DEHUMANIZING EPITHETS IN BASIC TRAINING: THE RECRUIT AS ABJECT

Recruits to the United States military come from all over the nation, bringing personal back stories and idiosyncrasies. The ritualistic context of basic training, though, takes specific people and semiotically renders them members of a generic type, the uniformed ‘recruit’, stripped of the individuating markers of their former life and treated as liminal (Turner Reference Turner1970) during their training period. At Parris Island Marine Corps recruit training center in South Carolina, for instance, arrivals are disgorged from a bus onto neat rows of painted ‘yellow footsteps’. Each pair of footsteps assumes the same position, heels nearly clicked together, toes pointed slightly outward, forcing the body to start standing at attention as the recruits first embody their new collective identity. Through exhausting repetition, recruits’ bodies will subsequently be biopolitically entrained into strength, endurance, and synchronized movements as their agency is utterly subordinated to the state's agenda (cf. Foucault Reference Foucault2004; MacLeish Reference MacLeish2019).

Alongside the reconditioning of the body is what might be called ‘psychopolitical retraining’ in how recruits imagine themselves and their ascribed enemies. Language plays a vital role in this psychopolitical drama. During their thirteen weeks of basic training, before they can be deemed ‘Marines’, recruits are merely ‘recruits’, sometimes referred to with their individuating surname (e.g. ‘Recruit Larson’) but sometimes with denigrating nicknames or epithets. Such insulting language is not officially permitted in the Recruit Training Order (RTO), but by all accounts, verbal violations of the RTO are fairly common, depending on the Drill Instructor (DI). Between personal conversations with DIs (active duty and retired) and published accounts (e.g. Smith Reference Smith2007), I collected a litany of insults used as appellations for recruits, many of them in circulation since before the Vietnam War era. These include ‘whiners’, ‘weaklings’, ‘wusses’, ‘lazy bastards’, ‘crybabies’, ‘snowflakes’, ‘maggots’, ‘hogs’, ‘crayon-eaters’, ‘clowns’, ‘retards’, ‘shit-bags’, ‘shit-birds’, and a raft of gender-troubled (and homophobic and transphobic) insults, such as (to male recruits especially) ‘ladies’, ‘little girls’, ‘faggots’, ‘pussies’, ‘pansies’, ‘buttercups’, ‘cupcakes’, and ‘sweethearts’. Infantilization, feminization, animalization, and objectification are common. The terms dance somewhere between the play of absurd metaphor and ostentatious disregard for the humanity and lived reality, especially the suffering, of the recruits. Indeed, some DIs will amplify their use of epithets against recruits precisely when recruits show signs of suffering or vulnerability. And though it is now a high-risk speech act, a few DIs still target ethnic, racial, or religious group members with intense cruelty. (A well-known case of identity abuse took place in 2016 when a young recruit from the Detroit area, Raheel Saddiqui, took his own life after repeatedly being called a ‘terrorist’ by his DI and asked if he ‘needed his turban’ (Reitman Reference Reitman2017).)

Epithets for recruits are routinely used (with specific, as opposed to generic, reference) as appellations or taunts, as in: ‘Faster, hogs’, or ‘What are you, little girls?’. Alongside these epithets, new verbal rituals and repertoires further discourage recruits’ sense of individuation. Recruits must avoid the first-person singular pronoun and yell responses to DIs’ yes-no questions, while any backtalk is met with verbal berating and painful ‘IT’ (incentive training). DIs recognize that the point is to create a transformed being. In conversation with me, two active-duty DIs spontaneously used the word ‘dehumanization’ in the context of recruit training, though they also signaled awareness that such framing could be controversial in the public eye. Said the first: ‘We need to de-, dehumanize, but that isn't the right word, but…what you thought you were, what you came with, we need to wash that off. We need to just wash it right off’. A second, in the context of a discussion about profanity, told me that unlike some DIs he knows, he follows the spirit of the Recruit Training Order: ‘You're not meant to dehumanize a recruit by insulting them, like, “Why didn't you do what I said, you fucking bitch?”’. (It was clear from context that he was invoking an exchange with a male recruit.) Twice evoking dehumanization to deny it, these DIs implied that at least some recruit training practices live right on its edge.

