SAILOR ABOARD AIRCRAFT CARRIER: "Security Breach!"

AIR FORCE PILOT: "I'll tell you what, man, there's bogeys all over this place."

OFFICER ABOARD AIRCRAFT CARRIER: "Okay. Fine. Go ahead three!"

RADAR OPERATOR ABOARD USS VINCENNES: "We had to have got it -- That was a dead-on!"

MONTAGE SENTENCE: "This week -- 'AMERICA'S -- DEFENSE -- MONITOR' -- will -- examine the -- language" --

NARRATOR ON-CAMERA, OFF-CAMERA VOICE: "Rolling!"

ARMY RECRUITS SINGING: "Everywhere I go..."

SOLDIERS IN HELICOPTER IN PANAMA: "That's the commandancia, right?" "Yeah."

SOLDIER IN HELICOPTER IN PANAMA: "On target! On target!"

MARINES SURROUNDING HOUSE IN PANAMA: "Get down on the floor! We're US Marines. We're here to help you."

AIR FORCE PILOT: "Okay. That's's it. I ain't saying no more."

MONTAGE SENTENCE: "This -- week -- 'AMERICA'S -- DEFENSE -- MONITOR' -- will -- examine the -- Language -- of -- War."

NARRATOR: In case you couldn't quite make that out, it's said something like, "This week, 'AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR' examines 'The Language of War.'"

NARRATOR: Welcome to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR." I'm Sanford Gottlieb. Everyday we all speak, hear, read and write thousands of words and, generally, we can make sense out of them. But often we sense that these words ring false. We sense that the speaker or author isn't clear, that they have an agenda that we're not quite aware of. And yet, we have all used language ourselves this way, skewing our own version of a story or even telling a lie.

When institutions, like corporations or government agencies, use misleading language, the false ring is much louder. The skewed version or the lie enters our language. It echoes in newspapers and on TV.

And as the media transmits the "echo," it "tunes" it a bit. For instance, as you probably know, most TV programs are carefully edited presentations. They make it look smooth and continuous, but they aren't.

As in this interview, recorded here in this room, while the interviewee is talking, the picture cuts to a shot of me nodding thoughtfully. Is that picture there to convince you of my keen interest? Well, I'm certainly interested in what the interviewee is saying, but that particular shot is a common device known as a "cutaway." It is used to cover a so-called "jump cut," an edit, a transition from one interview "bite," as they're called, to another. The shot of me was actually recorded after the interview was over. We don't do this to be deceptive, but so we can shape a story and fit a lot of material into a half hour program.

But what about a government agency like the Department of Defense, which makes the news, scripting and editing its account of an event like the invasion of Grenada in 1983? Of course, they didn't call it an invasion, they called it a "predawn vertical insertion," whatever that means.

How might the words the Pentagon chooses affect the way we understand that invasion, the invasion of Panama, or any military action or plan?

MR. LUTZ: Well, language is the only way we have to -- to communicate with each other about this real world around us and the issues that we face as a society and as a nation. And the words that we choose will help channel our thoughts and our arguments and our discussions.

MR. CHENEY, Secretary of Defense (At hearing): "The Warsaw Pact no longer is a target-rich environment from the standpoint of our SIOP."

WOMAN-ON-THE-STREET: Sometimes I feel they're talking in another language.

GEN. LINDSAY, US Special Operations Command (At hearing): "The AC-130 gunship again proved a great capability as a surgical tool to take out targets that were very difficult to get to."

ANOTHER WOMAN-ON-THE-STREET: I think that it's almost like double talk, then you don't know really what's -- what it means or where we're going and what the needs really are.

MR. LUTZ: So, if we say it wasn't an invasion, it was a predawn vertical insertion, that gives us a certain kind of reality and it tries to channel the discussion.

PRESIDENT REAGAN (On tape): "You, the American people deserve an explanation..."

MR. LUTZ : Words are used this way not to extend thought, but to limit it.

NARRATOR: Bill Lutz is a professor of English at Rutgers University. He has written a number of revealing books on mis-leading language in the military and elsewhere. His latest is called "Doublespeak: From Revenue Enhancement to Terminal Living."

INTERVIEWER: Can you define doublespeak for us?

MR. LUTZ: Doublespeak is language that evades responsibility, tries to make something unpleasant seem pleasant, something common seem uncommon. Basically, it's language that pretends to communicate when it really doesn't. It's language that's designed to mislead while pretending to lead you someplace.

INTERVIEWER: Are there different kinds of doublespeak?

MR. LUTZ: There's -- I -- I categorize four different kinds in my book, simply as a way of looking at language. The first kind is a euphemism, and we're all familiar with euphemism. "I'm sorry your father passed away," for example, instead of saying dying. But we really don't mislead with that language and it's not designed to mislead, it's out of sensitivity for the feelings of another person.

But in 1984, the US State Department decided that it would no longer use the word killing in its reports on human rights in various countries. Instead it would talk about "unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life." Now that's a euphemism that is designed to mislead.

A second kind is jargon. Jargon is the specialized language of a trade, profession or group. Doctors' jargon, lawyer's jargon, plumbers, carpenters, everybody in a special group has a jargon and there's nothing wrong with this jargon when people in the group use it to talk to each other. But when a member of the group uses it to talk to a person outside the group, knowing that the person will not understand this language, then you can have doublespeak.

A third kind of doublespeak is gobbledygook. That's the -- the double talk, the endless number of words that politicians use when they don't want to answer a question.

The fourth kind is -- I call inflated language, trying to puff-up things, make something ordinary seem extraordinary. In the Pentagon, for example, it wasn't a common ordinary steel nut that costs about 16 cents, it was a "hexaform rotatable surface compression unit," which is why it costs $2043 apiece for them.

INTERVIEWER: Are there any special groups who seem to use it more than others?

MR. LUTZ: Oh, clearly, the government, government at all levels, from -- from the local level up to the federal level. But interestingly enough, very close behind, only about a half-step behind, comes business, which produces a tremendous amount of doublespeak internally and to communicate with the public. And there you have the two largest forces in our society who thrive on this language and produce a tremendous amount of it.

NARRATOR: Lutz is the editor of the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, which gives an annual Doublespeak Award.

MR. LUTZ: The very first Doublespeak Award went, in 1974, to a US Air Force colonel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for saying to American reporters, "You always write it's bombing, bombing, bombing. It's not bombing, it's air support."

The great tool of power by those who want to maintain power, keep power and use power is language. It's not terror and violence, it's language. Because through language, you control how people perceive the world, how they perceive reality, how they talk about this reality and how you can structure the -- the whole debate.

NARRATOR: The "whole debate" is meaningless unless it's conducted in language that is clear and direct, qualities that are rare in today's military language.

But, of course, it's not all bad. Returning servicemen have introduced some colorful jargon to the language. From World War II, for example, we got the "Dear John letter," "chowhound" and "snafu," derived from an abbreviation for "situation normal, all 'fouled' up."

MR. BOREN: This bird, as you notice, has a very large rumpatory area, which is the artist's commentary, and it also has two heads with a forked tongue.

NARRATOR: The preeminent expert on the lighter side of this issue is Jim Boren, a World War II veteran, comedian, founder of the International Association of Professional Bureaucrats --

MR. BOREN (On tape): "...and we're not opposed to cutting red tape as long as it's cut lengthwise."

NARRATOR: -- and sometime presidential candidate, Boren celebrates military and other misleading language with irony and humor.

MR. BOREN: And we try to give recognition to the outstanding finger-tappers of the world, who apply what I call the "Principles of Dynamic Inaction," -- that's doing nothing, but doing it with style -- and who can utilize decision postponement techniques and other opswatchulated dispersality factoring to keep things from happening and thereby prevent mistakes from being made.

This is the Order of the Bird, which is our highest award, that was sculpted and presented, in absentia, to Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams. This was in recognition of his bureaucratic skills of not only keeping his job, but keeping his parking space.

INTERVIEWER: That was over Iran-contra.

MR. BOREN: Oh, yes. Yes.

NARRATOR: Of course, it's not only scandals like Iran-contra that load our language with doublespeak. Jim Boren probably couldn't produce enough Forked Tongue Bird Awards for all the deserving potential recipients in business, government and elsewhere. But in recent years, the military has provided some of the most remarkable examples.

David Morrison is an accomplished reporter and commentator on military affairs for the National Journal.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any favorite expressions of language that tends to hide or camouflage or make more abstract the -- the language of -- of war and the preparation for war?

MR. MORRISON: Well, I -- I -- I've always thought that if the US military could do as much violence to its potential adversaries as it's done to the English language, that probably the massive sums of money that have been invested would probably be well-worth spent. I mean, it's -- there's really so many, it -- it is hard to know where -- where to start.

COL. SUMMERS (US Army, Ret.): I guess my favorite one is "target servicing," which they use for putting artillery fire on a target. And -- But it's just a dangerous analogy because it -- it really, to the outsider, has almost no meaning, and that's bad enough.

