and recreation. That's for Abigail. She doesn't like acronyms. If we don't get it all done though, we're probably going to catch some flack for it. Just as part of our every day-to-day lives, we all encounter military language, right?
[ Music ]
So what might it tell us about American culture that we do this so often that our language is so peppered with this kind of lingo?
>> So peppered with it. We should probably consult some linguists. I don't know if they're into this kind of thing. Do the linguists have anything to teach us here?
>> Well, you know, it turns out they do have things to say. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson provide an entry point into this complex world of language. Their seminal work, 'Metaphors We Live By', which I read as an undergrad and loved and still think about a lot, they investigate the use of metaphor in people's everyday vocabulary. They argue that humans construct conceptual metaphors to describe everyday actions stating, quote, "our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature", unquote. The meanings behind these conceptual constructs reveal much about how we understand and interact with the world around us.
>> Right. This is a great book, folks, if you've got time for it, 'Metaphors We Live By'. Kind of makes you think about how language works to begin with, right? And these metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson argue, quote, "structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do. As human beings interacting with the world around us, these metaphors are shaped by our lived experience, and in turn they help to shape that experience."
>> Yeah, and so just this morning I was in OAA meeting, which is the academic affairs of deans and budget analysts and provosts, and we were talking about budget, as we are wont to do. And the budget analyst said -- we were talking about the willingness of people to engage in budget discussions, and he said "coalition of the unwilling". And everyone laughed because they knew what that comes from. But they know the coalition of the willing, but if I did a quiz, I'm going to guess most of them don't know that comes from George Bush's war in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? So we use metaphors for everything. They're everywhere once you start looking, right? They're truly everywhere.
>> Yeah, and so let's look into a little bit of the history of military phrases, lingo. How did this stuff find its way into the common American vocabulary? Like, it comes from George Bush, how are we using it in OAA meetings?
>> Yeah, right [laughs].
>> Like, where --
>> Past is prologue, right? It's everywhere. So the advent of military themed G.I. Joe action figures, military movies, TV shows, and video games like Call of Duty, wider audiences, young and old, are exposed to a certain degree of military language. And I'll make a quick point here, which is to say it used to be that all men had to register and serve in the military. So that was the way in which the language became common in society. I think, now, it comes through these other kinds of sources.
>> Through media.
>> So let's go ahead and bite the bullet --
>> Oh, again.
>> -- and face it. Movies and pop culture now have a huge impact on shaping how we think and speak. Films about war have a way of delivering military language to civilian populations that imprints itself on the fewer, right? Stay frosty, head on a swivel, things like that, on your six, all those phrases. Hollywood films and pop culture are not solely responsible for shaping our language and culture, but it's one way into understanding why Americans use military lingo in everyday dialogue.
>> Right. I mean, it is just such a popular part of our shared mediated experience. Hollywood and wartime have a really intertwined history that might be surprising. Ronald Reagan in cheesy wartime movies, right? Was that propaganda?
>> Straight up propaganda was the intent, yeah.
>> That was it [laughs]. Like, but we're talking about like actual war propaganda movies.
>> Yeah. Just like John Ford's movies portraying the Soviet Union as a democracy in his 'Why We Fight' series, because they were such important allies against the Germans. So during World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, otherwise known as FDR, Abigail, created the Office of War Information, the OWI, Abigail. This group worked with Hollywood writers, producers and artists to pump out patriotic mass media messages. Posters, slogans and movies were all part of the OWI's projects. Movies were huge then, right? I mean, movie theaters filled out regularly. These were social events in which everyone joined. It's a way in which we're very different. And then, you know, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, although perfectly fit and ready and able to serve in the military, chose to do their service, I'm being generous here, by being in these films.
>> Well, they served, just in a different way.
>> Yeah. But that's a sidebar that would take 20 minutes. I will say that John Ford gave John Wayne -- because they were close friends and John Wayne's career was built on all these movies and John Ford films, John Ford gave Wayne a ton of crap. It actually hurt their relationship as friends.
>> Oh, poor Marion.
>> Jimmy Stewart was drafted. Jimmy Stewart was drafted and served in the Army Air Corps. "Your money's over here", right? All that. That was a terrible Stewart. He flew B-24s. In the Fall of '43, Stewart went to England as commanding officer of the 703rd Bomb Squadron, equipped with B-24s, and had a long career in the Air Force Reserve, if I remember correctly, and I think he retired as a Brigadier General.
>> But flew combat missions. Like, Jimmy Stewart flew combat missions.
