Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore

Introduction

Modern Military Folklore

Retrospect and Prospects

Tad Tuleja and Eric A. Eliason

As countless recruits have been told by their boot camp instructors, There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way. You will learn to do it the Army way. The familiar adage reflects not only the armed forces’ perhaps exaggerated reputation for inflexibility, but the less debatable fact that the members of military organizations, like the members of other occupational folk groups, are enculturated into characteristic behavior patterns that identify them as group members, create solidarity, help them manage stress, and distinguish them from those not in the group. These patterns, which are observable in everything from dress to discourse, from jokes and songs and stories to institutional memory, comprise the capacious it that members perform the Army way or, if they are in another service branch, according to the customs and traditions of that branch. Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Marines: each has its own occupational folklore—and there are often specialized variants of that lore at unit levels, such as among Army nurses or Navy Seals.

Examples of military folklore are scattered throughout the vast literature on war and warriors, going back to Homer and the Old Norse sagas; indeed, it would be difficult to write about any military activity without reference to warriors’ vernacular speech, dress, daily routines, customs, and traditions. But as a subject inviting academic exploration in its own right, this particular form of occupational folklore, at least in English, has entered the scholarly purview only fairly recently. Tristram Coffin’s analytical index¹ (1958) to the first seventy years of the Journal of American Folklore contained occasional entries on heroes and pirates, but none on soldiers or military folklore; Joan Perkal’s similar index² (1966) to the first quarter century of Western Folklore mentioned only four entries in these latter categories. It would take World War I to turn folklorists’ attention to this neglected arena, World War II to bring that attention to critical mass, and Vietnam to bring it to fruition. Warrior Ways, building on this still maturing arena, is an attempt simultaneously to consolidate existing insights and to push the boundaries of the field into unexplored territory.

Our focus is intentionally narrow. Volumes could no doubt be written on the folklore of Roman legionnaires, Turkish janissaries, Lakota dog soldiers, or British infantrymen under the Raj. We leave such worthy tasks to more cosmopolitan souls. As North American scholars, we focus modestly and decisively on the modern period (that is, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries), on English-speaking (mostly American) warriors, and—even more decisively—on the lore produced by those warriors themselves, rather than on institutions mandating customs and traditions. In the essays assembled here, we hope to illuminate the ways in which members of the armed services creatively utilize various forms of expressive culture when they—as Jay Mechling put it nicely in another context—come together to make meaning in their lives.

Perhaps predictably, it was a major conflict—World War I—that sparked scholars’ initial interest in military folklore, and that led, even as the guns were still rattling, to some excellent early collections of modern warrior folkways. One of these, Fraser and Gibbons’s Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases (1968 [1925]), pioneered an attention to military slang that has commanded scholarly interest ever since. This volume remains a standard guide to British vernacular speech of the Great War, continuing to elicit respect even after the appearance of a later standard, The Long Trail (1965), by John Brophy and the dean of British slang scholars, Eric Partridge.

The Long Trail covered both slang and song, and in its attention to the latter it built on a rich tradition of occupational folksong collections—many of them by World War I veterans—that dated back to the conflict itself. From the British Expeditionary Force came Lieutenant F. T. Nettleingham’s Tommy’s Tunes (1917), a handbook of songs favored by the boys at the front and including numerous parodies of popular tunes. From the American Expeditionary Force came Ye AEF Hymnal (1918), published anonymously in France with the doughboys’ favorites. Shortly after the war, the Journal of American Folklore—still in its infancy—ran articles applying the then popular theory of communal composition (the singing, dancing throng) to soldiers’ songs, especially the best-known World War I example, the hydra-headed, ribald Hinky-Dinky Parlez-Vous (Hench 1921; see also Pound 1923; Cary 1935). This same oeuvre—rich in parodic license and good-natured grumbling at the Army way—inspired several good later collections: The Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (Niles, Moore, and Wallgreen 1929), Edward Dolph’s Sound Off! (1929), Dorothea York’s Mud and Stars (1931), and Melbert Cary’s definitive catalog of Hinky-Dinky verses, Mademoiselle from Armentieres (1930, 1935). Other valuable sources of World War I songs are Niles, Moore, and Wallgreen’s Singing Soldiers (1927), which focused on African American doughboys, and Max Arthur’s short, pungent volume, When This Bloody War Is Over (2001).

