Outside the Window: May 20, 2009. New York, New York. Sunny and nearly cloudless.

Inside the Book: 2001-2002. Muscogee and Chattahoochee Counties, Georgia. Unbearable heat. Jefferson County, New York. Knuckle-splitting cold.

            While reading about Mullaney’s final months of training, I thought of George Orwell—not the middle-aged idealist who went to Spain and fought the fascists in Homage to Catalonia but the middle-aged grump who returned to England and wrote “Politics and the English Language.” In the latter, Orwell argues that vague language has a definite political purpose: it makes the indefensible palatable. Instead of calling (oh, let’s pick an example at random) the act of shackling a man’s arms above his head for two or three days until his legs and ankles swell to grotesque and painful size torture, we might call it an “enhanced interrogation technique.”

            I revisited Orwell’s essay because, in The Unforgiving Minute, Mullaney argues that for an infantry officer euphemisms are useful, even necessary. Of the many acronyms he has to memorize, Mullaney writes:

It was a language designed for efficient commands over a radio, but there was another, more serious reason for stripping sentences. The real purpose was to reduce the sensations of panic and fear, to transform confusion into procedural formulas. Reporting “three friendly KIAs” was meant to be less visceral than detailing that Jones, Smith, and Reed were dead and beyond help. … Where people confront chaos and death as situation normal, the ability to constrain panic by procedure and sanitized language was critical to survival and success.

Mullaney points out that surgeons like his fiancée also use “sanitized language,” and for the same reason: it helps them do their jobs. The strength of Mullaney’s argument is that it can concede Orwell’s points. Orwell writes that clichés “will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” To which Mullaney might reply, “precisely!” A statement like “three friendly KIAs” would certainly annoy Orwell. It ducks the truth. It reduces human tragedy to tactical info. It, in Orwell’s words, “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” But in a situation full of “chaos and death,” it’s surely important (literally) to soldier on. And if verbal short-hand makes that possible, if it might prevent more “KIAs,” is it so very wrong?

I don’t know what Orwell would say. He doesn’t really grapple with the difference between a press flak reporting the “pacification” of an enemy village and a lieutenant reporting “three friendly KIAs” in the middle of a battle. Both statements elide the truth, but the latter, claims Mullaney, has real utility. I’m not sure I totally agree with him, but Mullaney has forced me to reread Orwell’s essay with a more skeptical eye.

To the Army’s credit, its field manual is honest about infantry combat. It is “characterized by extreme violence and physiological shock.” It is “callous and unforgiving” and its “consequences are final.” I know (from the cover jacket) that Mullaney will lose one of his troops in Afghanistan. I look forward to seeing what role “sanitized language” will play in that moment.