NARRATOR: Colonel Harry Summers fought in the Korean War and is a highly respected military historian.

COL. SUMMERS: I would argue that one of the things that made the Vietnam War -- that complicated the Vietnam War is that we used all these euphemisms when we were talking about war, so that people thought, when we first became involved in Vietnam -- As -- As most people know, it was the liberal side, the idealistic side of the American character that got us involved in Vietnam and suddenly they found they had blood on their hands and recoiled in horror. Well, they ought to have known that going in, but the use of these euphemisms, and "target servicing" is -- is a great one, really hides the reality of what war is and we ought not to do that. We ought to make sure that everyone understands what a terrible, bloody thing war is.

Lt. Col. DAVID HACKWORTH (US Army, Ret.): I've been very much affected by Vietnam and I think that the whole "body count," that word, would be one that has scarred my soul. Because what it was was a tidy way to say how many people we killed. It was a statistic. Instead of having that Rome or that Berlin or Tokyo to -- as a measurement, we needed a yardstick, so it became bodies.

NARRATOR: David Hackworth enlisted in the Army at age 15 in 1946. Twenty-five years and eight Purple Hearts later, he left the Army as its most decorated officer in 1971. He is the author of "About Face," the story of his personal disillusionment with the Army he loved.

COL. HACKWORTH: They always put the best face on it. Throughout the Vietnam War, if I can use that as an example, we had Gen. Westmoreland announcing "there's light at the end of the tunnel," "we are prevailing," the -- "we're winning" and -- and that's the nature of the beast. They try to always take their bucket of Army whitewash and paint the best face on it. They try to deceive the people.

PETER BRAESTRUP: Korea was unpopular, Vietnam was unpopu-lar, abstractions or no abstractions.

NARRATOR: Peter Braestrup served in the Marine Corps in Korea. He went to Vietnam as a journalist, writing articles for The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Mr. BRAESTRUP: A lot of that rhetorical, that military language, in the case of Vietnam, stemmed directly from political pressure, in my view -- and it's been fairly well documented now by historians -- from Lyndon Johnson's efforts to make this kind of ambiguous war effort, on his part, palatable.

INTERVIEWER: What's your favorite euphemism in the military area?

MR. LUTZ: Department of Defense. I point out in my book that in 1947, in the Defense Unification Act, buried down in that act, we changed the Department of War to the Department of Defense. And I think that is the single most effective and far-reaching piece of doublespeak in the 20th Century. Because by naming the Department of War Department of Defense, you have changed the whole nature of the argument. Just think if you had to run for Congress and you wanted to stand up and say, "I don't think $300 billion a year is a big enough war budget. We need to spend more on war."

MR. BOREN: Peace. Peace, in one of the Pentagon documents, was referred to as "permanent pre-hostility." Now isn't that exciting?

MICHAEL KREPON: My personal favorite is "damage limitation."

NARRATOR: Michael Krepon is a prominent military analyst and president of the Stimson Institute.

Mr. KREPON: "Damage limitation" is a term of art used in the nuclear targeting biz. It means, in essence, being able to attack and destroy opposing weaponry before it can be used to cause damage to your homeland. So, what damage limitation really means is offensive strikes.

MR. LUTZ: One great example comes from a US Air Force commander, who called the Titan II - you know, which is one of the most powerful weapons in the nuclear arsenal -- a "very large, potentially disruptive re-entry vehicle," sort of as if it's going to disrupt your party or something.

We talk about "surgical strikes." We talk about "soft" versus "hard targets." Soft targets are -- are cities. They're talking about taking out population centers here, soft targets in a surgical strike. Surgical implies clean and neat and not messy. The whole language implies things that are not possible in reality.

MR. BOREN: One of my favorites I think is -- is referring, in one of the documents of the Pentagon, to bullets as being "kinetic energy penetrators." And the same document referred to "violence processing," as the explanation for combat. I'm an old combat veteran of World War II and I found violence processing to be a rather interesting wordalogical projection pattern.

MR. LUTZ : "National security" is a phrase that is used by governments in power, the American government, any government in a country, to serve its own interests defining it. It's -- It's an interesting example of doublespeak. Watch out for these terms "we" and "us." We must do this in the interest of national security. Who's the "we?" Is it you and me or is it those in power who must do this for their interests?

WILLIAM WEBSTER, CIA Director (On tape): "When we think of national security..."

