Fair Language Covers Foul Hearts

Those who read me regularly know I don’t normally watch television. A few months back, however, I sat in front of the tube just long enough to see Ken Burns’ World War Two documentary. The War – as Burns titled this, his latest work – included some coverage of the Second Marine Division’s apocalypse on the island of Saipan.

One of those who survived Saipan physically unscathed, a Marine from Mobile, Ala., went home for a visit after the slaughter ended. Speaking to Ken Burns’ camera as a senior citizen, the ancient Leatherneck recalled problems he encountered in 1944 as he talked to friends and family who -- even though they knew he'd fought on Saipan -- hadn't the least idea of where he’d been or what he’d been through.

Among other things, the old warrior detailed one of the first changes forced upon young men by Marine Corps training: “You forget all of your adjectives,” he said. “All but two.” He wouldn’t say what those two words are because, he declared, his dead wife would rise up from her grave and scold him for having said them. While he was home in 1944, he said, he had to talk to his friends in slow motion. He had to say every sentence silently to himself before saying it aloud, for fear he would say one of those two words by accident.

At that point I started thinking about my own life: I'm a Marine Corps veteran myself, but the Marines didn't need to teach me to cuss because I already knew. How did I become such a foul-mouthed wretch?

I was born in 1948, in my parents home on a farm in Iowa. How old I was when I became cognizant, I do not know. Neither can I recall a time when I did not know the word 'shit'.

Our barnyard was full of shit. The old man spent a good share of his life shoveling shit up off the ground and hauling shit out to the fields, where he spread shit on the ground as fertilizer. Fifty Angus cattle quartered in the barn made sure the old man never ran out of shit to shovel.

Little boys going out to play were warned not to step in shit, but they often stepped in shit anyway because there was so much shit on the ground that not stepping in shit required focus at a level of intensity that made it impossible to play baseball – or anything else. Kids threw shit at each other when they got in fights or sometimes just for a lark. Kids who got in trouble said: “Oh, shit.” Kids who were astounded exclaimed, “No shit?” or “Willya lookit that shit?” or “I’ll be dipped in shit!”

In rural Iowa, shit followed kids to school every morning. We got up; we got dressed; we had breakfast; we put on five-buckle overshoes and went to the barn, where we waded through shit as we worked. When the bus came, we grabbed our books and rode to school. We walked into the schoolhouse and took off our overshoes on mats provided specially for that purpose. By the time classes started, the mats were covered with many dozens of overshoes, each pair of which was clotted with shit – which may explain why my friends all thought and said that “School is for shit.”

I don't believe anyone has truly lived who has not had suction jerk his or her tightly-buckled overshoe off of a stockinged foot while walking across a barnyard through eight inches of ice-cold, urine-drenched, slimy green shit. I always felt lucky because my ol' man had cattle but not hogs. Those who've had the experience can tell you: pig shit smells worse than cow shit. And white socks are a waste of fuckin' money.

I learned the word 'fuck' in 5th grade. It happened in the lunch room. I was sitting at a table with some big boys from the 6th grade, when I heard one of them refer to the superintendent as “that silly fucker.” The others all snickered at what was obviously some delicious joke. So I asked them: “What’s a fucker?” and got laughed right out of the place.

Not wanting to be laughed at, I never again asked anyone at school anything like that. Instead, I asked the old man at supper: “Dad: What’s a fucker?”

The old man looked at me coldly, and I could see I was about to get my ass kicked. The old lady interceded: “Dad: He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

So I didn’t get my ass kicked. But I didn’t get an answer, either, and the old man didn’t speak to me for several days after. His reaction clued me that I was onto something big.

So badly did I want to know what a 'fucker' was that I started hanging around the toughest boys at school so I could listen to them talk. For a few days I endured some rough handling on the playground – nothing serious, of course – but my curiosity was soon satisfied.

Too bad for me: the answer I got raised more questions. I couldn’t understand why one feller would call another feller a name like that. I mean fucking is what people do -- right? Ever since Eve picked that apple? So how did 'fucker' get to be a swear word? If everyone fucks one way or another, how did being called a 'fucker' become an insult? And what’s all that about 'knowledge of good and evil,' anyway? Is 'good' a hot, rapturous experience? Is 'evil' a bum jump? Or are those icky Protestants right to claim things are actually the other way around? All of those questions and more like them whizzed (no pun intended) through my mind while I worked to get my shit together by improving my fuckin’ vocabulary.

It takes months to learn to cuss fluently and correctly. And make no mistake: an adolescent boy has got to cuss fluently and correctly in order to be cool. First thing, as I've already hinted, is to learn the goddam vocabulary. Next thing is to master the fuckin' delivery. To be really cool, you see, a guy has to cuss casually, conversationally -- as though he ain't cussin' at all. So I hung out with friends who were also learning to cuss. Fuck jokes and shit jokes and cock jokes and pussy jokes were the order of every day -- the more stupid and obscenely outrageous, the better.

Beavis and Butt-head got it right: Thirteen-year-old boys sit around campfires, smoke stolen cigarettes, drink stolen beer, and joyously chant one or another of the Boy Scouts’ bogus, pep-rally cheers. I remember a couple of lines from one in particular:

"Cocksucker motherfucker, dirty old twat!
"Sixty-nine douchebag, tied in a knot!"

I forget the rest after all these years, but a lot of old Boy Scouts could chant it from memory, word-perfect, I'm sure. A fellah's gotta do sump'n at them fuckin' jamborees.

