THE WAR OF THE WORDS

...From the beginning of the second period, the predominant tense moved to the future, indicating that the war had had a beginning, was in the middle, and would soon have an end...

...Words like "offensive" and "attack" (as in "sneak attack") were reserved for the other side...

...Terms like "Ranch Hand," "weed killer" ("the same as you buy in the hardware store at home," said an American official in 1966), "routine improvement of visibility in jungle areas," "non-toxic," and "resources control" conspired to make defoliation and crop destruction sound like a major 4-H Club project...

...The titles given to U.S...

...The best way to clear the air is to begin translating official Pentagonese and Vietlish into concise, de-euphemized English as was recently done when Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana boiled down the Administration's Vietnam policy to its essence: "It is bombing four countries, and has invaded two, in order to withdraw from one...

...Operation Ranch Hand" was the folksy name created in 1965 for a series of concentrated airborne chemical defoliation missions during which, according to officials at that time, the chemicals being dropped were likened to "weed killers"—even though they could kill a plant fifteen miles from the point at which they were dropped...

...Semantically, the most difficult aspect of this period was that of building up the war without making it too obvious...

...Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population . . ." Mario Pei, in his book Words in Sheep's Clothing, says that in such fields as advertising, economics, and education, euphemisms—or, as he terms them, "weasel words"—are generally gross overstatements...

...The United States never attacked but rather initiated "an Allied drive," began an operation (like "Operation Cedar Falls") or, to use President Johnson's oft-used term, "took positive action...

...The innocuous-sounding "area denial" was a "concept" invoked to describe a variety of acts ranging from the incessant use of "anti-personnel devices" (which Mario Pei calls the total euphemization of the term "killer weapon") to the wiping of villages off the map...

...It was made to sound like a faraway graduate school rather than a war...

...Once again the introduction of a new dialect has been accompanied by a shift in the predominant official tense...

...Dirty Little War" After the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was put into effect in 1965, the UnWar ruse was officially dropped in favor of the "dirty little war"—so called because no matter how big or nasty it got, it was still officially framed in diminutive terms inferring something of the size and scope of an Excedrin headache...

...Although the actual term "dirty little war" was most common it had its variant forms such as "mean, dirty struggle" (Secretary of State Dean Rusk) and "dirty, brutal and difficult" (President Lyndon Johnson...

...A good primer in "before and after" terms appeared in 1966 in a letter from a bomber pilot in Vietnam to the editors of Aviation Week and Space Technology which pointed out that once destroyed a "straw-thatched hut" officially became "a structure," a dead pig or goat a "pack animal," a splintered set of logs felled across a stream "a bridge," and a sunken one-man dugout a "boat...

...The first Marines in Danang were sent to "defend" American installations, and then more Marines were sent to "defend" the "defending" Marines...

...The presently popular construction, "routine, limited-duration, reinforced, protective reaction air strike," sounds more like the name of a paper given by a theoretical physicist than what it is—an air attack...

...Included in the advisory group were large numbers of pilots who, as several writers of the period pointed out, dropped bombs and seldom if ever advised against dropping them...

...Not all of the official terminology of the period fooled people...

...attacks and operations were given obfuscating American names like Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, Jim Bowie, Yankee Team, Dewey Canyon, Phoenix, White Wing, and Pierce Arrow...

...One of the habituation techniques Ziferstein cited is that of "psychological backing and filling," which is ideally suited to periods of escalation...

...Ziferstein reduced the process of escalation to a simple formula which works like this: "First step: highly alarming rumors about escalation are 'leaked.' Second step: the President officially and dramatically sets the anxieties to rest by announcing a much more moderate rate of escalation, and accompanies this announcement with assurances of the Government's peaceful intentions...

...Adviser" stands as one of the euphemisms of the war that was so important to Washington it had its own elaborate support force...

...This scornful statement was delivered to Alice in Through The Looking Glass after she objected to his interpretation of the word "glory" as meaning "a nice knockdown argument...

...This is the time during which the cat-and-mouse game of verbal coinage and debunking occurs...

...Once the "advisers" had become "troops," the words "defend" and "defenders" received much official play...

...A refugee trying to return home on his own, needless to say, became "an escapee...

...The semantic lesson of Vietnam is not that in the final analysis words began to fail those who coined them, but that they succeeded so well for so long...