Elsewhere (McIntosh Reference McIntosh, McIntosh and Denton2020a), I have referred to this verbal drama of recurrent insults as a process of ‘semiotic callousing’. DIs say it anneals the recruits to combat hardship. But I suggest that semiotic callousing through epithets contains a subtler pedagogic lesson, like Victor Turner's (Reference Turner1970) sacra—those deeds, displays, and statements presented to the neophyte during a rite of passage to instruct them about what type of person they are to become. Not only do the epithets grind down the recruit to make them more amenable to learning a new role, but they also send several messages. They clarify that personal sensitivity must be expunged and that the individual must be sacrificed for the unit; they encourage, in other words, a position of necropolitical abjection.Footnote ⁴ And they clarify that language need no longer honor individual lives on their own terms, for just as the DI typifies and dehumanizes recruits through epithets and uncompromising orders, so too will the recruit typify and dehumanize ‘the enemy’. The callousing, in other words, is of both recruits’ personal sensitivity, and their sensitivity to those framed as Others. One might argue the epithets used against the recruit start the cycle in which the verbally abused become verbal abusers, constituting a semiotic loop that places both military participants and their targets into the condition of the living dead, offered up to kill or be killed.

There is some cross-cultural precedent for this conflation of soon-to-be killers with those-who-are-killable. Male initiation rites in many small-scale societies involve violent imagery in which the initiate is symbolically victimized, wounded, or sacrificed before being ‘reborn’ or otherwise rebounding into a position of strength, including, sometimes, that of a killer (Bloch Reference Bloch1992). Bloch sees this as part of a species-wide dynamic with a religious dimension, arguing that the sacrifice of the young self allows initiates to partake of a kind of immortal external vitality; violence in ritual is thus ‘an attempt to create the transcendental’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1992:7). Yet at the pragmatic level, the machinations of American basic training seem less about yearning for the transcendental and more about retraining the self into an affective and cognitive zone in which death (one's own and that of others) is thinkable. In this regard, I see American basic training as having intriguing resonance (however partial) with the Atavip pre-war rituals in New Guinea described by Simon Harrison (Reference Harrison1993). According to Harrison, aggression is so antithetical to Atavip norms and ordinary identity that a ‘temporary ritual transformation of the self’ is required to carry it out (1993:27). Historically, their ritual system involved ‘war magic’—including consuming magical leaves—that would place men into a state of dissociation, so they could kill for the good of their community but be relieved from personal responsibility for killing. Put another way, ‘it was not only the enemy who had to be depersonalized, but, much more importantly, themselves’ (1993:96). Epithets for the recruit in the US seem to play a somewhat analogous depersonalizing role, even if the maneuver is not metapragmatically recognized as such the way it was among Atavip.

Epithets for the recruit not only signal their abjection, but also can give them a foil to push against; the terms are simultaneously nihilistic and motivating (what soldier wants to be a ‘crybaby’ or a ‘cupcake’?). Both of these states of being serve the interest of the military. Service members must accept that they are in a newly killable category, but if they are to function successfully, they must strive against their own weakness and demise. It is no coincidence that so many of the epithets, for instance, are feminizing, and implicit within them is a taunt that the recruit must overcome (whether they are male or female) by proving their toughness and aggression.

My conversations with veterans themselves affirmed some of the effects I describe, such as the way that verbal berating leads to a kind of nihilism. One Vietnam veteran, Preston, was trained as a Navy Seal to hide in wait and kill his targets by the dozens, numb to feeling (‘the feelings’, he tells me ruefully, ‘came later’). He explains the effect of being insulted during basic training (original emphasis).

Preston was left with crushing guilt about having become a killer, but when he adopts a militaristic stance, he recognizes that the insults of basic training lay the groundwork for doing the job. I have heard similar arguments from veterans less peace-loving than Preston: the dehumanizing language of basic training toughens recruits to the peril they will face, while making it easier for them to subtract the humanity of others. And just as recruits become ‘types’, so too does their conceptual system typify ‘the enemy’.

