Orwellian Angels in the Crossfire

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – "Hi Sergeant, we hear there are clashes in Baquba.
Do you have any information on that?" screams the journalist down
a bad mobile phone line from Baghdad.
"Well Ma’am, MNF and ISF engaged with AIF, who were planting IEDs,
after coming under small arms fire," came the reply.

Confused? So was she. The history of warfare is written in acronyms that
cleanse the blood from gory wounds and strip the horror from bombs.

The Iraq war has spawned its very own alphabet soup of abbreviations and
battlefield buzzwords intelligible only to the military and war correspondents
trying to make sense of it all.

Many, like MNF, just make the longwinded multinational forces less of a
mouthful. Some, like IED, take the bang out of an improvised explosive
device — a makeshift bomb. Others, like AIF, or anti-Iraqi forces, are
part of the information war — the U.S. military uses the phrase to describe
insurgents.

Ready for a translation? "U.S. and Iraqi forces fought with insurgents
who planted roadside bombs and fired guns."

Long the exclusive lingo of soldiers on battlefields and generals in command
centers, the era of satellite television and instant Internet has brought
the bewildering jumble of military jargon into living rooms the world over.

From the hunt for WMDs to the search for HVTs, high value targets such
as Saddam Hussein, reporters "embedded" with U.S. military units
since the 2003 invasion of Iraq have brought the language of war and occupation
into the public consciousness.

The IED long predated the Iraq war, but as rebels get more creative, so
tongue-twisting variations on classics are born.

VBIEDs, or vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, often spell death
for Iraq’s fledgling forces, who have borne the brunt of such rebel attacks.
They are better known as car bombs. If the bomber is still in the vehicle
when it explodes, it is an SVBIED — S for suicide. When the bomber straps
the explosives to his person,
he becomes a PBIED.

Since roadside bombs have emerged as the weapon of choice for insurgents
attacking U.S. patrols, the military has begun to "up-armor" its "soft" vehicles.
Sometimes soldiers harden their vehicles using odds and ends. This is "hillbilly
armor."

When American soldiers are hit, they are often "medivaced" to
the CASH, or combat support hospital. If they recover, they will end up
RTDed, or returned to duty.

If not they become Angels, a euphemism U.S. military doctors use for troops
killed in battle, and contender for Word of the Year 2004, the American
Dialect Society’s annual competition for the best new word.

from Reuters