Kill Talk, Language and Military NecropoliticsBy Janet MacIntosh Oxford University Press 2025
If you are wondering what anthropologists actually do these days they are very hard at work dealing with extant cultures. Most recently, Brandeis anthropologist Janet McIntosh has been studying military language. Over a period of eight years she interviewed fifty combat veterans from three different wars and wrote Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics, “Necropolitics” is a term that deals with the reality of who lives and who dies. This concerns not only the enemy but the people doing the killing, who may be killed in the process. An experienced ethnographer with a long record of teaching and publication, McIntosh began by visiting the famous/infamous marine corps bootcamp at Parris Island near Point Royal, S. Carolina, and interviewed drill instructors. Much of marine corps bootcamp not only brutal physical training but being subjected to abusive language. Although the marines have made a faint attempt at becoming more PC, that is, going easier on racist and homophobic language, it still slips out. Recruits’ masculinity is attacked, they are referred to as “girls,” and their personal and religious beliefs are attacked as well. This abuse serves a double purpose: they are taught to obey orders in extreme situations without thinking, and also the abuse serves to bond them together against the drill instructor the same way as they will be bonded against their enemy.
Film director Stanley Kubrick was smart enough to include this in the boot camp scenes in Full Metal Jacket by casting an actual drill instructor to play his fictional counterpart. As if to demonstrate the double principle as described above a recruit snaps and kills his DI, eliminating one step in the process. The drill instructor/actor R. Lee Ermey didn’t need to have dialog written for him. He drew upon his own language: “…You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck.” A naïve audience member might assume this is a creation of the screenwriter but it is not; the language of the training is that outrageous.
McIntosh then turns her attention to the combatants themselves as they create their own language in the combat zone. She observes that combat troops often use language to deaden themselves in order to emotionally survive. One way to do this is make the enemy easier to kill through dehumanization. This quite often involves racist language. In Vietnam, the enemy were called gooks, slopes, slope-heads, dinks, VC (phonetic alphabet for Victor Charlie, or Viet Cong). The word gook and its variants can be traced to the American War in the Philippines in 1899. It was then recycled through World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. In the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world Hadji was used for the same purpose.
Another form of emotional deadening McIntosh calls “frame perversion,” or “humor that suspends soldiers between super-citizenship and what are sometimes depraved situations. Here is an example in the form of a marching cadence: “Little yellow birdie with a little yellow bill/Landed on my window sill/Lured him in with a piece of bread/Then I smashed his fucking head.” Another was a common inscription that could be found on Zippo lighters and flak jackets in Vietnam: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil. For I am the evilest son of bitch in the valley.” There were several variations, e.g.; substituting mutherfucker for son of a bitch.
McIntosh extends her study of language to veterans who became poets and writers after the war, and how they unpacked their experience in words. She talks about the phrase “It don’t mean nothing,” as expressed in a poem by David Connolly:
On his second day there, they went down into Bien Hoa city, with their brand new guns, just hours after the VC had left, and strolled along a wide, European style boulevard lined with blossoming trees and the bloating bodies of Americans, dead for days. He puzzled at their leader, the nineteen year old veteran with the pale, yellow skin, bleached, rotting fatigues, and crazy, crazy eyes who hawked brown phlegm on each dead American saying, “That don’t mean nothin; y’hear me, meat?” And of course, it meant everything.
One of the common phrases I heard a lot in Vietnam was taken from the Vietnamese: “Xin Loi,” or, “Sorry.” It was inflected ironically of course. Somebody dies, somebody says “Xin Loi.” Somebody loses a leg: “Xin Loi.”
McIntosh refers to this practice by veteran writers as “The Poetry of Rehumanization.”
I am merely touching the surface of this remarkable book which, unlike much academic writing, is fluid, emotionally compelling, and readable. In addition to anthropological and political applications, Kill Talk would be useful to doctors and therapists who want to more deeply understand the relationship between trauma and language; and for the general reader who wants to go more deeply into the present violent and unpredictable world.
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