ENEMY EPITHETS AND THE POLITICS OF EXTENSION

At the same time that new military recruits are being infantilized, likened to animals, and so forth during basic training, they may hear their highers-up pontificating about the enemy with a dehumanizing lexicon. In one of several conversations, Preston and his friend Vlad (who served in the Army in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1969–70) told me about the language they heard in basic training. ‘Gooks, hooches [abrasive slang for a dwelling], you dehumanize humans. They still do that in training’. Preston added, ‘The way I was trained, if you didn't have that you wouldn't be a good killer’. During this training phase, before a draftee or recruit enters combat, such epithets were often accompanied by generic referential claims such as: ‘They don't grieve for their dead the way we do’, or ‘They're not human’ (Sallah & Weiss Reference Sallah and Weiss2005:47). Other generic referential claims in circulation included ‘Gooks don't bleed, gooks don't feel pain, gooks don't have any sense of loyalty or love’, ‘The only good gook is a dead gook’, and ‘Dead gooks [have] a special stink’ (Park Reference Park2007:28–29). Some of these will have been highly familiar to American servicemembers, disguising themselves as entextualized, citable folk wisdom.

Generic assertions about ‘types’ seem to be easy to learn and think with (Gelman Reference Gelman and Pelletier2010) and do not constitute ‘generalizations from experience’; in fact, there could hardly be less experiential data when recruits first learn these terms, before they have encountered a single Vietnamese or, in the era of the GWOT, Iraqi, or Afghan individual. Many who fought in Vietnam report having readily internalized the hostile lexemes they were given, and the generic claims associated with them. Vlad, for instance, thinks back on the war with profound regret, and now realizes that basic training indoctrinated him with racist concepts.

Enemy epithets are semi-propositional, or half-understood, concepts (Sperber Reference Sperber, Lukes and Hollis1982), suffused more with affective stance than with conceptual clarity. As Marc tells me about learning a term for the enemy, VC (short for Viet Cong, an ostensibly neutral name for the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, but saturated with prejudice when it issued from American mouths), he speaks of a mystified, uncanny essence placeholder. (I use italics when Marc shifts into a hushed voice.)

Later, Marc added, ‘when you hear that [word], gooks, it's dread’. Characterizing the epithet with his whole body, he gesticulated with his hands around his upper arms as he shuddered. The term is infilled with suspicion; to go back to Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2003:18, original emphasis), it implies that ‘the existence of the Other [is] an attempt on my life… [their] biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security’.

Generic reference is pedagogically useful to the military before combat, loading military epithets with meaning. Referring to the enemy with these epithets can subsequently be emotionally convenient for soldiers in the brutal encounters of combat itself. In Ken Burns’ series about Vietnam, for instance, Marine Corps veteran John Musgrave—who became a poet, a counselor, and a highly reflexive person after the war—explains the role of epithets in his own psyche. After his first experience of killing, he recovered his ability to function by telling himself,

In Musgrave's self-talk, here, the phrase ‘I ain't going to kill anybody’ is striking along several lines. Ventriloquizing his earlier self, steeped in working-class and grunt informalities, he recalls a clear conceptual distinction between human beings (‘subjects’, or ‘somebodies’, who think and feel) and non-humans (‘objects’) who absolved the guilt one might feel in ‘killing’ them, for instead, they could be ‘wasted’ or ‘waxed’.Footnote ⁵ As one of my respondents, Doug Anderson, affirms in his unpublished poem ‘Kill them with a name’: ‘We were taught to call them gook, / slope, slant, and worse, / because it's easier to kill / that way, easier to sleep at night / if you've merely crushed a roach / under your boot heel’. Language and concept formation are intimately bound together, and the military euphemisms that sidestep human suffering not only make certain ideas more or less thinkable, but also certain deeds more or less do-able (cf. Cohn Reference Cohn1987).

The conceptualization of the enemy as pestilent is also evident in a combat anecdote from Marc. A man walking point in his squad was a few meters into the jungle when he came running back into a clearing, ‘screaming, ‘Dinks! Dinks!”’. Marc describes taking cover and listening as his buddies switched from an overtly racist to a profane epithet in the heat of the moment of firing their rifles: ‘[They] would raise up and scream and curse, “You motherfuckers!” Ba-ba-ba-bom, and down. “You motherfuckers!” and down’. (Marc later described the profanity as a way of ‘gearing themselves up’; it was bound up with the viscerally hostile energy they were mustering for their deadly act, perhaps similar to the way American soldiers in the GWOT have used heavy metal and rap music to ‘pump’ and ‘charge’ themselves up to kill (Pieslak Reference Pieslak2009:50–51).) A young woman survived not only this hail of bullets, but a second one shortly thereafter. As Marc walked past her, she gripped at his thermos for water. Marc admits at this point he could not imagine her as human. He didn't care if she lived or died, and if she touched his thermos, he told me, he wouldn't drink from its ‘contaminated’ opening again.