President GEORGE BUSH (ON tape): "Our national security strategy..."

Senator SAM NUNN (D- GA.) (On tape): "Our national security policy..."

Secretary CHENEY (On tape): "It's vital, in terms of our thinking, about where we want to head with respect to our own national security policy."

MR. LUTZ: It is an interesting phrase because it has no definition. It is a phrase that is taken out and evoked to clothe any kind of actions that those in power want to cloak with legitimacy and also to forestall debate or dissent.

MR. BOREN: In the Veterans Administration, at one time -- This was before Secretary Derwinski came in, 'cause he's changing it now, so it's a shocking thing. They referred to a case where a man -- the wrong leg was amputated and they've had other similar errors of the wrong organs or malfusionary elements within the medical handling and they -- they issued an instruction that should be known as a "therapeutic misadventure."

But Secretary Derwinski is changing that. He's insisting that all of the people and the lawyers, particularly, in the VA write in simple English and so, our International Association of Professional Bureaucrats recently issued him a Rejection Scroll, rejecting him from our organization because he's trying to subversively undermine the fuzzifications that are essential to the support, not only of military, but of the related elements that work within the --

INTERVIEWER: By making the bureaucrats speak English.

MR. BOREN: Oh, yes.

NARRATOR: Despite the encouraging efforts of a few to undermine fuzzification, the fuzzifiers seem to have them out-numbered. What's the effect of all this fuzz?

Mr. BRAESTRUP: All these fuzzy things get very dangerous I think when they're -- when they're discussed, particularly by the -- by civilian leadership, and kind of picked up by news- papers and pundits and so on. It becomes so abstract, when what you're really talking about is a bunch of scared 18 and 19-year olds scrambling around under rocket fire, or whatever.

COL. HACKWORTH: It was just inhuman and it -- it -- I think it eroded the morale of -- of our soldiers and it destroyed the morals of our officer corps because they had to lie. Young lieutenants and young captains lied and it went up right up the chain of command, everybody exaggerating, everybody inflating the count, so the generals would look good, so they could go along and say "We are prevailing, we are winning."

COL. SUMMERS: One of the little vignettes I used to tell to a War College audience when I talked to them and a true story. When I used to work at the Pentagon here and I'd walk home from work, about a mile or so, in military uniform, invariably a little gaggle of kids would follow along, 'cause they were attracted to the uniform, and they'd invariably ask two ques- tions. And the first question is, "What are you in the Army," or whatever, and you'd say -- I'd say the Army. The next question invariably was, "Have you ever killed anybody?" And, as I'd say to a War College audience, "These bloodthirsty little bastards know what the Army is for, you're the ones that forgotten it."

MR. LUTZ: What it leads them to do is to become cynical and to say, "Well, you can't expect anything more from politicians, you can't expect anything more from government. Ah, business always lies to me." And they get cynical. That I think is the single worst thing that can happen in a -- in a democratic society that must have participation of its citizens in the political process in order for this country to work. And if people start saying, "They're all liars, I can't believe them," then we have an -- an entire society based on mistrust. And cynicism leads to withdrawal, so that we don't have people participating in government and in public policy debates.

And it also leads to, "Well, they're just words, and words don't mean anything," when words mean everything. And without words, we're in big trouble, both as a nation and as a society, and the human species is in trouble because it's all we have to hold us together.

INTERVIEWER: You were a combat veteran, you say --

MR. BOREN: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: World War II How do you personally feel about efforts to camouflage the reality of war?

MR. BOREN: Well, I think that it's a -- From a bureaucratic standpoint, I think it's vital that it be done.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think people in the Pentagon use these expressions?

MR. BOREN: Well, it's the professional way of bubbling to the top. If people say precisely what they think, in terms that everyone can understand, they leave themselves no maneuvering room. But if they fuzzify their statements with multi-syllabic interfacing of wordalogical ideotoxicities, then they in the future can interpret it to be whatever it's best for them to interpret to mean at that time. And it keeps the people from finding out what's going on.

You see, if the people ever find out what's happening in the Pentagon and they can understand the documents, they're liable to want to take over their own government. This is a -- This could undermine the bureaucratic way of life. It could be a subversive thing.

INTERVIEWER: The mass media plays a very special role in the use of language. How do they weigh-in on this?