...The future tense is used only sparingly and then in conjunction with terms like the President's beloved promise of a "just peace" following on the heels of Vietnamization...

...Gallup's pollsters found last March that seven out of ten Americans believed the Administration was veiling facts about the war...

...For instance, it has been only recently that more than a few periodicals have started calling war-related lies "lies" instead of "elements in the credibility gap," or "evidence of lack of candor...

...One of the outstanding linguistic innovations of the war cropped up as a facet of the "dirty little war" dialect...

...As it was in the beginning, the current official effort is to make everything—no matter how extraordinary—sound routine with the emphasis on giving the war a patina of normality, optimism, and even dullness...

...Such terms mostly revealed themselves after an object was destroyed and not only gave dignity to that which was gone but—as with other facets of Vietlish—made it all seem less horrific...

...Probably the quotation from the war which will be longest remembered is that of the unnamed American major who said of the village of Bentre, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it...

...Or as Peter Lisagor, Washington correspondent of the Chicago Daily News recently recalled, "A whole language was created to minimize that we were in war, and didn't know how to fight it...

...The job of declaring that the United States was actually at war in Vietnam fell to the press and individual legislators...

...Other terms were created to give the adventure the aura of a Boy Scout hike...

...In his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell pointed out that because many political actions are too brutal to face without flinching, the language describing such actions has to consist largely of "euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness...

...Consequently, the Vietnam war has required more than just a new set of terms but rather a veritable language (which some call Vietlish) of sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle deception...

...Many of the words and terms of the war are by now so completely debunked and abused that if they were not so laden with tragedy they would be funny...

...Most famous were those "advisers" who were not "troops" even when more than 20,000 of them were roaming the Vietnamese countryside...

...Among Orwell's 1946 illustrations were these: "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification...

...Obfuscating terminology buys time and continues to do so today...

...And in the current dialect there is no such word as "invasion...

...Several futile attempts were made to change "napalm"—a World War II marriage of naphthene and palmite— to new names like "napthagel" and "incendagel...

...Not content with Vietcong, many U.S...

...Called "target verification," these curious postmortems were spotted by others...

...UnWar II Since the election of President Nixon, the demeaning of meaning has continued unabated into a third period...

...The result is to leave the citizen "bewildered, helpless, and apathetic...

...And while the other side could only "ambush" American and South Vietnamese troops, the Allies could only "encounter" their adversaries...

...The time has come for a citizen militia of verbal vigilantes who know the difference between a war and a "just peace" and who in their own speech apply the principles of the truth in packaging laws...

...The late Bernard Fall reported that in 1966 the United States claimed a total of 20,242 "defectors" who carried 1,963 weapons among them...

...Unlike the more ambitiously constructed falsehoods of the war disclosed in the Pentagon Papers, the words and phrases used and created by the Government have been compact little lies, ruses, dodges, distortions, and euphemisms...

...involvement and lasted to 1965...

...What will come in its place...

...rice" was inevitably the only rice ever .confiscated or pinpointed by airborne herbicides...

...The first period, characterized by the dialect of "UnWar I," began with the earliest U.S...

...It was during this first period that some of the classic obfuscations were coined...

...The forced transfer of civilians was invariably given a nice "operation" or "program" title like "Operation Independence" or "Operation Sunrise...

...Second, the nation's professional linguists and semanticists seem to have decided to examine the martial language of today from the safer vantage of a decade or so hence...

...pronouncements opted for "hard-core Vietcong...

...His book, "Think Tanks" was recently published by Atheneum...

...According to Schell, the dilemma was resolved by calling them "hostile civilians" at the scene of "evacuation"—strongly hinting that their forced transfer was justly called for—and then, once transferred to camps, calling them "refugees," a term that strongly suggests that these were the people fleeing their enemy...

...The memo which was distributed to the Armed Forces Vietnam Network also ruled out "National Liberation Front" in favor of "Vietcong," and cautioned that the phrase "troops used to bait the enemy" was never to be used...

...The ever-so comforting term "national security" gets applied without public outcry to far-flung outrages such as invoking it as a reason for keeping American reporters out of Laos or for opposing publication of the Pentagon Papers...

...The handmaiden of habituation is euphemism, and the second period—the "dirty little war"—was euphemistically the richest of this war and perhaps of any war...

...Linguistically, the Pentagon Papers are interesting because the same officials who had no delusions about the larger fictions of the war had bought their own deluding language and used it in their top-secret memos—apparently without embarrassment...