When Army Lieutenant Conrad Braun gave a televised interview shortly after a battle with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in Vietnam's central highlands in February 1967, he used the epithet ‘dinks’ in several ways that emphasized the enemy's homogeneity and interchangeability.Footnote ⁶ Describing how his unit was overrun, Braun said,

In the above excerpt, Braun drops the article to use ‘dink’ as if it is a proper name for any NVA fighter, highlighting the interchangeability of one to the other. Later in the interview, too, Braun describes how he planned to destroy the personal effects of his fallen comrades as his unit was outnumbered. ‘I was about to just blow it all up with me rather than let dink get it. He definitely wasn't going to get us’. In such statements, ‘dink’ becomes a mass noun, a singular ‘he’, as if all ‘dinks’ have become one entity, comprised of some not-quite-human, sneaky enemy principle.

If sometimes ‘dink’ is a mass noun, elsewhere in Braun's interview ‘dinks’ are not only count nouns, but also mentioned precisely in a context of being counted. The quantification, too, is profoundly de-individuating. ‘There were dinks in threes and fours piled up outside that platoon perimeter’, says Braun. And later, ‘He'd kill about ten, eleven, twelve dinks I think, out there. I think I personally can account for three’. This pattern of numbering was doubtless encouraged by the United States’ emphasis on ‘body count’ as a way of gauging American success in Vietnam (‘The [NVA] body count now, I think, is eighty-three’, says Braun near the interview as he sums up the carnage). The death of a ‘dink’, in Braun's discourse, is primarily a matter of quantification rather than suffering or the dissolution of a full life (cf. Frank, Slovic, & Vastfjall Reference Frank, Slovic; and Vastfjall2011). Meanwhile, Braun names his own buddies—‘Owen Mapes’, ‘Spec-4 Jones’, ‘Sergeant Brown’—and describes some of their acts of valor in the face of grave injuries.

While the politics of epithets have shifted in ways I describe below, the Global War on Terror launched after 9/11 has been a breeding ground for equally vicious generic typing of the enemy. In 2003, for instance, when Ryan came to Parris Island for Marine Corps training, she tells me that ‘from the minute you arrived, towelheads, sand n****r, that kind of thing, were pumped into you’ (notice that in the second epithet, one racial slur piggybacks on another, presumably for semantic and affective leverage). Other common Islamophobic epithets included ‘camel jockey’, ‘raghead’, and ‘haji’, from the Arabic term for a person who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Army veteran Anna describes the rules of thumb as she learned them a decade ago, using generic references. ‘[We heard it] in the sense of, like, an Iraqi is potentially a haji, [and] a haji in that context is not a good person… You should be wary of them, because you never know’.

Anna's sense that ‘you never know’, any Iraqi is ‘potentially a haji’, gets at the heart of why military epithets for the enemy are incompatible with the delicate ethical ideals described at the start of the article. The epithets hyperbolically draw attention to racial, religious, or national features, and can readily be scaled up to encompass allies and civilians in a context of uncertainty about who is allied with whom (well-known dilemmas for the American military in the Vietnam War and the GWOT). Some veterans describe how such ambiguous terms tended to blur fighters and civilians, dehumanizing all of them. Marine Corps veteran Matt Young (Reference Young2018) explains that during his training in the mid-2000s, ‘The infantry taught us to use language like ‘haji’ and ‘raghead’ and ‘target’ and ‘towelhead’ to dehumanize not just enemy combatants, but every Iraqi or Arab person we encountered’. Army sergeant Sean Davis (Reference Davis2014:131) describes an American colonel in Iraq talking cynically about his interpreter: ‘I can't trust the fucker. He's a raghead too’.