By way of practice, we boys worked on lines like “You lowdown, worthless, pissy-pants, chickenshit sonofabitch! Cocksuckin’ motherfuckin’ afterbirth-eatin’ product of an abortion from the bored-out, bastard daughter of a bunch-punched Mongolian whore!”

We practiced stuff like that because we wanted to amaze each other. In order to amaze our friends, we had to get the tone and the cadence just right, stress the proper syllables, make rude poetry of it (though we never then thought of what we were learning in those terms). And above all, we had to cuss offhandedly: be cool when cursing.

As practice progressed, things got more complex. My friends and I learned to hide our amazement because amazed is not a cool thing to be. My game at that point was to know when I'd amazed my friends (though they tried to hide their amazement) while hiding the fact that I knew I had wowed them. It was learning to look someone in the eye and punch them in the face without telegraphing the blow. It was learning to know when someone was about to hit me without warning. It was playing good poker. It was the social equivalent of fighting a fast-draw duel: I had to get it right or I was dead.

So it was that after I joined the Marines I learned that -- aside from Marine Corps jargon, which is sometimes 'obscene' -- the Corps had little to teach me about cussing. The cursing of the drill instructors was music to my ears not because they taught me a lot of new obscenities (They didn't.) but because they cursed precisely, rhythmically, and by the numbers. Parade-ground Marines don't drop their gees or slur their words: some nasty thing isn't 'a goddam fuckin' mess' but rather 'It Is A God Damned Fucking Mess'. According to some drill instructors, it never rains in boot camp. Instead: "Jesus Is Pissing On Us Again, Ladies! Christ Hates Fucking Marines Because He Is Jealous! He Always Wanted To Be A Marine, And He Still Tries Every Few Years -- But The Wimpy Son Of A Bitch Can Never Get Through Boot Camp!"

The drill instructors' tirades step forward in quick time, 90 beats per minute. Their words are somehow grittier for being clipped. Their enunciation is exact. When they're at their best their tone is musical, as if they were singing cadence. My experience was that the DI is a breed apart. Ordinary Marines (an oxymoron) don't talk like DIs unless they're joking or speaking to someone they do not respect.

Sailors I've met convinced me that the prevalence of obscenity in any man's language is in proportion to the amount of time he spends in an environment without women. The extent to which a man is brutalized by his occupation is another, related factor. Having never worked oil fields or mining camps, I don't know how men in those places talk but I can't imagine their speech is less obscene than any others I've met and is probably more so.

Teamsters spend long weeks, even months, alone on the road. They are among the most fluent and effective cussers I ever encountered. As is true of those who live by any other trade, the language of truckers is idiomatic. He who speaks it best gets ahead of those who don't speak so well. Walk into a repair shop and tell the mechanic: "My truck doesn't have any power." You won't get the attention you would get if you said: "That piece o' shit I'm pushin' wouldn' pull a dead whore off a pisspot."

Some people hold that we today use more obscenities than at any other time in history. I personally don't believe it. Roman soldiers bear me witness: graffiti scrawled on ancient walls use the Latin equivalent of 'fuck'. You can bet, therefore, that troopers at Calvary who gambled for the clothing of Jesus laughed as they played and cussed ". . . . that god-rotting, idjit Jew. The silly sumbitch was crazy enough to tell ol' Herod that he was the king! Wouldjoo fuckin' believe dat shit?"

Robert Graves was a tough old son of Tommy Atkins who survived two tours in the Ypres Salient. In one of his novels (I think it was Sergeant Lamb's America or Proceed, Sergeant Lamb), Graves mentioned that British redcoats spoke 'flash language,' by which he meant the argot of Britain's 18th century criminal underworld. When I was on active duty our speech was a blend of Marine Corps jargon and the slang of the Sixties drug culture, sprinkled with a few expressions borrowed from the Vietnamese. Similar things are true of soldiers of all wars, everywhere. Poets such as Graves have long known the beauty and utility of 'foul' language: there are allusions to it in Shakespeare. And while Mark Twain (in Roughing It) chortled wickedly that a bartender shot through the face with a Colt Navy revolver was "one of the deadest men who ever lived," it's a lead-pipe cinch that when Twain shared that story with his drunken pals in the bars and the brothels of Virginia City, Nevada, he couched the tale in terms yet more colorful.

Times truly have changed since World War Two. Today's economy forces Mom into the workplace with Pop, where both of them scrabble for the family's bread. At work they talk to the same people for the same reasons about the same things in the same way. Thus today's Mom is hardened; she can cuss with the toughest of men and probably enjoys it just as much. Even so: the warrior home from Afghanistan will have to mind his mouth just as did that veteran of Saipan.

The Saipan Marine didn't quite lie to Ken Burns' camera. He was truthful inasmuch as he did live during a time when their loss of socially acceptable modifiers was a problem for returning vets. The old Marine fudged a little, though, when he let on that his cussed language was the biggest barrier between him and his loved ones. The whole truth is that veterans back from a combat tour -- in Saipan or Afghanistan or any other goddam place -- know things about how people are put together and how people come apart, things of which folks at home insist that civilized people do not know and should never stoop to learn.

Therefore I think the measure of a man is not only how he bears himself through the fires of combat, but also how he adjusts to certain facts of life that confront veterans who come back to these United States. Among such facts, one is that a prissy aversion to 'foul' language is cheap armor that covers militant ignorance. Second, militant ignorance on the part of the folks at home is what put the vet in harm's way to begin with. A third is perhaps hardest of all for some: The vet must understand that he is a stranger now to those who knew him of old. If ever again they learn to know him truly, they won't like him any more. He can never be at home among them again.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -