Along with blood, sweat and tears, war produces words. A new dictionary records the words American doughboys, dogfaces, GIs and grunts have thought up in every war they fought.
The list goes beyond terms that have crept into civilian vocabularies - jeep, AWOL and gizmo - to others whose military origins may not be as obvious - scuttlebutt, goldbrick, baptize by fire, bite the dust, big wheel and Dear John, for example."War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases from the Civil War to the Gulf War" by author Paul Dickson, shows that as long as Americans have gone to war they have also taken a sardonic view of the environment of battle - the mud, the food, the enemy, the petty rules and the chances of survival.
Food, death, disfigurement and discharge, this dictionary shows, have been soldier preoccupations forever.
Chow and grub date back to the Civil War. But the GIs of World War II came up with the most slighting terms for food. Fried liver was alligator bait; corned beef was GI turkey. Prunes were army strawberries - and were also known as looseners.
Sausages were bags of mystery; beans were commissary bullets; spinach was marsh grass; toast was shingles; sauerkraut was shrubbery. In the Vietnam War, canned ground beef patties in gravy were called Gainesburgers. In the Persian Gulf War, any unappetizing entree was camel meat.
In the gulf, MRE stood for Meal Ready to Eat, the successor to the C-ration of World War II. Those forced to consume MREs said the name consisted of three lies. From MREs, it was simple for soldiers to shortcut the name to simply Rees.
Death spawned a vocabulary. Kick the bucket was used in the Civil War. In World War II, to die was to check out. In Korea, the term became to buy the farm or to go to the big PX in the sky. In Vietnam, to waste was to kill but to be killed was to be greased, as in, "Anything you do can get you greased, including doing nothing."
The body bag of Vietnam was officially called the human remains pouch in the gulf war.
In World War I, a basket case was a soldier who had lost all four limbs and was brought home as a head and a torso in a basket. The War Department issued a bulletin on March 28, 1919, saying it had no record "of an American soldier so wounded during the whole period of the war."