The net of extension in military epithets was also flung widely across Vietnam (and neighboring countries such as Cambodia, where some American troops fought just over the border). According to Army veteran Haywood Kirkland, ‘As soon as I hit boot camp in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, they tried to change your total personality. Transform you out of that civilian mentality to a military mind. Right away they told us not to call them Vietnamese. Call everybody gooks, dinks’ (Terry Reference Terry1984:90–91, emphasis added). Sallah & Weiss (Reference Sallah and Weiss2005:47), in their Pulitzer-Prize winning account of the war crimes of one American unit in Vietnam, describe the wide extension of the epithet in the minds of the Army men: ‘These Vietnamese were no better than the Vietcong, they said. They were all gooks, and none of them could be trusted’. As Holmes (Reference Holmes1989:391) describes the ‘mere gook rule’, killing a Vietnamese civilian ‘did not count’ in the minds of many American combatants, because the extension of the dehumanizing term so readily extended to encompass them.

In fact, to return to Lieutenant Braun's 1967 NBC interview, we see a telling (if inadvertent) confession of how widely enemy epithets could stretch. Correspondent Howard Tuckner breaks in at one point during his narrative to ask a metalinguistic question: ‘By dinks you mean North Vietnamese?’ Braun smiles slightly, and looks down as he replies. ‘Yeah. Dinks are uh NVA, North Vietnamese, communist, Charlies, anything’. Braun's smile, his only expression of facial affect in a seven-minute interview, might reflect his sudden awareness that the term might sound startling, even shocking, to some Americans watching from their living rooms. As he defines ‘dinks’, he lists a series of expanding social categories, starting with the ‘NVA’ or the formal North Vietnamese Army, and ending up at ‘anything’ (including ‘communist’, which could encompass vast numbers of civilians). Clearly, many common epithets for the enemy militate against the ethical principle described by the philosophers at the beginning of this article; namely, that service members should be carefully selective about who is dehumanized and when.

Then-presidential candidate and Vietnam Veteran John McCain got into trouble in February 2000 when he tried to argue he could personally limit the extension of an ethnoracial military slur. McCain was criticized for using the word ‘gooks’ to refer to North Vietnamese. From his ‘Straight Talk Express’ bus, McCain tried to clarify that he was referring only to the interrogators who had held him captive and tortured him for five years. Perhaps he felt his personal experience gave him authority to control the limits of the word's reference. But as philosopher Hilary Putnam (Reference Putnam1975) once put it, ‘meaning just ain't in the head’, since dubbings that establish reference rely on broader social context.Footnote ⁷ Here too is where Bakhtin's (Reference Bakhtin1983) invocation of word history as part of word meaning is illuminating. ‘Gooks’ has historically been used by US occupation troops to refer to a wide breadth of Asian nationalities, from Chinese to Korean, and as we see it was often extended to encompass all Vietnamese. A speaker's intentions do not refine the extension of an epithet, making finely grained distinctions between who is and is not caught in its dehumanizing reductions. Military generics have been regimented in quite the opposite way, in fact, by their historical and pragmatic use.

Another reason McCain ran into trouble has to do with broader shifts in language ideology in the decades since the 1980s (cf. Cameron Reference Cameron1995), shifts that have framed some of the national dismay as Americans look back at the terminology of the Vietnam war era. Racist and xenophobic language was in wide circulation in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, and a word like ‘gooks’ would not have caused an American pile-on in the 1960s. After all, Howard Tuckner mediated Lieutenant Braun's translation of the term ‘dink’ for viewers without a hint of judgment. And immediately after Braun's interview (in which he uses the term ‘dink’ no fewer than eleven times), the camera cuts to NBC studio anchor Bill Ryan, who endorses Braun's ‘professionalism’:

In the 1960s, an NBC anchorman, a figure of cultural authority and respect at the time, seemed to accept that epithets for the enemy were the argot of military expertise, perhaps even necessary to warfare and to making do in a ‘strange land’.