World War II generated its own complement of song compilations, notably an update of Dolph (1942; a revised and expanded edition of the original compilation published in 1929), classic collections by Hamish Hamilton (1945) and Eric Posselt (1943); and, from Great Britain, retrospective volumes by Martin Page (1973, 1976) and C. H. Ward-Jackson (1945). That conflict also widened the scope of those interested in military folklore. The first year of the war, for example, saw two notable instances of the regimental potpourri genre: Cyril Field’s Old Times under Arms: A Military Garner (1939), and a third edition of Leland Lovette’s Naval Institute standard Naval Traditions and Usage (1939). These were followed by similar honorific compendia on the customs of the British (Edwards 1950) and American (Boatner 1976) armed forces.

An early exception to this top-down perspective was Agnes Underwood’s 1947 article Folklore from G.I. Joe, in the then infant New York Folklore Quarterly. Underwood was teaching composition at Russell Sage College to young veterans who were among the first beneficiaries of the new GI Bill. Among the items of World War II folklore they shared with her, with the obscenities chivalrously omitted, were examples of slang, songs, jokes, cadences, slogans, superstitions, and prayers—plus a variant of the popular shaggy-dog story, The Kluge Maker, which was also recorded by Jansen (1948) and Dorson (1977 [1959]). A fellow military folklorist, Les Cleveland, later (1987) indexed Underwood’s collection and rightly lauded her as a pioneer in the emic approach. Her article, and his response, helped to establish the New York journal as a small but distinguished venue for military folklore articles (see also Roulier 1948; Keith 1950; Koch 1953).

The 1940s also saw heightened scholarly interest in military language, of both the bureaucratic variety that Elinor Levy, in this volume, calls officialese, and the foot soldiers’ slang that she dubs enlistic. Descriptive compilations in this period included Elbridge Colby’s Army Talk (1942), John Riordan’s American Naval ‘Slanguage’ in the Pacific (1946), and Joseph Roulier’s Service Lore: Army Vocabulary (1948), which argued that linguistic ingenuity helped servicemen adapt to institutional rigidity. The postwar period—with pop Freudianism on the rise—also saw the first glimmerings of psychological analysis, with sociologist Frederick Elkin’s argument (1946) that military lingo expressed soldiers’ conflicted adjustment to routine and authority. Later psychological analyses included Thorpe’s (1967) sensitive study of his fellow flyers’ mindset, an examination of the saltpeter myth by Rich and Jacobs (1973), and Kenagy’s (1978) study of pilots’ sexualized speech.

Like previous conflicts, the war in Vietnam both reinforced existing military speech and elicited creative additions to its repertoire. An early example of interest in this phenomenon was Joseph Tuso’s reproduction in Folklore Forum of the mock interview What the Captain Means. Reprinted by, among others, Burke (2003, 2004), Pratt (1984), and Tuso (1990) himself, it remains a classic illustration of institutional obfuscation. Subsequent studies of Vietnam-era jargon have included Cornell’s (1981) G.I. Slang in Vietnam and helpful dictionaries by Clark (1990) and Reinberg (1991). Dictionaries with a wider historical focus have been produced by Elting, Cragg, and Deal (1984) and Dickson (2004). The latter work brings the collection of military slang into the twenty-first century, as does Bay’s (2007) guide to milspeak and Robson’s (2008) well-annotated compendium of naval slang.

The war in Vietnam also dramatically expanded the production of military folksongs and of studies devoted to their analysis. In the Vietnam era especially, it is important to distinguish between songs written about the military by civilians and songs made by military personnel themselves. The former are ably documented in Serge Denisoff’s Songs of Protest, War, and Peace (1973), a standard source for music of the antiwar movement. For the latter, the indispensable authorities are Les Cleveland and Lydia Fish. Cleveland was a New Zealand airman who wrote about the occupational folksongs of soldiers serving in conflicts from World War II to Vietnam. His essay on the folklore of the powerless (1985) and his book Dark Laughter (1994a) showed how soldiers used such songs to protest against authority and manage fear. His essays on Vietnam’s occupational folk tradition (2003 [1988]) and singing warriors (1994b) compared US and New Zealand reactions to the Vietnam engagement. All of his work is richly contextualized, well annotated, and insightful.

