Break on Through assignment

During the Vietnam war, there were many terms used that soldiers were expected to know and understand. These acronyms and nicknames were used to talk about everything from different types of weapons to just basic racial slurs. Some terms include:
"AWOL"- meaning absent without leave.
"Charlie" or "Charles"- this is a basic slur used to refer to the Vietnamese
"crispy critters"- burn victims of the napalm (a flammable jelly used for attack)
"DMZ"- a demilitarized zone
"slope"- a racial slur for any Asian person

It was important for all soldiers to know these terms as well as many more, as it was a way for them to communicate with each other on the battlefield.

- K.D.

sources:
the handout that Mr. Gomez gave us in class
Google images

Comments

  1. shutupandfishFebruary 11, 2018 at 8:42 AM

    A large part of the lingo that needed to be learned came from the military's propensity for acronyms, but there was also darkly humorous and sometimes hateful slang that was a coping mechanism for the "hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of terror."

    ReplyDelete

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