One would be hard pressed to find mainstream media apologists for such epithets today. American language politics have changed sufficiently that epithets for both recruits and ‘the enemy’ have grown controversial. In fact, it is not unusual to hear official or public messaging from various military authorities that epithets for recruits are no longer allowed, though they are still used fairly often on the ground. As noted, Recruit Training Orders in the Marine Corps urge Drill Instructors to use respectful language in addressing recruits, and Jeff, who attended Officer Candidate School for the Army in 2000, tells me that it was officially ‘prohibited’ for officers to use epithets against privates in training. ‘We're trying to turn them into soldiers, not degrade them and make them subhuman’, he told me. Yet many still believe that such concessions to recruits’ feelings, or indeed broader national sensitivity to word choice, can compromise national security (cf. Gutmann Reference Gutmann2000). A number of Marine Corps Drill Instructors told me directly that to eschew epithets for recruits is to risk weakening the nation's fighting force.

As for epithets for the enemy, the Army veteran Tom (who served in Afghanistan) says his friends in basic training over the last five years told him, ‘Okay, you can't say haji. We can't call them raghead anymore’. A former Marine in his mid 20s, Lennie, tells me ‘I heard a lot of terms like ‘towel heads’ before entering the Marine Corps, from movies and from other people talking, but when I definitely went into boot camp, there was, like, less emphasis on race [from the Drill Instructors] and just more emphasis on ‘the enemy’. While this verbal shift has played out unevenly across military branches and platoons, there has been a subtle ideological shift, overall, in public-facing military culture when it comes to verbal sensitivity. Overtly racist and Islamophobic epithets for the enemy are now expected to live a more clandestine existence.

What labels for the enemy remain, then? One hides its troubling politics in plain sight: ‘terrorist’. The term does not overtly attach to a particular racial, ethnic, or religious group, yet is highly reductive—caricatural—in its characterization of negative motives and morality. (This is why some veterans tell me epithets like ‘primitive terrorist’ were common when they served in Iraq or Afghanistan.) ‘Terrorists’ are framed as barbaric, hate-filled, and vicious enough to target civilians, in contrast to putatively civilized and just ‘soldiers’ in war—yet as Asad (Reference Asad2007) has extensively argued, the contrast is untenable given that legal-moral guidelines are often breached in war, and wartime strategy often necessarily kills civilians. Through its history of use in the US, too, the term ‘terrorist’ very often connotes a Muslim religious extremist. The simple term ‘enemy’, while still reductive and imputed with an almost evil frisson, at least does not bundle in racial connotations or assumptions about religious motives. The term is racially, ethnically, religiously, and geographically neutral; it does not attach to the putative biological qualities of its targets, nor lump by any simple, single attribute, and as such, its extension seems less likely to be extended to entire demographic categories (e.g. all Vietnamese; all Muslims or Arabs; and so forth).

Some service members make a personal language-ideological decision to eschew racialized or religious epithets for the enemy in their discussions of the GWOT. Consider Sean Davis (Reference Davis2014:39), for instance, who during training at Fort Hood was instructed by a captain that ‘The ragheads don't have the common courtesy to give the American soldier a fair fight’. But, perhaps in connection with having bought a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq out of nascent curiosity, Davis opts in his memoir to describe Iraqi combatants—particularly when they were shooting at him or his buddies—not as ‘ragheads’, ‘hajis’, or the like, but with the religiously, racially, and ethnically neutral pejorative: ‘shitheads’ (Davis Reference Davis2014:86–87, 107).

THE WAY OUT: THE SPECIFICITY OF CONTACT AND THE ABANDONMENT OF EPITHETS

Sallah & Weiss (Reference Sallah and Weiss2005:272) spoke to the mother of one GI who had come home from Vietnam deeply disturbed. He would sometimes rant about how ‘the gooks were all the same and how he should have killed more’, but later express regret about opening fire on ‘unarmed men, women, and children’. Evidently, here was a man wrestling with the question of where his dehumanizing and perhaps even his labels should have been bounded. Were they really all the same? Was a child, or an unarmed civilian, a ‘gook’?

The generic references issued during the training phase (e.g. ‘Gooks don't feel pain’; ‘The ragheads don't have the common courtesy to give the American soldier a fair fight’) make existential claims detached from real events and people, and don't have to answer to contradictory data. They instruct more-or-less naïve recruits in what to expect. Once service members have been in the theater of operations, many continue to use the same epithets in specifically anchored (or ‘deictically selective’; Agha Reference Agha2007) contexts, as in, ‘I shot that dink on the spot’. When they attach the label to a specific person or people, the label can still drag the dehumanizing reductions—the generic typing—bundled into the lexeme (see also Zuckerman, this volume).