Lydia Fish, a Buffalo State College professor who worked with Cleveland on early—and still useful—bibliographies of military lore, continued her colleague’s interest in the Vietnam era. Through her management of the Vietnam Veterans Oral History and Folklore Project (VVOHFP), she has become an unrivaled expert on the occupational folksongs of that era. The project’s website is an essential first stop for anyone researching Vietnam-era folklore. In addition, the Articles and Papers link on Fish’s website (http://faculty.buffalostate.edu/fishlm) includes her works Songs of Americans (1993) and Songs of the Air Force (1996) during the war. Fish has written an appreciative assessment (1989) of Air Force officer Edward Lansdale (1908–1987), who during the war sent valuable collections of such songs to the Library of Congress. As VVOHFP director, she also produced a seminal recording of 1960s military folksong, the Flying Fish CD In Country (1991).

The Vietnam War holds an enduring fascination for scholars of the baby boom generation, and this has elicited, in addition to Fish’s work, two online resources of special note. In 1988, humanities scholar Kali Tal founded the electronic journal Viet Nam Generation and shortly thereafter The Sixties Project, a website hosted by the University of Virginia that includes essays, poetry, and personal narratives about that turbulent decade. Of particular interest is the journal’s special issue Nobody Gets off the Bus: The Viet Nam Generation Big Book, also available in book form (see Baky 1994). The second resource is the journal New Directions in Folklore, published at Temple University. Its special issue on military folklore, guest edited by Carol Burke (2003), includes useful essays on occupational folksong by Fish, Cleveland, and Martin Heuer as well as essays on military speech by Burke, gun lore by Richard Burns, and World War I poetry by Timothy Rives.

While the scholarship on military folksongs such as off-hours ballads and parodies is copious, the literature on the most occupationally integrated American military folk music, marching and running cadences, or Jody calls, has by contrast been limited. Like Jodies themselves, this scholarship has been provocative. Work in this area began in 1965, when former paratrooper George Carey, then teaching at Middlebury College, published a collection of marching chants he had heard from members of the 101st Airborne Division. Two years later, Bruce Jackson, asking What Happened to Jody? explored the roots of this para-musical genre in African American culture (1967). In the 1980s, Sandee Shaffer Johnson published two collections of expurgated texts at the ironically named Daring Press (1983, 1986). Subsequent studies by Burke (1989), Knight (1990), and Trnka (1995) emphasized the chants’ aggressive and misogynistic implications. More recently, Richard Allen Burns has investigated cadences as part of gunlore (2003) and, in a volume devoted to recovered, represented, and reimagined folksongs, has stressed the role of drill instructors as military tradition bearers struggling to adapt the lubricious material to changing circumstances—including the entry of women into the armed forces (2006). His chapter in this volume builds on these earlier explorations.

The material culture of modern warriors—the stuff they made and, in Tim O’Brien’s famous phrase, the things they carried—has received remarkably little attention from English-speaking folklorists. Information on collectible items is available in antiques magazines (see, for example, Smyth 1988), but scholars have yet to turn much attention to such items of soldierly interest as graffiti, good luck charms, mementoes, pinups, barracks décor, and creative dress style. Notable exceptions include Chittenden’s (1989) study of a Vietnam veteran’s vernacular art, the recollections by Dewhurst (1988) and Sossaman (1989) of so-called Pleiku jackets, and Bernadene Ryan’s (2011) examination of challenge coins. The observations in this volume by Gilman on military dress, Mechling on soldiers’ photography, Eliason on their appropriation of Afghan decoration, and Burke on battlefield talismans make forays into this largely unexplored territory. We hope that they may inspire future investigations.