MR. LUTZ: Well, the national media uncritically transmits the doublespeak by transmitting the language uncritically through the newspapers, through radio, through television. You give legitimacy to this language and I don't think that this is legitimate language and I think reporters have every right at least to say -- When writing your copy, a reporter could simply say, "The government announced a new package of proposals for revenue enhance-ment" -- "the government's term for a tax increase" -- and just keep on going, just translate it. Reporters translate foreign phrases all the time. They translate scientific terminology all the time. Why not translate the doublespeak for us?

NARRATOR: In his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell said that our language consists "more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse." It may be inevitable that these ready-made phrases creep into our language. You hear one and then you use it. It's easier to invoke "national security" than to think through each particular case.

But sometimes it sounds like military and government officials have constructed an entire language for themselves out of these phrases and doublespeak words.

How can we change this? We can use honest language ourselves. And perhaps with the end of the so-called cold war, official military and government language will become more clear and direct.

INTERVIEWER: What connections do you see between the now terminated, we hope, cold war and doublespeak?

MR. LUTZ: Oh, in fact, the cold war was so important -- Language was so important to the cold war, it has given rise to a whole new field of study in political science called "Word Politics," because it was a war waged with words on both sides. So, it'd be interesting to see with the demise, hopefully, of the cold war what will happen to word politics, what will happen to the language, as we scramble to replace some of the old concepts with new words.

COL. HACKWORTH: I'm so thankful that the cold war is over so we can re- -- walk away from this and start all over again.

INTERVIEWER: Tell the truth.

COL. HACKWORTH: Yes, and tell the truth.

COL. SUMMERS: The reason we maintain an armed force is to kill people and destroy things in the name of the United States. If you don't want to do that, that's all well and good, but don't hide from yourself and don't kid yourself what the military is. And it's their ability to do that that gives them their value. It's that threat, the old iron hand in a velvet glove, if you will, that gives the military its utility as an instrument of the foreign policy of the United States. And that reality has to be kept in people's minds and, among other reasons, so that the armed forces are not committed lightly.

The idea, well, we can send the armed forces in for some sort of a -- a peaceful resolution to the crisis; that's not what they do. They -- They are not a scalpel, they're a meat ax or a battle ax, and when you need a battle ax, they're very good at that sort of thing. But the -- So, euphemisms are dangerous and we ought not to use them.

INTERVIEWER: If you were able to suggest to military and government officials ways to change their language, what would you tell them?

WOMAN-IN-THE-STREET: Well, to tell -- Well, to talk to people like they're equals and to talk -- speak in language that everyone can understand.

ANOTHER WOMAN-IN-THE-STREET: I'm not so sure they want us to understand.

MAN-IN-THE-STREET: I think we use too much public relations jargon in order to achieve what we want to do and sometimes we in the public are, you know, swayed by that jargon.

INTERVIEWER: How could they make it better?

WOMAN-IN-THE-STREET: I think they could simplify the language. I think they could be more honest with what they're doing and why.

MR. LUTZ: We have to fight back. As long as we're passive and cynical, they'll keep right on talking that way and getting away with it. They want us to be passive and cynical and that's why we have to get active and start fighting back.

MR. BOREN: It is bringing a halt to the peristaltic movement of the thought processes neurologically projected within the gutational factors. So, it brings the -- into a bag of mush. Did I make myself clear?

INTERVIEWER: Very.

MR. BOREN: Okay. Thank you.

GEN. POWELL (At hearing): "We must always have contingency forces, the kinds of forces that will deal with the unknown, the kinds of forces that will always be ready to go, proud to go and able to accomplish a mission successfully, such as we did in Viet-- in Panama recently."

COL. HACKWORTH: I think they put a face on war that removes the -- the tragedy, the -- the -- the violence.

INTERVIEWER: Have you picked up any new ones in regard to the American military intervention in Panama?

MR. LUTZ: Well, you just said it, intervention. Nobody's talking invasion. They talk about action, taking action, taking military action.

SECRETARY CHENEY (On tape): "Young men and women who are dedicated and devoted to their task, who are professional, and who are ready to do whatever the country requires to have done to safeguard our national security."

MR. LUTZ: Actions start happening to fulfill the words that have been spoken.

MAN-IN-THE-STREET: You have to be I think somewhat informed or follow the papers and things like that to understand what they're actually talking about. And I don't think the average American does that, to be honest with you.

NARRATOR: More and more are phrases stuck together like prefabricated buffazuffers of the obfuscation rize.

INTERVIEWER: If you had one word that stands out above all the others that you'd really like to change, in the sense of making people say what they mean, what would that word be?

MR. BOREN: Well, I think that's a subversive question that you're asking.

MR. LUTZ: So, the words that we choose are extremely important.