>> Jimmy Stewart. And if you know anything about the bombing campaigns, those crews took heavy casualties. That's that recent series, 'Masters of the Air', I think it was called, is a pretty accurate representation. It's, I mean, every actor you like, they're gone pretty much by the end.
>> Well, spoiler.
>> Sorry.
>> Flocking to the blockbusters, okay [laughs].
>> You could know history, that would be okay [laughs].
>> What? You mean the bombers? What?
>> It's tough to say "spoiler alert" to historical events. Oh, by the way, Lincoln was assassinated.
>> What?
>> I'm sorry. Yeah.
>> Okay. Okay, World War II. World War II. What's happening when World War II?
>> Well, so this is, yeah, you said -- that's a really -- I didn't catch this, flocking to the blockbusters. So Jimmy Stewart flew blockbuster missions, right? And starred in blockbuster movies. Well played, Liam, the script writer for this episode.
>> Thank you, sir.
>> Nicely done. So during World War II, Americans had front row seats to a whole range of military movies, giving them access to military scenarios and language. They were huge hits. People were hungry for them. You know, it's also worth knowing that there were, before the movies, there were news clips that gave them highly manipulative versions of what was happening in the war, but still, that's how they learned things.
>> Right, the newsreels that started every film. Like, you went there for your -- the minutemen were on the march around giving their one minute spiel on, like, the news, right? And they would give you these little --
>> Just like in 'Captain America'.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> Just like in 'Captain America'.
>> It's a real thing. No, I'm trying to give an example of how we learned things, quote-unquote, via movies, but 'Captain America' does have a representation of that. Exactly. But 'Casablanca' was a huge smash hit, grossed $10 million in 1942 with a operating budget of $950,000 and certainly it's had to have raked in hundreds of millions since then, right?
>> I love that movie.
>> You're not going to do the imitation? You can't do, "Here's looking at you"? I cannot.
>> This is, "Here's looking at you, kid."
>> Humphrey Bogart, yeah. Play it again, Sam.
>> No, you're going to cut that and splice in some "You must remember this."
>> "A kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh."
[ Singing ]
>> Okay. So good. It's so good. What's the significance of all this? The media, and to a greater extent pop culture, found popular success in a genre of war movies and it still does this today. This stuff sells. You know, Americans might want peace, but they love to watch war. We love -- we pay to do it. You know, "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
>> So this is where I have to remind everybody that Dr. Hart is a religious studies professor. So she did just make a Sermon on the Mount reference, I think, in the middle of a podcast on military lingo.
>> That's right. Matthew, baby [laughs].
>> And then of course, you know, I wish that was a dominant metaphor, right? The Sermon on the Mount. That would be really helpful right now in our culture.
>> We're bringing it back, people.
>> Another metaphor that sort of captures a lot about America, right, the business of America's business, that'd be Calvin Coolidge.
>> Arch pragmatists in a capitalist vein.
>> There's a famous story about Calvin Coolidge. He was notably taciturn and somebody made a bet to get him to say three words at dinner, and he mentioned it and Coolidge just looked up and said, "You lose." [laughs] I don't know if it's true or not.
>> [laughs] That's two. Okay listeners, today, war has reminded us of Jesus, has reminded us of Calvin Coolidge. Let's just -- I just want to bask in the wonder of that for a hot second. But really, one point here, it's all about what sells. That's what we're coming to. With Clinton, President Clinton in the '90s, we start openly calling ourselves a market democracy. So in the world of a, you know, American social socioeconomic understanding, the '90s were a market democracy. Our national values and commercial consumerism, they are explicitly wrapped up together in a pretty unrepentant way. And so with the advent of more accessible media outlets, pop culture's longstanding intrigue with the genre of war movies, and no shortage of war movies and video games, the American civilian has a VIP access to military language and --
>> And firearms.
>> And firearms.
>> [laughs] Virtual firearms, yeah.
>> Virtual firearms, real firearms.
>> Popular culture may be partially responsible for feeding the American lexicon with military jargon. The military language remains grounded in the military community and its experience, that's what we're trying to here, the ins and outs of military language, its uses, and significance to the military community, which we have a responsibility to in this podcast. So we'll turn to the linguists for some help on this. In his article 'The Language of Naval Fighter Pilots', linguist Thomas E. Murray expands on the significance of language communities. Quote, "two widely recognized reasons for the creation of [inaudible] and other specialist vocabularies are first to identify their users as members of a specific group, and conversely their non-users as non-members, thus creating or intensifying psychological and social unity among the group's members, and second, to achieve linguistic economy, that is to reduce a complex subject or action to a single word or phrase", unquote.