Material culture is only one of several areas in which modern warrior ways invite further attention. One area with obvious research potential is the lore of men and women engaged in conflicts that postdate what seems to be, for folklorists no less than historians, the perennially fascinating terrain of Vietnam. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, the United States has been almost uninterruptedly engaged in missions abroad, yet none of them has elicited much attention from folklorists. The Journal of American Folklore, for example, has published only one article on folk (as distinct from media) expressions generated by the Second Iraq War, a study of a father’s memorial to his fallen son (Pershing and Bellinger 2010). The essays in this volume by Gilman, Oswald, Burke, and Eliason focus attention on the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is much more to be done in this area, as there is in the study of America’s limited interventions in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia.

There is more to be done especially on the conflict in Korea. As the sixtieth anniversary of that prelude to Vietnam approaches, it remains, for folklorists no less than the general public, America’s forgotten war. Dan Cragg’s (1980) study of sarcastic procedural signs, or prosigns, draws on his experience in Korea, and George Carey’s seminal essay (1965) on marching chants focuses on those current in the Korean War era. But to our knowledge no studies have yet appeared in folklore literature of such potentially rich subjects as war brides, brainwashing, Douglas MacArthur anecdotes, or the adoption by US (and UN) forces of Korean martial arts.

Students of military folklore might say more about race, class, and their interaction. While the experiences of American warriors of color such as the Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo code breakers, and the Vietnam War’s bloods have garnered some popular attention, they have not been adequately scrutinized by folklorists. As suggested by Tom Vennum and Mickey Hart’s CD of Ho Chunk (Winnebago) military songs (1997), the lore of Native Americans in the US services provides an especially fertile field for further research. Folklorists might also help to analyze the hints of social tension—evidence of a muted class warfare—that appear in songs, tales, and jokes about the brass from at least World War I onward.

We might also pay more attention to the changing gender composition of the military community. Carol Burke has set a high standard in this regard, and feminist scholars have done creditable sociological work on the gendering of the military. But much more could be done with regard to women warriors’ own folk culture—on the ways in which their experiences are reflected in story, song, dress, and other expressions. The same point could be made about the experiences of gay and lesbian members of the armed forces. Mickey Weems’s and Eric Eliason’s essays in this volume break interesting ground by addressing this long marginalized (and suppressed) segment of the warrior class; in the post–Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell era, there is an opening for folklorists to follow their lead.

Another understudied area is the naval services. The formal ways of the seagoing services have long been amply documented in official sources such as Lovette’s Naval Traditions and Usage (1939). But, with the exception of the slang studies noted above (Riordan 1946; Robson 2008), Simon Bronner’s study of equator-crossing rituals (2006), and Burke’s work on Naval Academy traditions (2004), scholars have paid relatively little attention to vernacular Navy or Marine traditions, and even less to those of the United States Coast Guard. Gillespie’s chapter in this volume takes a step toward correcting that oversight. We trust it may spark renewed interest in sea service folkways.

More, too, might be done to explore the folkways of those in auxiliary or support roles for the military proper. Chief among these would be military spouses—a group whose culture Young explores in this volume. Other paramilitary groups deserving of study might include USO performers and staff, organizations of Gold Star mothers, military contractors, and students in military academies. The folkways of these corollary groups, worthy of study no doubt in their own right, might also enrich our understanding of warriors’ folkways.

Another area for research is the role of the new media made possible by the Internet in transmitting, manipulating, and debating military folklore. Today, warrior ways are made public knowledge, and thus available for discussion, through a network of government websites, other official websites (such as those managed by private patriotic organizations), Facebook and other social networking pages, YouTube postings, and forums and chat rooms numbering in the hundreds if not thousands. Information and exchanges posted in these electronic venues provide rich insight into public images of the military, and into the contentious, often vitriolic debates about the activities in which they are engaged. We hope that the brief invocation of these venues by Gillespie, Weems, and Tuleja in this volume may point to their potential value as arenas of further research.

Finally, a word on humor. Scarcely a chapter in this book fails to indicate, directly or by implication, the centrality of humor to military life, and its fruitfulness as an index of warriors’ worldviews. Dictionaries of slang, song collections, cadences, stories, material culture: anywhere one finds military folk expression, a sense of sardonic resignation, often ribald, is not far afield. Examples have appeared in volumes such as those listed in our brief Humor bibliography as well as in venues such as Reader’s Digest’s perennially popular Humor in Uniform feature—now appearing under the feature title Off Base. Little critical analysis, however, has been brought to bear on military humor, and this is a field in which psychosocial approaches could be especially valuable. Surely a close reading of typical soldiers’ jokes, puns, and humorous stories could be as useful in illuminating warriors’ worldviews as are existing studies of their vernacular speech and traditions.

