https://global.oup.com/academic/product/kill-talk-9780197808023

(Author’s Note for Context: The preface and introduction of Kill Talk make clear that this book does not claim to encompass the full range of U.S. military language or experience—realities far too varied and complex to be fully captured here. Instead, it centers on the language of U.S. infantry combatants, with a particular focus on the Marine Corps.)

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    Congratulations on your brand-new book! It’s a really good read, a really, really, good read. I guess I just wanted to first of all ask you how you came to this topic. What compelled you, what propelled you? How long has this idea been in gestation?

Janet McIntosh:    Well, it started young, for me. In the preface I talk a little bit about being a middle schooler who was assigned certain books about war, and I was so –

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    – it was All Quiet on the Western Front, right?

Janet McIntosh:    Yeah, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. I was so privileged that I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the idea that people could do these awful things to each other. I think I combined that with my anthropologist’s curiosity about what I call human impressionability; our tendency to kind of soak up ideologies and belief systems and diverse ways of being that are around us, which can impel us to take certain actions. Merging those obsessions with an interest in linguistic anthropology, plus a recent preoccupation with the American right wing, brought me to this moment.

Also, I filled in years ago for Hugh Gusterson when he was at MIT, teaching his class called “Anthropology of War and Peace.” Reading the material on his syllabus brought these old questions about the worst aspects of humanity back to life for me. I grew up in a sort of Quaker inflected family, so the idea of committing violence on behalf of the State felt very distant and kind of alien to me. But we know the people who serve as the “tip of the spear” are just people, sometimes volunteering for and sometimes forcibly put into a situation that can get pretty awful for them and their adversaries. I wanted to understand how anyone could achieve this frame of mind as combat infantry, becoming not only potential killers but also more killable from the state’s perspective. So I think that’s what brought me to it—it was partly fed by my own incomprehension.

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    The books that we write are sometimes very impenetrable and so I’m wondering if you had a sort of overt strategy to try to make it a book that could reach as many people as possible.

Janet McIntosh:    Well, thank you for that. I really did try with this book. You know, in the book that you and I edited (Language in the Trump Era, 2020) we were careful to try to make it teachable. We unpacked and clarified theoretical terms for readers who hadn’t been initiated into linguistic anthropology or language studies. So that’s something I was mindful to do in this book as well, like when I explain iconicity in semiotics, or explain humor theory as it applies and doesn’t apply to certain military jokes, or describe military kill talk as a kind of linguistic infrastructure that tries to shunt and stop empathic emotions and thoughts rather like a road nudges traffic this way and that.

I also showed draft portions to quite a few veterans. One of them told me that an earlier version of my intro was like “a wall of words” to him, so I tucked my tail between my legs and thought, how can I write this in a way that can reach him more successfully? I don’t want to overstate the book’s importance to veterans, but some I showed it to did feel it was interesting or helpful. One said, “It’s like we’re locked in a box of our personal experience and you’re dumping out all our boxes on the table and recombining them to make more sense of them in a way we can’t. Plus, it helps me know my shit is not isolated or unique.”

Norma Mendoza-Denton:  One thing that I really liked about the book was the structure of it, from Marine Corps boot camp, to combat, to the linguistic and semiotic aftermath of war for some combat veterans. I want to know what the fieldwork was like, and how you incorporated fieldwork notes into this incredibly vivid narrative that takes the reader through boot camp, and forces the reader to wonder: would I also disintegrate like this?

Janet McIntosh:    So it would have been challenging for me to enlist in the Marines for participant observation, but after a couple of false starts I did manage to get access to the Marine Corps Training Depot in Paris Island, South Carolina. I was a fly on the wall for a drill instructor’s reunion, which was several days long. And that was a remarkable opportunity, because they were doing all kinds of activities on the island, and recruits are sometimes visible in training outdoors. The veterans were reminiscing and joking among themselves, and then all these different events for the group were set up by active-duty drill instructors. I couldn’t formally interview the active-duty, but I did hang out with them, and it was fascinating.

Separate from that, I interviewed and hung out with quite a few veterans of the Vietnam war and the “War on Terror,” plus used documentary footage, memoirs, social media, and a lot of primary sources including some from the military itself, like official training policies. I learned to take some of those with a grain of salt, like their prohibitions on verbal abuse, which I talk about in the book. The ethnographic descriptions of basic training and also combat language are pieced together from all of these, starting with the most experience-near material. And I spent a good amount of time with the veteran writers’ groups and poets and artists I discuss in the last third of the book.