...Prior to April, 1965, when the adviser ruse was officially dropped, all American adviser-pilots had to be accompanied by a South Vietnamese ("Even a mail clerk would do," according to the Los Angeles Times back then) so that if the craft crashed or was shot down, the Vietnamese could be named as the pilot...

...Such transfers were officially termed "compulsory relocation" and the civilians involved were either moved to "strategic hamlets" or "resettlement centers"—locales that were often no more than what were called "refugee camps" in other wars...

...The most conspicuous gaffes were some of the ill-fated attempts to change war-weary terms that were getting bad names for themselves...

...Just as terms for U.S...

...Wars have always presented a semantic challenge to those managing them because armed conflict is ever so much harder—if not impossible—to start and maintain in an atmosphere of official candor...

...This was followed by the dialect of the "dirty little war" period from 1965 to 1968 which, in turn, was followed by the period from 1968 to the present in which the dialect of "UnWar II" is spoken...

...Not content with announcing "harass and destroy" missions against rather innocuous-sounding junks, sampans, and barges, the Navy officially began calling them "waterborne logistic craft...

...Perhaps the most abused and abusive adjective of the war has been the provocative "hostile," especially when used to modify "civilians...

...Even though the language of the Vietnam War is wearing thin and requiring more frequent changes to keep us off balance, other life and death terms remain generally unchallenged...

...First, the press has too often babbled in official jargon or used its own weasel words to tell us what is happening...

...For instance, more than one news dispatch from the war told how a "hootch" or hut, once destroyed, became an "enemy building," and bomb shelters blasted were seldom called that after their demise but rather "VC bunkers" or "a network of tunnels...

...However, in the field of war and destruction the trend is to minimize the implications...

...Thus far the war has manifested itself in three linguistic periods, each presenting a distinct dialect of the mother tongue...

...With notable exceptions, the two groups in the best position to call verbal bluffs and reveal word-pollution have, regrettably, not done so...

...The effort to play things down in this current phase is generally reminiscent of the early UnWar period characterized by low-key words...

...As a New York Times reporter observed a few years back, "A few people were driven together, a roll of barbed wire was thrown over their heads, and the strategic hamlet was finished...

...Atomic device," which sounds like the name for a power plant, still passes for "thermonuclear weapon...

...V.C...

...And the new step equally logically prepares the ground for the next small and seemingly insignificant step...

...Among them: "pacification," "light at the end of the tunnel," "body count," "free-fire zone," "hearts and minds of the people," "suspected Vietcong target," "kill ratio," "target of opportunity," "quantification," and "search and destroy"—the last a term that even the most sluggish GI and junior high school student understands really means to "destroy and then search...

...People have long-since stopped flinching when they hear "Defense Department," even though that agency does more and more of its business away from home...

...As a careful student of "Humpty Dumptian semantics," I have set down the linguistic record of these three periods...

...The thirty-four dollars given to families of South Vietnamese civilians killed by mistake were officially called "condolence awards," and gross bombing errors were seldom termed anything more incriminating than "navigation errors," "misdirections," or "technical errors...

...Moreover, such enemy rice was invariably found in "caches" or "hoards" while AID rice came packaged in bags...

...operations, concepts, and hardware tended to sugar-coat their lethal reality, terms for their enemy counterparts were given more imposing names...

...During this period officially-adopted modifiers helped mitigate a multitude of sins...

...Late last year, for instance, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird insisted time and again that the ill-fated, out-of-the-ordinary raid to rescue POWs from North Vietnam was a routine SAR (for search and rescue) operation —a term normally used to describe rescue efforts of a much smaller size and scope...

...This, of course, was the operating principle in effect during the second period of the war...

...A non-destructive example of "before and after" Vietlish has been the instant renaming of a "civilian refugee" to a "defector" or "returnee" as soon as he walked into a Chieu-Hoi (Open Arms) camp...

...It is a distinct dialect, but close enough to the first to be called UnWar II...

...Just peace," which translates as "continued war without American combat troops," is as cruel a misuse of the word peace as came from President Johnson who was "waging the peace," "conducting a peace-keeping action" or saying, "Our purpose is not war but peace"—a slogan minted in mid-1966 when U.S...

...The words most often used to describe our increasingly combative role during this period were "indirect," "economic," "political," or "tutorial...

...III...