With Western militaries pushing the bleeding edge (literally) of technological change, military folkloristics must evolve with the changing ways of war. In line with this imperative, Warrior Ways continues the tradition of military folklore scholarship recounted above but also moves the field forward, looking at issues and addressing questions raised by changing conditions. Some of its contributors are senior scholars; others have their first publication in this volume. Some employ speculative and theoretical perspectives; others are descriptive and historical. They are women and men who display a wide variety of relationships to the military. Several have service backgrounds, some in combat abroad. Others are parents, offspring, and/or in-laws of military personnel. Some have worked for the military without being in the service themselves. All have had close contact with military people—in fieldwork, as teachers, or some other form of involvement.

The contributors also represent a variety of political, religious, and moral views about military service in general, and they hold as many different opinions about current and past conflicts as there are conflicts and contributors. However, while some of these views may manifest in an ancillary manner in some chapters, politicized scholarship is not what this collection is about. Each contributor seeks to understand and present some aspect of military expressive culture and analyze it critically but sympathetically while remaining cognizant of the sacrifices made by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

At times, some of this book’s contributors may present seemingly contradictory observations and conclusions. We don’t try to reconcile them. Individually and collectively, we try to avoid the logical error of assuming that any partial glimpse into the varieties of military experience—like the proverbial blind men’s grasping at parts of the elephant—can ever capture the complexity of the whole.

This expansive and, we hope, nonpolarizing approach is not, of course, universal. Despite the natural limits of observational and interpretive capacity and the uncircumscribable complexity of military experience, societies still tend to maintain rigid master narratives about their soldiers’ experiences. In the past, for example, war was widely seen as a test of bravery and an opportunity for glory, and military service was seen as a duty one stoically undertakes on principle or for love of country. A rival narrative—currently fashionable although generally unpopular among veterans—is of soldiers as idealistic innocents whom we owe sympathy and support since they have been victimized in our name by political leaders who have sent them on psychologically damaging errands. Neither of these narratives captures the nuances of lived experiences as revealed in Warrior Ways.

Nor are those nuances captured by what are probably the two most durable of military stereotypes. One is the notion of the warrior as an amoral automaton, either made an unthinking killer through dehumanizing training or seeking a way to legitimately channel innate and perverse violent tendencies. In truth, because of their extraordinary responsibilities and the often harrowing nature of their work, soldiers may well deeply experience richer and more tormenting emotional and moral dilemmas than their civilian counterparts. Also, in Western militaries, where discipline and human rights are core values, those with undisciplined violent tendencies tend to get weeded out during recruitment or training. That there are sometimes well-publicized lapses from these core values does not invalidate this general observation.

The second common stereotype—that militaries draw disproportionately from the economically disadvantaged—assumes that service is an unjust burden rather than a sought-out honor. This stereotype is also untrue. In the United States military, 25 percent of all recruits come from the wealthiest 20 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, while only 11 percent come from the poorest 20 percent.³ Recruits sign up for many reasons: to pay for school, as a family tradition, out of patriotism, for the adventure, for the training, and for the sense of being part of something bigger than themselves. This book testifies to that variety of motivation and suggests that military people’s worldview—that central element of every folk group’s experience—is similarly complicated.

The multiple truths of soldiers’ experiences lie between and beyond pat master narratives, and are as varied and complex as are individual soldiers, their units, their missions, and the areas of operation in their respective conflicts. But master narratives are powerful, and soldiers whose experiences do not easily fit them often learn to adjust their own stories or to keep quiet, because deviation from a popular narrative can lead the unreflective to assume that the soldier himself or herself is deviant. This presents a challenge to scholars attempting to understand how military lives are lived from the inside, rather than in conventional media representations. Our contributors have attempted to let soldiers speak for themselves and invite readers to compare their actual expressions to cultural expectations

One of the ways social scientists seek to confound stereotypes and master narratives is by turning to native, or reflexive, ethnographers. This volume’s first three chapters are all authored by folklorists whose service with the military goes beyond participant observation. One is a civilian Air Force employee. Two deployed to Afghanistan—one as a civilian contractor and one as a national guardsman. Each focuses on the most dramatic of military situations: in-country wartime deployment or, to use the term common among US soldiers in the Middle East, playing in the sandbox.