At times, however, when the specificity of the human being in question rises up to meet the presuppositions and simplifications of the epithet, the mismatch between the label and the manifest qualities of the ‘enemy’ person becomes evident to the speaker. The speaker takes note of some quality or qualities of that person, some aspect disregarded by the epithet, to move toward a different stance in their verbal practice. Apparently, several types of encounter or realization can prompt this shift.

Preston, for example, explains that the skill Vietnamese showed in battle helped him to move away from the epithets he'd received during training. ‘We were told ‘Get the gooks, slant-eyed bastards’, you know, and this and that… [but] I never felt like calling them anything because I appreciated… what kind of firepower we had versus what they had. [We had] like four or five times what they had or more, but they still beat us’. Braun also moves momentarily away from enemy epithets when he foregrounds Vietnamese prowess in battle. His interview with Tuckner had been in process for several minutes and Braun had already clarified he considered ‘dink’ a synonym for ‘NVA’ (the North Vietnamese Army) and indeed for any Vietnamese. But near the end of the interview, Braun shifts stance to enunciate a certain respect. ‘What do you think of this war?’ asks Tuckner. Braun replies,

Braun's first shift into using ‘NVA’ (instead of his preferred ‘dink’), here, makes a more positive reference to the enemy, in the context of what might be reported speech (‘they say we fought crack NVA troops’). He indicates the incongruity of praising them— ‘just a funny thing’—before going on to concede he has ‘the greatest respect in the world for the NVA’, including their competence and bravery. The term ‘NVA’ here highlights their status as members of a trained military force, rather than pestilent racial others, and Braun's stance has shifted from disparaging to admiring. Braun's interview clarifies the way an epithet congeals ‘as-if’ abstractions that a speaker can move away from by choosing a different lexeme.

In other accounts, an interaction with an ‘enemy’—looking them in the eye, seeing and hearing their suffering, witnessing their relationality, or grasping that they possess the capacity to reason, plan, even worry—seems to activate a richer in-filling of the other mind, and a corresponding reluctance to use the grotesque caricature of the label.

Sean Davis (Reference Davis2014:111–12) recounts a series of events in Iraq in which he came to question the dehumanizing conceptualizations he had learned in training. A Humvee in his convoy was ambushed and Davis and his squad rushed into a nearby grove trying to find the triggermen. They found ‘an old man in a white dishdasha talking to a boy in dirty hand-me-down clothes’, and his squad buddy whispered, ‘Let's get these motherfuckers’. It wasn't clear if they were the culprits, says Davis. At some level he ‘wanted to kill them’, but there was a certain beauty to how ‘the sun cut through those orange trees and fell on the old man's white robes’—and Davis was moved to approach them to speak. ‘After talking to them’, he writes, ‘I didn't see them as enemies—just a grandfather taking his grandson for a walk’.

Some weeks later, Davis was moving door to door on a search for insurgents, and encountered an Iraqi man in his forties who spoke excellent English. The man says he had studied at University of Illinois in Champaign, but moved back to Iraq to bring his father to the hospital for kidney dialysis. He told Davis that Iraq had not been as bad under Saddam, who ‘left most people alone’ (Davis Reference Davis2014:133). Later, says Davis, ‘I couldn't stop thinking about what the English-speaking man out on the road had said before taking his father to the hospital in Baghdad. Were these ‘terrorists’ just fatherless sons wanting revenge?’ (Davis Reference Davis2014:137).

Shortly thereafter, Davis was assigned to an air assault QRF, flying over villages in a helicopter. ‘Looking down at the houses I realized that each one held a family, each one was a home, each home had children, mothers, fathers, grandparents. That wasn't something I thought about in training and now it was something I couldn't avoid thinking about’ (Davis Reference Davis2014:137). Not long after, when Davis was instructed to shoot a group of men in a sector he had been assigned to, he finds himself ‘staring’ at the men around a campfire. ‘I lost my breath and the bottom of my stomach dropped out. We were really going to have to kill these men’ (Davis Reference Davis2014:143). His reluctance to shoot is evident in his noun choice: they are men, their equal ontological footing foregrounded by the word. Davis opted to engage them verbally before shooting, and learned they were merely security for the Baghdad zoo. Nobody died there that day.