>> That's great. Interesting. Okay. So language can, one, identify members of a specific group, and also create a category of people who are outside that group, right? In group, out group.
>> So that example I gave earlier of writing CF on a piece of paper, that's exactly that. Nice job, Liam.
>> Yeah. You have created a community with your compatriots.
>> We're laughing at everyone else and they don't know why. Yeah.
>> So to create the group, and number two, creates a linguistic economy as a means of navigating complex subjects or traumatic situations. And again, CF is a linguistic economy for, like, wow, this class is really f'd up, you know. So these are broken down into words or phrases, often these complex subjects or traumatic situations. Just give me a shorthand, you know. Historian and World War II veteran Paul Fussell, whom we love a lot over here in the SNAFUBAR --
>> We do love him, yes.
>> -- he explains the role that language and euphemism play in war as it relates to linguistic economy. So essentially, don't radio that troops are retreating. The troops are in, quote, "retrograde movement", or they're disengaging. Right? You don't want to just yell, "We're retreating", that's going to have cascading impacts.
>> It's going to demoralize the troops.
>> Going to demoralize people. But disengagement, that's intentional, there's agency there. Right? You're not experiencing war-related trauma, you just have battle fatigue. You're tired, man. The allies didn't invade France on D-Day, they were liberating it. You know, in this way, the language used in military scenarios can dampen the severity of certain situations. There's some psychological distancing from something scary or harmful or traumatic, and this also played into Fussell's ideas on morale.
>> Yeah, so and it's also worth noting that with language like retrograde movement, disengaging, liberating, he talks about the use of language by leadership to portray things in a very positive way, and in a way that can also be disingenuous, right? So, retrograde movement, as opposed to Monty Python's "run away, run away", which is very direct and very clear.
>> "Run away, run away!" Well, I think I want to go for one second here, because I think that this reminds me of Chesty Puller, who's loved by Marines everywhere. Right? This is kind of one of the two central icons of Marine lore. And I -- he's the guy who said -- he didn't use retrograde movement, but he said, advance to the rear. Right? And it was a way that, like, it was a double coded thing where he knew his troops who would follow him anywhere would understand that this was a euphemism. And this was a joke of a euphemism on the joke of the euphemism.
>> Because he's probably being funny, right?
>> He's being funny, right? We're advancing to the rear. You know?
>> Okay, because I don't know Chesty Puller. Right, right. And obviously you're liberating France. You can't say invading, because that's what the Germans did, right?
>> Right. Germans invade, we liberate.
>> Yeah. Okay.
>> Okay.
>> This style of language building is not unique to the military. Many other occupational fields also have their own forms of lingo and speaking. Individuals who work in a hospital or at a university commonly have terms for places, events, groups, events, which require an explanation to anyone who's not part of that community. Language used among certain groups inherently builds a sense of community and connection between members, while also excluding others.
>> Yeah. And even in our -- I mean, we get this on a, like, street level, even in our own little friend groups or family circles we have nicknames, inside jokes --
>> Like Snouty.
>> Snouty. Like Snouty. We know Snouty.
>> Like we invented Snouty, yeah.
>> Yeah. Or --
>> That's a real thing.
>> That's a real thing. Or terminology that has specific meaning and resonance within select circles. You know, as Murray points out, Murray, remember our linguist Thomas E. Murray from above, he points out group jargon and/or vocabulary identifies, quote, "users as members of a specific group." However, the military is not a small group, right? This language is used for specific purposes.
>> Yeah. I mean, I'm reading a novel right now by Peter Heller and there's a scene where a woman's talking to a young man. He keeps saying "yes, ma'am", and she identifies him as military.
>> Yeah.
>> Because he keeps saying -- and he's also in great shape and he's got a clean cut, all that. But it's the "yes, ma'am" that sort of tips her off. Southern or military, right? So this use of particular coded language in the military comes with several benefits. The first, to obscure military terminology from not only the civilian world but from potential enemies, obscure acronyms, and coded languages are harder to decipher. They also save time, which can be crucial during high tension moments. They also, you know, build community.
>> Yeah. Yeah, so they're effective in like a very human way and also in a real pragmatic, get the job done kind of way. The military's phrases, abbreviations and acronyms expedite long titles, situations, you know, all these things, into neatly packed word sandwiches [laughs]. If you need to communicate quickly, think about it, would you rather say "commander naval meteorology and oceanography command"? Okay? And everybody's like, what, say that again, right? Or you could say "com nav met oc com" [laughs]. Which is better? We're not really sure here. That's a little bit of an excessive one. But sec nav, sec def, cent com, you know, okay, like secretary of the navy, central command. That's what we're talking about here. Like, commonly we hear sec nav as secretary of the navy, right, cent com as central command.