Even with the multiple deployments of our current wars, soldiers don’t spend most of their time downrange. And even when deployed there is much truth to the old saying War is 90 percent boredom and 10 percent terror. But it is combat roles that most distinguish soldiers from civilians, and the unique circumstances of deployment produce distinctive expressive culture. In her essay on the things they carry, Carol Burke explores the role of personal talismans as sources of magical comfort to soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. Based on her year’s deployment, her essay shows how in an environment where the greatest threat may come from unconventional weapons such as IEDs, soldiers carry a variety of good luck charms—some brought from home, others obtained in country—intended to increase their chances of survival. The psychological value of these protective objects, she shows, sometimes has less to do with their owners’ belief in their inherent potency than with the fact that they have been acquired as gifts, often from more seasoned soldiers. Their true magic for soldiers is how they demonstrate mutual caring among warriors.

Justin Oswald begins by examining what is arguably the most common of all military folk genres, the personal narrative. He reveals the role of the much-feared camel spider in stories that US soldiers tell about their Middle East deployments. These fearsome animals (they are not technically spiders, but solifuges) are notorious for their speed, stealth, painful bite, and uncanny ability to penetrate the perimeters of tents and sleeping bags. Oswald shows how these characteristics make them a suitable metaphor for the indigenous enemy, and how staged death matches between them and scorpions provide a theatrical catharsis for those in harm’s way. Camel spider stories, which often reference official warnings about the creatures, also serve as initiatory bonding vehicles for new recruits about to enter a danger zone.

Eric Eliason invites us to consider a military folk group not as a passive object of study but as a dynamic player in the creation and analysis of expressive culture. Drawing on his experience as a chaplain serving with US Special Forces in Afghanistan, he shows how these military professionals and the local Pashtun people have cross-fertilized each other’s folkways as they cooperate in reconstructing and providing security for the region. His essay explores the ways in which Afghan traditional culture has influenced the practices of American soldiers and how they have developed a descriptive and analytical discourse to understand it. He focuses particularly on the sense-making American soldiers have done regarding Afghan folk theology, vernacular architecture, vehicle and tool ornamentation (what soldiers call jinglefication), and traditions of male bonding that are sometimes homoerotic, such as Man-Love Thursday. In shifting the analytical perspective from that of scholars to that of the folk being studied, Eliason proposes the idea of folk-folkloristics as the bottom-up practice of folklore analysis done by folk groups other than folklorists.

The book’s second section, which focuses on various modes of sounding off, begins with a chapter on the most effective means of developing unit cohesion and group identity that the military has ever employed: the cadence calls that were first popularized in the military by Sergeant Willie Duckworth in World War II. Folklorist and retired Marine Rick Burns examines cadence singing’s most common character, a certain Jody who is sweet-talking your girl and driving your car while you are away at war. This figure’s historical importance has loomed so large that cadences are themselves often called Jodies. Burns explains that Jody’s popularity stems not only from the fact that he articulates soldiers’ common fear of being cuckolded (when this volume’s editor Eric Eliason served in Afghanistan as a chaplain, twenty soldiers came to him with wife and girlfriend worries for every one that came for combat stress-related issues), but also because Jody’s attack on fidelity mirrors soldiers’ own sexual waywardness. The same soldier who curses Jody one day may on another occasion spout the common saying What happens TDY stays TDY (TDY is a temporary duty assignment away from home base). This saying articulates a cavalier attitude toward sexual fidelity that, Burns suggests, may elicit guilt that cadences transfer onto Jody. This essay also examines the prevalence of death as a cadence call motif and underscores one of the most powerful insights of folklore as a discipline—that close reading of the texts the folk produce themselves can lead to greater ethnographic understanding than the theories and speculations that folklorists bring to the