Nick Paton Walsh is embedded with the US army in Afghanistan.
There comes a point, somewhere between not being disgusted by a portaloo’s contents and thinking that there might be water and nutrients in a Gatorade, when you run the danger of starting to speak Arm-ese.
I’ve been embedded for 10 days now – only four of them actually at an outpost, by some freakish trick of logistical madness – but have on a couple of occasions begun to talk utter crap. Tracking? See?
The American Army outdoes most of its counterparts in both toys and verbeage. The British military are too imbued with the remnants of the class system to really need a universal dialect – the soldiers speak English, the officers Posh.
The Russian military is endearingly frank: a spokesman once warned a colleague not to go to the toilet alone as – and I quote his decision to put one PR faux pas out to try and perhaps prevent a worse one – “some of the guys here have not seen a woman for a while and might do something”.
The Americans do hyperjargon. Let’s break new readers in gently with one example.
“There’re four gentlemen sitting in vicinity of FMH5 – that’s 400m to north. A motorcycle moved to north on route langley. Those four gentlemen then headed off in a direction west. Our squad designated marksman will go up there. He’s got an M14 rifle with a Leopold scope, he’s got deep visibility on that and we’re going to see what he can see”.
In short: some men were sitting outside until a motorcyclist went up to them. Now they’ve left, we’re sending a sniper up to have a look. (By the way, FMH5 is not its real name. The sergeant and author of the above asked we remove it in case it gave something away to the enemy).
What they really wanted was PID on the INS (Positive IDentification of INSurgents).
A brief lexicon: Pax are people. “Tracking” means “yes”, or OK. So does Roger (favourite joke: “Roger”. Reply: “No, my name’s Nick”. Bring on the clowns). If asked whether you have “eyes on” something, it may sound like a rich housewife leering at their tennis coach. But it actually means you can see something. Eyes on? Tracking? Roger.
[Between this sentence and the last, I have learned another. TP. I took an abortive trip to a portaloo. There was no TP.]
We had a KLE today. That’s a Key Leader Engagement. Not a 16th century wedding between Spain and France, or a Sarkozy genuflection towards Ms Bruni. It means going to meet the people who live in the village next door. We met them. They were nice. They wanted pens and a medical clinic.
I was guilty of speaking this once. I said to our cameraman that the American’s “RoEs” meant they had to get the Afghan soldiers to do a lot of the fighting for them. He looked at me bemused – a touch hypocritical for someone who eats MREs (Meal Ready to Eat – an army food ration) on holiday for fun.
Rules of Engagement, I meant. But it was clear. I had done as the Romans. Maybe this is what an empire does to its language when everybody’s speaking the original version.