{"id":845,"date":"2016-05-13T21:33:11","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T18:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=845"},"modified":"2016-05-29T16:39:24","modified_gmt":"2016-05-29T13:39:24","slug":"the-peculiar-language-of-soldiers-the-atlantic-may-4-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2016\/05\/13\/the-peculiar-language-of-soldiers-the-atlantic-may-4-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"The Peculiar Language of Soldiers (The Atlantic, May 4, 2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

JERUSALEM\u2014\u201cWe have two flowers and one oleander. We need a thistle.\u201d Listening to the Israeli military frequencies when I was an infantryman nearly two decades ago, it was (and still is) possible to hear sentences like these, the bewildering cousins of sentences familiar to anyone following America\u2019s present-day wars. \u201cVegas is in a TIC,\u201d says a U.S. infantryman<\/a> in Afghanistan in Sebastian Junger\u2019s book War<\/em>. What does it all mean?<\/p>\n

Anyone seeking to understand the world needs to understand soldiers, but the language of soldiers tends to be bizarre and opaque, an apt symbol for the impossibility of communicating their experiences to people safe at home. The language isn\u2019t nonsense\u2014it means something to the soldiers, of course, but it also has something to say about the army and society to which they belong, and about the shared experience of military service anywhere. The soldiers\u2019 vernacular must provide words for things that civilians don\u2019t need to describe, like grades of officers and kinds of weapons. But it has deeper purposes too.<\/p>\n

(Read more here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JERUSALEM\u2014\u201cWe have two flowers and one oleander. We need a thistle.\u201d Listening to the Israeli military frequencies when I was an infantryman nearly two decades ago, it was (and still is) possible to hear sentences like these, the bewildering cousins of sentences familiar to anyone following America\u2019s present-day wars. \u201cVegas is in a TIC,\u201d says a U.S. infantryman in Afghanistan …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":852,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions\/852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}