>> And, you know, I remember when POTUS showed up. I was like, who started saying that and why?
>> Yeah.
>> And what is it for, sort of SCOTUS?
>> SCOTUS and FLOTUS.
>> Right. It was like, who --
>> Those are all -- we just, we love acronyms.
>> I assume Abigail's responsible for that, because she loves her acronyms. Like, could we have more acronyms, please?
>> Sending letters every day, postcards, saying "please, more acronyms" [laughs].
>> So there's a strategic element in this. There's also psychological benefits, a psychological aspect that allows for the creation of distancing from bleak and harsh realities through this kind of language. The use of conceptual metaphors like neutralizing instead of killing, civ cas instead of civilian casualties, friendly fire, collateral damage, fragging instead of just saying killing an officer, NCO, fragging was a huge part of the Vietnam War, for example. This just serves a purpose. It can make profound loss less traumatic. It can make violence less traumatic. It makes engaging the enemy less traumatic. And that's pretty important, right?
>> Yeah. Yeah, Tim O'Brien, an American novelist and army infantry sergeant in Vietnam, somebody else we're also pretty into here at SNAFUBAR --
>> Yeah, he's a great writer.
>> We'll come back to him, yeah. He writes about this in his sort of classic book, 'The Things They Carried'. He's writing about his experience in Vietnam and he says, this is a quote, "They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased, they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as though to insist and destroy the reality of death itself. They talked grunt lingo."
>> Insisted. That's a new one for me. The reality of death was insisted and destroyed, contained in the language. I think I would add one other point there. I think films and TV shows really also frame the way we think about our own presence in spaces like in war. So there probably is that script in their head. They mentioned John Wayne taking a stand, for example.
>> Yeah. And this isn't a bad thing. This is what Joseph Campbell will tell us is, like, having a mythically educated imagination means having all these characters in our mind that allow us to react to unanticipated, unforeseen, uncontrollable situations with a kind of moral compass. So we see -- like, having these scripts is valuable for leading a purpose-driven life. It's also valuable in this case, especially for Tim O'Brien and the wartime. We go for managing unmanageable situations.
>> Nice. I love that. Thank you so much. So death isn't the only thing insisted by this lingo. In his book, 'Wartime', Paul Fussell talks about soldiers typecasting the enemy. If language is used to dehumanize the enemy, to relegate opposing forces something less than human, then you are not fighting those humans, you don't see them in their entire complex humanity. Right? It makes it easier to kill them. This, as Fussell notes in his work, has catastrophic consequences in war. Also shows how certain types of language can distance people from the traumatic realities of war. We're not going to say the words, but one thing he emphasizes, and I think this is also a metaphor as we live by, are the one-syllable pejoratives for Asians, for Germans, and others. It makes it, you know, to think of them in very much cruder terms. This is also explored quite effectively in John Dower's 'War Without Mercy', about the conflict with Japan in the island campaign. And he shows how the depictions of the Japanese, the language used about the Japanese, the perception of the Japanese, led to really brutal war, right? And sort of a language of extermination. That's where you get from, like from human language to a language of extermination, that gets us to dropping the atomic bombs and firebombing civilian populations, right?
>> Yeah. And that we use in everywhere I can think of, that I'm sort of ticking off in my mind. Like, the Japanese example is an extreme one because it does end with the atomic bomb. But it's a pretty common feature if you're going to be put in a position of having to kill other humans, to do what you can to dehumanize them. And warfare, you know, it's in this way and others an emotionally charged, high stress environment. For Clausewitz -- Okay, Clausewitz. We're going back Clausewitz folks.
>> Old school.
>> Old school.
>> OG.
>> OG Clausewitz. The most revered Prussian war theorist of the early 19th century. He wrote his famous book was called 'On War'.
>> Straightforward.
>> Very straightforward. Emotions, for him, emotions were the foundation upon which reason had to be built. So they had to be clear and acknowledged and understood and mostly managed. They couldn't be ignored. Language is a way of managing emotions. You can't just repress them, you have to manage them. Language that's used to provide soldiers with emotional distance from traumatic situations can be a calculated, emotionally defensive response that's really effective. Like a shot of adrenaline when the body sustains a painful energy, it preserves you in the moment.
