Restrepo
>The Language of War
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| Still from Restrepo |
Chris Flynn @ Overland considers the acronyms of the battlefield in Sebastian Junger’s documentary Retrepo.
On 26 February 2009, novelist and journalist Nick McDowell began his embed with the United States Army’s 1st Cavalry Division in Mosul, northern Iraq. He was to spend two weeks researching a report for Time magazine and his book The End of Major Combat Operations. Most of that time was spent accompanying the units he was assigned to on counterinsurgency missions and grappling with a language he had no understanding of – military slang. A common experience among journalists new to the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq is their shock at how difficult it is to understand not what the locals are saying, but the coalition forces.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )While some military jargon may have entered common parlance through its use in film and video games, for the most part the staggering array of acronyms and nicknames can be bewildering to the layman. During his brief tour with the First ID (1st Infantry Division) McDowell relied heavily on Sergeant Gustavo Nogueira (‘Gu’) as an interpreter. Nogueira was a dual Brazilian/US citizen whose mother, an undocumented worker, worked as a housecleaner in Boston. Any thoughts McDowell had of his patois being informed by TV shows like The Wire were quickly dispelled. In The Wire, which might as well be a war series, a burner is a pre-paid mobile phone that is used to conduct narcotics transactions prior to being discarded. In Iraq and Afghanistan, a burner is a gun.
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