...Counter," by the way, has long been in vogue as a soothing military modifier employed in such constructions as "counter-force deterrence"—a resonant, almost musical term that has what poets call liquidity which is produced by the absence of frictional consonants and the liberal use of r's...

...A search of current journals in these fields reveals that the terminology and slang of World War II have just recently become acceptable for scholarly analysis...

...Counterinsurgency" was a technique which the United States taught rather than practiced, and when an American flyer-"adviser" did not return to his "training base" his death was noted as a "training mission" loss...

...Fall concluded that most were unarmed civilians "surrendering" at the peaceful camps to escape the horrors of war rather than defectors from the other side...

...In his paper, "Psychological Habituation to War," he follows the U.S...

...Third step: after the general sigh of relief, the originally rumored escalation is gradually put into effect, after all...

...Despite claims to the contrary, the war is still very much on and no doubt more terms will be coined for the periods ahead...

...term for our allied South Vietnamese specialists practicing the same black arts of destruction and assassination attributed to "Vietcong terrorists...

...Such an unflinching attitude towards language is significant in light of the war in Vietnam because it is obvious that "Humpty Dumptian semantics" have been and are today a major tenet of unwritten official policy...

...Each war generates its own terminology—the Korean war, for instance, brought forth the phraseology of the "police action...

...For a long time such titles as "National Liberation Front" and "People's Army of North Vietnam" did not exist, officially, unless accompanied by the disdainful modifier, "so-called...

...One of the most apparent changes from the first period to second period dialect was the shift in the predominant tense of official pronouncements...

...bombers were hitting Haiphong and Hanoi...

...build-up in terms of conditioning the homefront: "Each step appears to evolve as a logical consequence of a previous small and seemingly insignificant step toward greater involvement...

...The conspiratorial-sounding term "infrastructure" was liberally applied in lieu of the civil government when officials explained that villages had to be cleared to "deny the use of the civilian infrastructure" to the Vietcong, or Pathet Lao, depending on what nation's villages the Americans were "saving" at the time...

...This time most statements are made in the present ("Vietnamization is working") and the past (as in Nixon's "mission accomplished" speech to the Marines last April...

...Many of the terms were replays of terms long ago spotted as outrageous misrepresentations but which were nonetheless effective...

...It took years, but at last the words and phrases of Vietlish began to falter...

...As revealed recently in the Columbia Journalism Review, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) put into a memo its dissatisfaction with such terms as "search and destroy," "body count," and "Hamburger Hill," asking instead for, respectively, "search and clear," "enemy deaths," and "Hill 937...

...During the UnWar phase, statements were presented in the noncommittal present, giving no hint that the war had a future...

...The word "dirty" was a reference to the enemy and served as a built-in rationale for the counter-dirty tactics employed by the home team...

...Limited air interdiction" tends to evoke a picture of a poorly-funded soil aeration program rather than heavy bombing in Laos...

...Known as "before and after" terms, they were created to meet the demand for "results" from Washington where the war was being fought on charts at Pentagon press briefings...

...I. UnWar I Early in the war Vietlish was geared to understatement, and the efforts to prove that our actions in Vietnam were not "war" but UnWar were far more exhaustive than the campaign to make 7-Up the "Un-Cola...

...Rather it is "an incursion"—a term that makes one think of a somewhat impolite excursion...

...If there is a strong sales challenge involved in putting over a war, the number of new coinages and official redefinitions increases...

...For instance, yesterday's "advisers" may be tomorrow's "instructors," "support staff," or "technicians...

...Writing in The New Yorker in 1967, Jonathan Schell pointed out that during the land-clearing "Operation Cedar Falls" the Army faced a major semantic problem in deciding what to call the people it was forcing from their homes...

...One of the few detailed studies of the verbal accomplishments of this period was conducted by psychiatrist Isidore Ziferstein...

...Perhaps it is time for a revival of President Johnson's pet, "positive response," to cover such attacks, or perhaps it will be something new like "withdrawal-affiliated sortie...

...Righteous-sounding "counter-terrorists" was the U.S...

...Paul Dickson is a Washington-based free lance writer who has contributed to Esquire, Saturday Review, and The Washington Monthly as well as to The Progressive...

...And while "protective reaction" is still doing its job—as evidenced by the fact that so many newspapers repeat it without so much as a set of quotation marks—some publications have caught on, and its time may be drawing nigh...