>> With a ton of damage later, right?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
[ Music ]
So that brings us to gallows humor or dark humor, which is observable in a variety of different professions, cultures and experiences. Gallows humor includes sinister jokes in the face of unimaginably grim or traumatic experiences. Importantly, it's also a way to make light of traumatic events. Psychologist Herr Sigmund Freud called such humor in the face of traumatic circumstances, quote, "rebellious", unquote, stating, quote, "Its fending off of the possibility of suffering places it among the great series of methods which the human mind has constructed in order to evade the compulsion to suffer", unquote. Compulsion to suffer.
>> Compulsion to suffer [laughs].
>> Wow [laughs]. Really?
>> It makes me want to laugh [laughs].
>> Yeah.
>> Gallows humor. I mean, I live, I'm at home in the world of gallows humor myself. This is -- I'm very comfortable there.
>> Oh, same here. Yeah.
>> It doesn't always land well.
>> I teach climate change and I have to always explain to my students why I'm laughing so much.
>> Right.
>> Like, I'm not happy about it.
>> And really, Dr. Strangelove. I mean, it makes me think Dr. Strangelove, right? Do we, does it get any funnier [laughs]?
>> "Raise animals to be slaughtered?" You have to watch it. You know, this was Kubrick's effort to make a serious movie about the threat of nuclear war right after the Cuban Missile Crisis. My dad was on a carrier and they were told by their commander we were going to war with the Soviet Union. And it's such a dark topic, he had to take a humorous approach. And I think it is his only humorous movie. Anyways, this is all a form of language and humor that carries cultural or experiential significance. And certainly, this gallows humor is an observable feature within military language communities. World War I journalist Philip Gibbs, who accompanied British soldiers throughout the duration of the war, gives us a glimpse at this gallows humor, recounting that soldiers, quote, "laughed at the most frightful episodes. The more revolting it was, the more sometimes they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence. When the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau or a mess table, it was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate", unquote. So we can think about gallows humor as a means to hold on to and repair the humanity between soldiers experiencing traumatic combat scenarios. I'm a peacetime veteran, but even there, the humor is so dark and so mean and it's the hardest I've laughed in my life. I mean, good Lord, I was always laughing. Yeah.
>> I mean, I have laughed the hardest I have laughed at some of the funerals I have been to. And I think that understanding the way that this kind of gallows humor functions as a tool of defense against the greatest inhumanities in life helps us to stop ourselves when we're inclined to look at communities that develop this kind of gallows humor and look at them and see an inhumanity. Just bare inhumanity, right? It's a way to cope. Language is a bridge between that inhuman reality and a reality that's really deeply human.
>> So we're finding our humanity through the gallows humor then? Is that what's happening?
>> I think so.
>> I mean that, there must be a reason why Liam italicized "the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate", right? So you're trying to pull back some of that humanity.
>> Yeah. And how do you do that? You distance yourself a little bit. You take control somehow of the situation, right?
>> Right.
>> And through this coping, a deep reverence for humanity that's couched within gallows humor, right? The psychological mechanisms for gallows humor is the indication that there is humanity there, not dissociation, not psychosis. You know, there's this 2021 study involving over 20,000 active duty military personnel that indicates, quote, "perceived unit cohesion, humor, and morale were positively associated with each other and negatively associated with PTSD symptoms over and above the effect of deployment stressors", yeah, unquote, right? So this is like tying together that humor and morale and unit cohesion. This is a coping mechanism actively against the traumatic effects of war. And again, it's not the absence of humanity, it is the mechanism that preserves the mind in times of uncertainty and trauma.
>> I'm loving the research in here, Liam. I remember when we worked on the script before, we talked about dark humor and gallows humor. And I think you've done a nice job of pulling in some sources, supporting and helping us better understand its importance. So there's also the benefit of increasing social unity among members of the group. So in addition to the defensive role and the linguistic efficiency role, it also has that real positive cohort building role. It helps them recapture their humanity. They have a shared language and they can more easily and clearly perceive each other as belonging to a connected group. Which of course, you spend time around veterans, boy, they just, when they meet each other, they glomp together. And this is something that really persists after they leave active duty.
