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    Embrace the Suck
    Embrace the Suck
    Embrace the Suck
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Embrace the Suck

    By Austin Bay

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    About this ebook

    Members of America’s armed forces have their own distinctive language: milspeak. Especially since WWII, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have invented and adapted their own slang vocabularies, creating a colorful insider’s lingo of bureaucratic buzzwords, acronyms, mock jargon, dark humor, and outright profanity. Milspeak gives a unique and touching insight into military life from basic training to the trenches; from the flightdeck to the cockpit.

    This comprehensive field manual, complete with descriptive and humorous illustrations, includes more than 500 colorful entries including:

    Voluntold: Derisive slang for “I was ordered to volunteer.”
    Back to the taxpayers: Navy slang for where a wrecked aircraft gets sent.
    Dome of obedience: Slang for a military helmet. Also called a brain bucket or Skid Lid.
    Echelons above reality: Higher headquarters where no one has an idea about what is really happening.
    Embrace the suck: The situation is bad, deal with it.
    Embrace the Suck is the perfect gift for the soldier, sailor, marine, or airman in your life—or for the Beltway Clerk* who yearns to speak like one.

    *Derisive term for a Washington political operative or civilian political hatchet man. May refer to so-called “Washington defense experts” who’ve never served in the armed forces.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPost Hill Press
    Release dateJan 9, 2018
    ISBN9781682614969
    Embrace the Suck

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      Book preview

      Embrace the Suck - Austin Bay

      A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK

      An Imprint of Post Hill Press

      ISBN: 978-1-68261-495-2

      ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-496-9

      Embrace the Suck:

      A Guide to Milspeak

      © 2017 by Austin Bay

      All Rights Reserved

      Cover Design by Tricia Principe, triciaprincipedesign.com

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

      ../black_vertical.jpg Image236309.JPG

      Post Hill Press

      New York • Nashville

      posthillpress.com

      Published in the United States of America

      244563.jpg 244564.jpg

      Introduction to the Second Edition

      Introduction to the First Edition

      Milspeak Definitions: Troop Idioms

      Appendices

      Links to Jargon and Slang

      About the Author

      244559.jpg244560.jpg

      Eleven years of war have passed since I wrote the original introductory essay—eleven years of warfare involving Americans and their allies. Young Americans in uniform continue to slug it out in Afghanistan. For Americans, the war in Afghanistan began in September 2001.

      In 2011, American soldiers, marines, and air-men left Iraq, their withdrawal buoyed by political assertions of impending peace.

      The Islamic State’s 2014 invasion of northern Iraq and its hideous genocides brought the Americans, as well as the servicemen and servicewomen of several NATO allies, back to Iraq.

      Like it or not, a chill reminiscent of the Cold War grips Europe. The U.S. and NATO now con-template permanent troop garrisons in eastern Europe to deter the Kremlin’s adventurism.

      As for Korea—the Korean War never really ended. The 1953, armistice was not a peace treaty. As this second edition goes to print (and as an ebook), North Korea is once again threatening South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. with nuclear immolation.

      Yes, the Korean peninsula, to employ Korean War military lingo, remains in deep kimchi—in deep trouble, or, to be blunt about it, in deep shit.

      Deep kimchi is a superb example of military slang. It combines been-there-done-that authenticity with an obscenely accurate assessment of the current state of affairs, usually tactical but in this case, addressing the geostrategic. That’s one reason it still gets used, particularly by U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force service members who have pulled a tour or three in South Korea.

      ***

      The great strategist and field soldier Carl von Clausewitz insisted that war is inherently political—that war is a political instrument, political intercourse using violence to achieve a political goal.

      While commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama asserted that the tide of war is receding. He employed that precise phrase on October 21, 2011, in a speech that suggested victory in Iraq and Afghanistan was near. The phrase reappeared in remarks President Obama delivered on January 5, 2012.

      The president asserted a rhetorical conclusion to a decade of war. However, the battlefield had not reached what Clausewitz would recognize as a political conclusion.

      In 2017, a political conclusion in Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, and eastern Europe remains elusive. As a result, American servicemen and servicewomen and their families continue to bear the burden of war—the suck of war.

      Why? Milspeak can even provide a politician with a clue; when it comes to combat the enemy always gets a vote.

      No one is quite sure who first spoke that idiomatic phrase which combines hard-earned wisdom and wit. I recall hearing a variant while on active duty in the 1970s, to the effect the enemy always gets a say in war. I’m not sure when I heard the vote variation. Vote parodies an organized, peaceful political process, which adds another touch of ironic acid. Heck, in combat, soldiers vote with fire and maneuver, don’t they?

      Like deep kimchi, the phrase the enemy always gets a vote is classic milspeak. It succinctly and colorfully reminds the overconfident and cocky among us that it is foolish to assume your enemy sees the battlefield as you see it and to assume you know what the enemy will do. Make those dumbass assumptions and your enemy’s vote may surprise you. His vote might even lead to prolonged suffering and more spilled blood.

      U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Trump presidency James Mattis directly related the phrase the enemy always gets a vote to prematurely concluding a war has ended or is even winding down. No war is over until the enemy says it’s over, Mattis said when he was serving as a U.S. Marine Corps general officer. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.

      ***

      The following paragraph from this book’s original introduction still strikes me as an essential observation:

      "At its core, warrior slang is a language of discipline and shared suffering,

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