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    When I think of how to teach this book, of course I would teach it under bureaucracy and the state, war studies, conflict studies. But also, I would like to see it paired with studies of language socialization, including Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps’ famous book. Because you can really see the transmission of particular modes of being through the “verbal laceration,” as you call it, that’s inflicted on recruits by drill instructors. You say it’s expected to be reproduced by soldiers onto the targets of their actions.

Janet McIntosh:    Exactly. There’s this broad, unconscious analogy, I believe, that the drill instructor is to the recruit as the future Marine is to the enemy—it doesn’t apply perfectly, but there are ways I really think it does. Also, there are conscious rationalizations for why Marine Corps boot camp can be so harsh and weird, sometimes morally topsy-turvy; a lot of drill instructors will say it instills “toughness” and “discipline” and “obeying orders without hesitation.” But they don’t even, I think, fully understand how brilliantly they’ve managed to follow the kind of rite of passage structures that Van Gennep and Victor Turner described so many years ago.

Recruits  are ground down by drill instructors’ harsh language, like their sonic blasts of yelling, and feminizing insults, and weird unwinnable head games—we know being ground down is part of what Turner identified as a common starting point of a liminal phase.  But also I believe the content of some of this harsh stuff starts to actively build them back up into their new role. In other words, the harshness and weirdness themselves look pedagogically important to me. Like, the sonic patriarchy of yelling and the insults are tools for a recruit in turn to dominate and dehumanize others when they are in the theater of war. And sometimes, the insane yelling a few drill instructors do where they start to sound “like a dead man” because their vocal cords are blown out and they’re still yelling through pain—it’s like an enactment of putting your body on the line for the state, which is exactly what combat infantry will need to do when it comes to the crunch. The head games drill instructors play to mess with recruits in the barracks are like a microcosmic lesson about the inverted moral universe Marines may find themselves in when they’re in combat. And so on.

Norma:    Yeah, that’s just incredible. Now, you and I talked a tiny bit outside of this context about some former military members who are now in Congress, especially Tammy Duckworth, who started dropping F-bombs in news interviews and chalked that up to her military training. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Janet McIntosh:    I remember that she dropped an F-bomb, and she gave herself an out by saying, “Sorry, I’m using my Army language.” I mean, profanity is overdetermined in military contexts. It seems to be more tightly connected to the limbic system, and to strong emotions that can go along with the extremes of combat or high stakes situations. It indexes masculinity in the US, maybe especially working-class masculinity—and when you’re in the military, indexing masculinity is not just for guys. The very sound of profanity in the English language is often one syllable, ending with a plosive consonant – it sounds impactful, like violence. It’s also transgressive and norm busting, like kinetic violence. Semantically, a lot of it refers to bodily rupture; things coming into and going out of the body, which also mirrors kinetic violence. So it’s overdetermined in being connected to the emotions, connected to military masculinity, even connected iconically in its form and its norm-busting qualities and its semantic references to things like penetration. No wonder it’s considered military. On that note, I was reading Pete Hegseth’s 2024 book recently, The War on Warriors-

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    You’re just a glutton for punishment here.

Janet McIntosh:    Ha ha. And I was looking at his acknowledgments section. Hegseth makes this move that is actually diagnostic of a major semiotic and linguistic trend that I discuss in the book. He has one sentence that very piously says something like, “I’d like to thank my Lord God and Jesus Christ my Savior for all the blessings,” and so forth. And then in the next sentence he says something like: “And please forgive all the profanity in this book. You can take the man out of the Army, but you can’t take the Army out of the man.” Even in those few lines you can see a dualism of registers or repertoires. On the one hand, you have this official, proper language—Hegseth’s is overtly religious, or it can sound very polite, from the “sirs” and “ma’ams,” or very bureaucratic with all the acronyms and euphemisms. So there’s that restrained, bloodless type of language in the military, which is drastically contradicted by its underbelly, this transgressive, raw, profane, feral verbal repertoire. It points to the duality of the military “supercitizen,” as Catherine Lutz calls them, especially combat infantry, which on the one hand takes on the lofty status that can come with military service, and on the other, sometimes out of sight of the public, engages in all these illiberal transgressions of conventional morals – which is a path you probably have to go down if you might be taking lives for a living.

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    You have taken us through this narrative, where you get the young recruit. They go to Paris Island, or wherever, and they get hardened. Then they get deployed, where they might kill all these people. When they come back, they begin to reflect on all the things that happened. And in the case of your respondents, they might even wind up in a support group where they start to deconstruct some of that edifice of militarism that has in some senses taken over their consciousness.