>> Yeah. And it's something that endures till the end, I think. And I've got a story here. When my dad was dying, like really near the end, he didn't have a lot of energy. We're in the world of death's door. And he couldn't get up. He was in bed and couldn't get up. He actually, you know, really couldn't talk much at this point. When he did talk, it was quiet. It was quieter than we'd known him to be. We all knew what was going on but, you know, we accentuated the positive. Try to keep his energy up, right? Use the positive language. One of my brothers, when he arrives and his dad is upstairs in a hospital bed that he can't get out of and he's more tired and closer to death than the last time they saw each other, one of my brothers, nobody really remembers which one, opens the front door and yells, "eat the apple" up the stairs. My dad's response was immediate, unhesitating and loud. The brother yells, "eat the apple", immediate response, "eff the corps". Except he didn't say eff. But it was spirited, right? It was joyous. It was so layered in meanings and identity and experience. My brothers aren't Marines, but this little piece of Marine lingo was a way for them to connect, for my brother to connect to his dying father. And in its call and response, it was a way for my dad to reach back out, to really live fully into the world right there, like at the end.
>> I like the call and response there too, because it brings to mind, you know, a church sermon, for example, right, and the community building there. The other thing we can really see throughout this is that military lingo's got an edge to it. It can be prickly for those who aren't used to it. I've learned to stop telling certain stories, stop using certain phrases in academic life.
>> Yeah, there's some times the gallows humor, the lingo doesn't land.
>> They just look at you like, what are you? [laughs] But so the deadlines we talked about working toward that edge is there too, in ways we feel but maybe don't think about. A deadline is a civil war line around prisoner of war camps. And if you walk past it, you get shot. Quote, "at many prisons, the deadline was a low rail fence. Others utilized a series of stakes with rope tied between them, an embankment and trench and a series of white stakes that were illuminated by lanterns at night", unquote. This reminds me of another story with its own edge. For soldiers that experienced the chaos and violence of a civil war battle, the phrase was "seeing the elephant". This is how they described seeing war for the first time. They would see another soldier and say, "have you seen the elephant?" Right? Seeing an elephant in the 19th century was rare, strange, and even laughable. But you never forgot when you saw the elephant, either the real elephant or the one of war. I think that's why the Oliphaunt reference is in Lord of the Rings, right? It's a half-assed theory that I'll never research, but yeah [laughs].
>> [laughs] I live for those. Okay. Well, that's that for today, folks, although we will come back to these topics again and again. I think lingo is going to, it's going to come back to us. Something we reference often in episodes and we'll spend a couple more later episodes --
>> We'll call each other out when we do it.
>> We try, you know, we try. And you call in --
>> We'll call you in. That's what we say now. I will call you in [laughs].
>> [laughs] What I hear you say.
>> If I say call you in, feel free to smack me across the table.
>> We're going to start throwing shit at each other. Okay. So we thank you for tuning into this episode of SNAFUBAR. We hope you enjoyed this brief look into military lingo. And, you know, and to really -- I hope, we hope also that we've created a little bit of self-awareness around, or increased our self-awareness around the language we all use to describe our everyday lives. Those metaphors we live by, in Lakoff and Johnson's phrase. Lingo is like shorthand. It can provide us with some linguistic efficiency by containing layers and layers of meaning in just a word or two. It can help us to foster group cohesion. It can make it really clear who isn't in the group, who doesn't know the lingo. It can protect us from difficult or traumatic realities. These metaphors we live by, they can tell us something about who we are, where we came from, what we value.
>> And so you might ask yourself, what kind of metaphors do you use? And are they derived from military expressions? Is it okay when a dean says, keep your powder dry? This is a dean I know. He's a veteran. So it's not here. So no one get offended. Or don't die on that hill for an argument about grading or assessment [laughs].
>> Yes, this is --
>> He'd say to me, "Do you want to die on that hill, Jeff Crane?" Like, "Uhh" [laughs].
>> A previous dean of mine, a great dean, by the way, who I only have good things to say about, I came to him with a problem once and he said to me, "Sara, I can help you. But is this the hill you want to die on?"
>> Exactly. Keep your powder dry. Don't die on that hill. And we'll see you next time at the SNAFUBAR.
>> All right. See you next time. You've been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.
>> And me.
>> Abigail Smithson, producer.
>> Liam Salcuni, writer, researcher.
>> Roman Sotomayor, writer, researcher.
>> Check out our show notes for a list of works cited from the podcast, and thanks for listening.
>> Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
[ Silence ]
>> You've been listening to SNAFUBAR, a Cal Poly Humboldt production brought to you by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Our team includes me.
>> And me.
>> Abigail Smithson, producer.
>> Liam Salcuni, writer, researcher.
>> Roman Sotomayor, writer, researcher.
>> Check out our show notes for a list of works cited from the podcast, and thanks for listening.
>> Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.