Friday, August 7, 2009

Can you kill one troop?

The appeal of using the word troops to stand in for soldiers, marines, sea- and airmen and women, not to mention the coast guard, which no one does, is demonstrated in this sentence. Journalists need to write succinctly (note to the publicity-conscious: if you want to show up in news reports, get a job title that's shorter than 4 words) and at the same time be inclusive of all manner and gender of military personnel -- another awkward term. So we get "Three U.S. troops killed in Iraq's Basra" from Reuters, and "Pentagon Plans to Send More Than 12,000 Additional Troops to Afghanistan" from US News and World Report to cite just 2 of hundreds of similar headlines. (With 4430 U.S. soldiers, marines, etc. killed in Iraq and 773 in Afghanistan as of today, and nearly 200,000 stationed in those countries, we have many occasions for the phrasing.)

"Troops killed" is short, nasty and brutish -- which is the problem. The collective noun erases the individual and smooths over the specificity of the lives interrupted and the deaths that have resulted from the wars. Troops don't seem like people -- maybe not to them either.

Journalism stylebooks say that
troop used in the singular means a group of people, while the plural, troops, means several groups. They give their blessing to using troops to describe a large number of individuals -- it's understood to mean individuals, they say -- but what constitutes a large number isn't specified. AP and the New York Times stylebooks, industry standards, note that "Three troops were killed" is a no-no. Apparently a lot of headline writers and reporters didn't get the memo.

I'm not sure what a useful alternative would be. The dead get turned into
casualties, the deployed into battalions or brigades (and, yes, Iraqis and Afghans are enemies when alive and have beeen dismissed as collateral damage when we've killed them, but that's a rant for another occasion). That's how the language works and we understand, don't we? But the collective term also dehumanizes the people we're talking about, making it easier for the vast majority of Americans who have nothing to do with anyone currently in the military to forget that these are mostly young, often unformed, sometimes bored, usually scared men and women and maybe making it easier for them to become dehumanized when they're sent into misbegotten fights that baffle and outrage them.

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