Davis’ descriptions repeatedly connect humanizing the enemy other to recognizing their relationality with other people. Similarly, Ryan, the Marine, was highly trained in close combat skills (she tells me ‘I have seventeen confirmed kills’), but lives with profound regret today: ‘I was so brainwashed into ‘it's us or them’… [but] you're just killing people, because they were born someplace else… It was still somebody's dad, and somebody's son, and somebody's uncle, and somebody's brother’. Rather than vilifying the enemy with epithets, Ryan now conceptualizes Iraqis through tekonyms that thickly embed them among their kin.

Preston, the Navy Seal who killed so many in Vietnam, had a humanizing encounter he spoke to me about on three occasions, and on all three he referred to the Vietnamese individual involved as ‘a boy’. Preston was inside a village home, engaged in a firefight, and the ‘boy’ came at him with an AK-47. Preston shot him and began to walk out the door, then glanced at ‘the boy, who was just dying’. Listening to the boy's moans, Preston was overtaken by a feeling that he wanted the boy's death ‘not to be awful’.

In one conversation about this incident, I asked Preston to clarify how old ‘the boy’ might have been. It turns out he was probably a teenager, well on his way to young adulthood, but the word ‘boy’ connotes someone so young they require the care of others, emphasizing his vulnerability and perhaps his relative innocence. Later, Preston says that the moment he could be humane to that boy was the moment he began to relocate ‘my own humanity’. It is a familiar refrain; one that Young (Reference Young2018) describes decades later in reference to his time in Afghanistan: ‘while I'd been dehumanizing the Arab world, I'd been dehumanizing myself as well’.

Preston's friend Vlad, also a Vietnam veteran, says his encounters with Vietnamese suffering made him question ‘the lies that were told to us’. ‘You know, just driving through the villages and seeing the looks on their faces, you could see the horror and terror and sorrow of the people… they didn't want us there… driving past the graveyard listening to their howling and crying. Wasn't easy’. Vlad came to question all the epithets he had learned in the Army, and when he describes the civilian deaths he witnessed at American hands, he is overcome by emotion as he describes the small intact features of ‘a girl and a boy’, including the shiny straight hair of the girl, and the children's innocent faces, just before their bodies are taken apart by weapons.

When American service members or veterans conceptually infill an ‘enemy’ with full human lives and vulnerabilities, it seems to become harder to use the epithets they learned in basic training. I finish with an example that captures the very moment one Vietnam veteran, a medic in the Marine Corps, realized he could no longer use such a term. Doug Anderson's poem describes how his men had been setting a village on fire ‘to kill its vermin’. But they dragged a man out of a hole—and his vulnerability became visible in pathetic detail.

For Doug, as for many veterans I have spoken to, the act of moral recuperation is often bound up with re-humanizing people through the language used to characterize them. Those who find themselves broken by remorse after service are often not merely guilty about what they (and the entire military apparatus) did to others, but also how they labeled and conceptualized them. Wartime epithets seem to have collateral damage—not just those sanctioned to be killed in war, and not only all those civilians whom even the military itself would not have wished to be killed, but also, more subtly, some of the servicemembers who labeled people cruelly enough to disregard them. When they look back in hindsight, they are appalled by their deeds and also, as evident in the statements above, their own mindset, established in part by their lexicon. Recovery requires new language, new stances, a ‘Thou-orientation’ (Schutz Reference Schutz1970:185; see also Buber Reference Buber and Smith1937) that grasps the human existence of the other person once so vilified.

Derogatory epithets are a pernicious problem, here, but they are not the only linguistic culprit. The connotations of an epithet are infilled, in part, when the terms are used in generic referential statements. Such generalizations render an idea ‘portable’; readily entextualized and spreadable, masquerading as wisdom from someone's experience. Yet in military contexts, such claims bring the full weight of hostile nationalist ideology to bear on impressionable minds, posing as aphorisms to live by, when in fact they are statements for the soul to die by.