Traditions of members of the armed services. Like any folk group, people in the military
use lore to indoctrinate rookies; to censure inappropriate behavior; to explain the
irrational, and to define members of the group (whether the group be the platoon, the
company, the division, even the branch of the service) from nonmembers. Also, like other
groups of workers, military units invent their own language. When freshmen, or “plebes,”
at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, finish their summer basic training,
they trade in their “dixie cups” (sailor hats) for “covers” (officer hats) and begin the
toughest year in their careers, a year in which “flamers” “ream them out” in front of their
peers for minor infractions. Those who receive the harshest abuse are the “shit screens”;
those who ingratiate themselves with upperclassmen, the “smacks.”
In World War II, a pilot would rev up his “coffee grinder” (plane engine) and, with
permission of the “madhouse” (control tower), take off toward his target, where he would
either “hang out the laundry” (drop parachutists), drop a few “eggs” (bombs), or make a
“split S” (combat maneuver) and then hightail it from the “junior prom” (hot mission),
“flak happy” (suffering from combat fatigue), hoping to get home without a “panting
virgin” or a “ruptured duck” (injured plane).
One cannot be a full member of a group without speaking the group’s language, and
the highly formalized speech of drill instructors, in which every insult and every
command has been practiced and polished on preceding recruits, begins the initiation.
Although the skills taught in basic training change with the introduction of new weapons
and new combat techniques, one learns the proper relation to authority largely from
traditional material: through the stories of what happened to previous recruits who failed
to take orders, through the sometimes brutal boot-camp games designed to test one’s
mental as well as physical strength, and through the marching chants performed on the
parade field. Such chants, cadence calls, or “jodies,” as they are referred to by the Army
and the Marine Corps, celebrate the need to repudiate the pleasures associated with one’s
former civilian past and to embrace a martial future (or, more literally, to leave your girl
and love your rifle):
Cindy, Cindy, Cindy Lou
Love my rifle more than you.
You used to be my beauty queen,
Now I love my M–16.
Used to go to the county fair,
Now I don’t take you anywhere.
Send me off to Vietnam
Goin’ to get me some Viet Cong.
With my knife or with my gun
Either way it’s just as fun.
Not only does lore inculcate the values of a military identity, it also serves those in
wartime as a preparation for combat. Before going into battle, warriors of all cultures
perform rituals (maybe only as simple as a prayer or a cheer). In Vietnam, one unit filled
a porcelain toilet bowl with beer, or liquor when they had it, from which, one by one,
soldiers sipped their libation before heading out of camp. In Vietnam, troops decorated
helmets with political, religious, and personal slogans, carried tokens as good luck
charms, fashioned in-country patches, and transformed planes and helicopters into
ferocious animals and friendly mascots, or, like their World War II predecessors, adorned
them with cheesecake pictures.
While folk practices instill military values, some also provide a way of safely
subverting the chain of command. Veteran sailors (or “shellbacks”) crossing the equator
summon King Neptune from his royal depths in order to initiate, through a series of
humiliating rituals, the “pollywogs,” as they are called—those on board making their
maiden crossing of the equator (especially fresh officers). Such “crossing the line”
ceremonies, performed on board ships since the 1600s, ritualistically subvert military
hierarchy by installing for a day at least a new command: the costumed sailor as King
Neptune, his cross-dressing buddy as Queen Aphrodite, and their royal baby (generally
the fattest sailor on board dressed in a diaper). Not nearly as elaborate, yet thematically
similar, anecdotes that celebrate the ways in which a crusty chief petty officer teaches
arrogant inexperienced lieutenants a lesson circulate widely among enlisted troops.
To explain the irrational or the uncanny, soldiers tell stories of miraculous
occurrences, of bullets deflected by Bibles and dogtags, and every war produces its share
of angel-helper stories. Typically, an older soldier helps a younger struggling soldier, one
too tired or too wounded to keep up with his fellow retreating buddies. Upon waking the
next morning, eager to thank his rescuer, the young soldier finds that the one who helped
him back to friendly lines never existed or was someone who had himself died in combat
months or years before. Phantom soldiers fight in every war. The spirits of downed pilots
repeat their distress calls on the anniversary of their death. In one Vietnam account, an
army combat soldier fights valorously until one day when he sees himself in VC (Viet
Cong) clothing stalking through the bushes. Such radical ambivalence marks the end of
his tour of duty.
Members of all branches of the military exchange shorttimer calendars, pictures of
either a patriotic or a bawdy image intricately divided into 365 shapes that the short-timer
progressively colors, one each day until he returns home, the calendar completely filled
in. Short-timer sayings (“He’s so short he could jump off a dime” and “He’s so short he
could wipe an ant’s ass”) and superstitions about the inadvisability of fighting alongside
one with less than a month to serve proliferate during times of war.
The Vietnam War, more than any other, produced a con-stellation of lore associated
with the return home. An account often told to sum up the returning vet, his sacrifices
unacknowledged, his heroism unhailed by an American population fed up with the war, is
the spat-upon story. The war-weary soldier, many accounts claim, taxis into the gate,
deplanes, and walks across the tarmac, but instead of hearing the cheers and bands that
welcomed his predecessors, he walks through a crowd of jeering people, one of whom
spits on him. Although the account defies reality (How many troop transport planes flew
into commercial airports?), it is always told seriously. This story epitomized for many the
terrible irony of the Vietnam War, but the story predates that war. It was told about
Korean War vets whose pain and hardship seemed to many stateside to have been for
little. The story penetrated popular culture as well. In the 1950s film Shock Corridor, a
journalist going undercover in an insane asylum tells a first-person version of this story in
order to ensure his disguise as a shell-shocked Korean vet.
Stories of unappreciative civilians spitting on veterans; of soldiers returning home
from Vietnam early, only to be shot by their fathers suspecting them to be intruders; of
extraordinary draft-evasion attempts that failed; of crazed combat soldiers fashioning
necklaces of severed enemy ears—these stories and many more constitute the legendary
repertoire of Vietnam.
Carol Burke
References
Burke, Carol. 1992. “If You’re Nervous in the Service…”: Training Songs of Female Soldiers in
the ‘40s. In Visions of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture, ed. Paul Holsinger
and Mary Anne Schofield. Bowling Green, OH: State University Popular Press, pp. 127–137.
Cleveland, Les. 1985. Soldiers’ Songs: The Folklore of the Powerless. New York Folklore 11:79–
97.
Jackson, Bruce. 1990. The Perfect Informant. Journal of American Folklore 103:400–416.
Kenagy, S.G. 1978. Sexual Symbolism in the Language of the Air Force Pilot: A Psychoanalytical
Approach to Folk Speech. Western Folklore 37:89–101.
Sandels, Robert. 1983. The Doughboy: The Formation of a Military Folk. American Studies 24:69–
88.