This is My Shit: Why Army Language Makes Sense

While I was in Iraq, I wrote about the word Shit as a pronoun. The post is here. Earlier today I was reading a book called The Zone by Sergei Dovlatov about life in Russian prison camps. Dovlatov wrote about a prisoner correcting a new camp guard about the guard's improper use of the word fuck.

When I wrote in 2009, it was about the difference in how soldiers use shit and bitch as a pronoun.  In that post, I noted that anything that will fit on a bunk is shit.  Anything larger is a bitch.

But I neglected the reason for the use of these pronouns.  From the moment a young soldier begins the process of enlisting, he is showered with acronyms and awash in the Latin-derived words of government bureaucracy.  Normal human beings cannot hear and retain hundreds of opaque new words and terms, so each soldier remembers a few new terms and for the rest says, "The sergeant told me some shit I was supposed to remember."

Then the soldier actually goes to basic training.  On the first day, soldiers file through supply and receive uniforms, boots, underwear, belts, packs, duffel bags, insignia, name tags, a helmet, and hundreds more bits of gear, large and small. These items could be identified by the nouns in the last sentence, but they are not.  The camouflage uniform is ACU: Army Combat Uniform.  The helmet is ACH: Advanced Combat Helmet. The belt and pouches for ammo and other equipment is our LBE: Load Bearing Equipment.  Our dress uniform is the ASU: Army Service Uniform.

When we were training for Iraq, our first sergeant would yell, "Line up outside in five minutes! ACH, LBE and weapon! Move!" My sleep-fogged brain would rebel and I would think as I pulled on my ACU pants, 'Why not call it a fucking helmet!'

The 18-year-old I was when I first enlisted and the 56-year-old I was when I deployed to Iraq was hit with a blizzard of opaque terms. My response to this brain storm was to identify ownership first.  So I pointed to a pile of gear and said, "This is my shit." or  "That's your shit."

Later when the soldier is assigned a vehicle, a large-caliber weapon, or other piece of equipment that won't fit on a bunk or in a duffel bag, he will say, "That bitch is mine."

I said that of my first Jeep in the Cold War Army.  A Jeep in the army could not be just a Jeep. It was a Truck, 1/4th Ton, Cargo, M151A1, a number and nomenclature I can still recite from memory.  Four decades later the Jeep's replacement was a Humvee or High Mobility, Multipurpose, Wheeled Vehicle,  M998.

Either way, when I had a vehicle I could say, "That bitch is mine, I'm throwing my shit in it.

Shit as a Pronoun

Shit has many uses in Army language, but is way more specific than Fuck--which is used for everything. In Iraq, I washed a load of clothes and dumped the unfolded load of laundry on my bunk. Someone asked if I was going to chow. I said, "I have get my shit off the bed first."

In the Army, shit is can be a substitute for every other noun--up to a certain size.
If something can fit on a bunk, like laundry or field gear, you can say, "That's my shit." But when referring to his Humvee, the driver says, "That bitch is mine."  When I first got to Iraq, the parking lot where we were pitching a maintenance tent had to be cleaned.  The sergeant in charge said, "We have to police this bitch up."

Shit also has other uses. Shit can actually refer to feces as when someone leaves a room to "take a shit." That is an interesting linguistic twist in itself. What the speaker will be doing in fact (one hopes) is leaving the shit behind, but since effort is involved, taking is the verb--the same usage as taking a picture. Another twist is in the use of the s-word as an exclamation. "Shit!" is generally negative, but "No Shit!" is positive. If I tell Private Snuffy he has guard duty he will exclaim, "Shit!" to express his dismay. If later on I tell him the Private Duffy has duty in his place, Snuffy will say, "No Shit!" and be happy.

But the main use is as a pronoun. Looking at someone else's food, I might say, "I don't like that shit." If my tools were in disarray I would say, "I need to get my shit together." If someone else were advising me to put my tools in order they might use the same phrase or the odder form, "Get your shit straight!" You can't think literally in most uses of shit.

By now you must have had "enough of this shit" so I will "stop this shit" right now. Except to add that the most common modifier of the word of the day is Bull, often said as if it had three syllables.