Janet McIntosh:     Yes, in my last chapters I talk about connecting with disenchanted veterans and their language. Some of them went on to become poets, sometimes doing a lot of metalinguistic poetry work to demilitarize themselves and speak back to what war did to them and others. Some engage in the practice of making their uniforms into paper, which is a semiotically incredible thing. They do it in an inverse rite-of-passage where they cut up the social skin that was meant to de-individuate and depersonalize them, and then they reconstruct it into this blank canvas, on which they can begin to reflect and express their personal sensitivities. It’s actually a genius concept that veterans themselves invented, and it opens room for both self-work and a lot of political expression.

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    But what happens to the people who don’t deconstruct that training? Because not everybody comes back and is able to transcend all of the symbolic and physical violence that was done to them by this incredible system of dehumanization.

Janet McIntosh:   You are right, countless veterans don’t have the luxury of encountering those groups, or they’re just not inclined to. From what I can glean there are really a lot of different paths. Some people are really good at compartmentalizing, so for them the language and headspace of combat successfully kept certain things at bay for them, and they’re very high functioning. A few veterans have a kind of anger or military nostalgia they may channel elsewhere, like into militias. (By the way, military folks are not disproportionately radical, but militias are disproportionately stocked by military veterans.) And then some people have trauma and moral injury that starts to leak out, sometimes a very slow leak that might not be felt until two decades after combat, for example, by which time some people are just devastated by these traces in their psyche and soul. The question of how to help is an open one; biomedical approaches can only go so far. Some folks I worked with mostly felt like the best help would be to stop unnecessary wars before they even begin, because they are a tragedy not only for “the enemy” but also for members of one’s own military.

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    Yeah. I have one other question that’s a little bit broader; it’s about your incredibly captivating term “semiotic callousing.” Part of the reason it’s so captivating is because it is so apparent to me, how that’s supposed to work. You get the sense that this is something that built up over time from verbal lacerations, just like a callous that protects your body from repeated injury, that also allows you to, I don’t know, walk on hot coals, right? And of course, it’s very intertextual with your other work on the right wing. So, I really, really like that term, and I can’t help but think about it in the current political landscape. I wanted to ask you about semiotic callousing as not just the military strategy, but a wider political strategy.

Janet McIntosh:    I think it was very startling to a lot of liberals and progressives when Trump was first coming to power, how many insults he would rain down on his political adversaries, and then how many people seemed to take his cue and do the same. It was like some floodgates of verbal abuse opened. And now it feels like it’s happening again on steroids.

It seems like there are several motivations for this.  Obviously, some of this is a twisted jouissance in having the power to parade your political enemies in the town square, a demented medieval politics. (No offense to the medieval folks.) And then, and some of it is using hyperbolic insults, calling adversaries “crooks,” to turn people irrationally against them.

But I do think that folks like Pete Hegseth would favor semiotic callousing facing both outward and inward. As in: we, America, will be stronger and more dominant and have better national security if we are extravagantly verbally vicious, and military folks definitely need to learn to do that and harden way up because the Biden era emasculated them. But also, all these so-called woke people on the left who have been so concerned about microaggressions and so forth are just wusses bringing the nation down. They need to be hardened up too, harden them up or get them out, and so we’re maybe doing them a little bit of a favor by training them to toughen up with some semiotic callousing in the form of verbal cruelty. I think that is part of the national dynamic right now. And it’s running rampant through the streets at the moment.

Norma Mendoza-Denton:    Thank you so much. There’s so much to think about in your book. And I’m just going to wrap this up with one last curiosity for our listeners or readers, which is that you know you’ve written this incredible tome that is clearly the result of a ton of fieldwork. But inquiring minds want to know: what is your writing routine? How did you get this done?

Janet McIntosh:    Writing with friends has actually proven to be one of my favorite and most effective ways of writing at this stage in my life. Now that my children are older, going on writing retreats with friends for several days at a time is just such a boon and a beautiful thing when it can happen. Or even if it’s just carving out like an afternoon and sitting in a cafe with a friend. I’m a herd animal. I like to be with another cow that has its head down and is munching on the same grass. It’s companionable, and it keeps me focused. I recommend this to all writers in academia who might be struggling in the kind of the solitude of writing in your own room. I would say that doing it in a connected way has been a remarkable thing. That, and deadlines; those are the only things that save me.