Euphemism

You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory.

-- Apocalypse Now, 1979

You hear that Mr. Anderson?... That is the sound of inevitability...

-- The Matrix, 1999

I don't choose these epigraphs as examples of euphemism, but of irony in general. As we know, that smell he was smelling was the smell of defeat; and the entire plot of The Matrix is about the human conquest over inevitability. I also think both speak, the former with irony and the latter without, to Mr. Bush's little adventure in "Arabia."

But my particular purpose today is to address three specific euphemisms pertaining to the war:

1) The Roadside Bomb, or I.E.D.: As I've mentioned before, such terminology is highly misleading. It is understandable that the military should refer to things in this way. As professional soldiers they deal in acronyms and dispassionate labels. But for those of us over here, sitting comfortably and either cheering or jeering the conflict from our collective armchair, I think it's important to understand what these things really mean. I can't recommend these recent Frontline episodes enough, if only for the fact that this war, which is generally only televised in the most sanitary way imaginable -- where are the corpses? -- is displayed in all its horrifying ugliness in these programs. Explosion after explosion, roadside, improvised, suicide, and car bombs, destroying Humvees, tanks, lines of police recruits, innocent passers-by, journalists, hotels, and anything else. The violence is beyond description. Each of these "roadside" detonations sends a shock through the civilian spine. To my mind, roadside bomb sounds like an annoyance, a nuisance, a thing that might be defused, or blow out a tire. But soon enough these bombs will drive our casualty figures above three thousand dead, thirty thousand wounded, and countless Iraqi civilians, police officers, cabinet members, and others. A friend of mine was riding in a Humvee in Iraq when one of these exploded next to the vehicle. The boy next to him was blown to bits in an instant, reduced to matter in a second, and my friend suffered the collapse of bone structure in his face. The element of chance could hardly be illustrated more clearly, and my friend, literally inches away, was spared, though he has been left with scarring as a permanent mememto mori.

I only bring this up because I know that despite the attention I pay to all this, until I watched these endless streams of videos from Frontline, I had no conception of the reality of the violence. I knew it was horrific, I knew I would never last a minute in such a situation -- but I do not believe we can honestly form our opinions, whatever they may be, about this business without confronting, each day, the visceral, actual, quantifiable level of the violence of modern warfare. There are those in the administration and the neoconservative punditocracy who speak so cavalierly about the use of nuclear weapons that we can only assume they are as out of touch with the laws of physics as we all are with the realities of the roadside bomb -- a bomb that might more rightly be called, if we should be honest with ourselves, a weapon itself of mass destruction. Just look at the numbers -- they don't lie.

In the film adaptation of Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, a black-ops team "paints" the target -- the home of a Columbian drug lord -- which will be destroyed by a laser-guided bomb, dropped from thousands of feet above by an F-18. The explosion is immense, destroying the compound and killing dozens of men, women, children. This is the kind of explosion one can see routinely on the streets of Iraq, and each one takes with it anyone and anything unfortunate enough to be within fifty yards of it. In the film, upon detonation, Willem Dafoe boldly deploys the technique of the euphemism, confirming to the pilot the success of their coordinated action: "Circular error probable zero," he says. "Impact with high-order detonation. Have a nice day." This breezy dismissal is offered with some irony. If one must participate in the semantic polishing of the realities of violence, then one should at least do it like that.

2) "Made to feel that he is drowning...": I'm no expert on torture, though I've been reading up on it lately. The euphemism here is created by the use of the present participle. From what I understand, the reason the victim of waterboarding is "made to feel that he is drowning" is that he is drowning. This terminology seems to forget the fact that a man underwater with no access to oxygen is, by definition, always drowning, until he is drowned. The practice is not "dunking," as Dick Cheney explained it on the radio the other day. It consists of strapping a man to an inclined board, so his feet are elevated above his head, and then pouring a stream of water over his face so the water enters the nasal cavity and induces the "feeling of drowning." Maybe it's just me, but last I checked, having one's breathing passages filled up with water was what it meant to be drowning.

3) The Tactical Nuclear Weapon: As I mentioned above, the use of nuclear weapons has become a popular recommendation for securing "victory" against "the enemy." It seems to me that anyone familiar with the basic physics of atomic explosions, and/or anyone who ever read anything, including a simple chart with facts and figures, about the impact, both instantaneous and over time, of the bombs our country detonated over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should understand that this formulation is no simple euphemism, but an outright contradiction in terms.

Perhaps the incessant explosions of this seemingly endless war really do constitute the sound of inevitability. Perhaps it is inevitable that our differences will forever be "settled" by eliminating those with whom we differ. Perhaps it is not in our power to change this. But it is in our power to change the way we discuss it, to confront the ugly truth about ourselves with ugly and honest language appropriate to it.