Necropolitics and the Language of Death: How Military Talk Turns Recruits Into Killers
From The Observatory
Source: The Observatory
From boot camp battle cries to euphemisms on the battlefield, the U.S. military relies on “kill talk”—a robust linguistic infrastructure to strip individuality, suppress empathy, and normalize violence, long before they ever fire a shot.
'This adapted excerpt is from Janet McIntosh’s Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) by permission of the author. It is adapted and produced by the Independent Media Institute for the Observatory.
“Necropolitics and the Language of Death: How Military Talk Turns Recruits Into Killers” by Janet McIntosh is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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Editor’s Note: This article, by nature of the topic, may include language that is considered sensitive and/or vulgar to some readers.
Introduction
Night after night, the buses pull up on the tarmac outside the Parris Island Marine Corps recruit training center in South Carolina. Usually, they are full of young men—still boys, by some measures—with a nervous feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They will have sensed the air getting heavy and sticky, and they might have noticed a swampy stench. They’ve seen enough movies to know what comes next, but they still find it startling.
A drill instructor storms the bus, shirt tight around his muscles, belt seeming to float around his flat abdomen, roaring at the neophytes from under his circular hat brim.
“SIT UP STRAIGHT! From this point forward, you will only answer me with a YES, sir, NO, sir, AYE-AYE, sir. DO WE UNDERSTAND?”
“YES, SIR!” yell the recruits.
“Now get OFF MY BUS! NOW, NOW, NOW!”
The young men hustle to plant themselves on a row of yellow footprints painted on the road. The yelling follows them, an acoustic assault so thick and fast and strangely inflected that each recruit has to listen hard and use herd behavior to know what to do next.
They know they’re about to be transformed, but they are unlikely to recognize all the subterranean dynamics of this change and how the acoustic qualities of boot camp will reshape them into hardened killers. These qualities will also model the disintegration of their personhood and their necropolitical abjection—that is, their killability in the eyes of the state.
Military Language
In the face of war’s brutality, language might seem like an incidental detail. But United States combat veterans who pay attention to it will attest that embodied ways of speaking—from yelling to cursing to joking, and beyond—can be intimately bound with experiences of kinetic violence.
By attenuating thought and agency, yelling can alter recruits’ sense of self. Drill instructors in the Marine Corps also tinker with recruits’ idea of selves by announcing shortly after their arrival that “the words ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘my’ are no longer part of recruits’ vocabulary. Instead, they are to refer to themselves as ‘recruit [last name]”. Drill instructors agree this lexical system is designed to foreclose egocentrism and stop recruits from thinking of themselves as individuals.
In 2016, Sergeant Jennifer Duke explained to PBS NewsHour, “We need to break down these individualities that they come with, of self and ‘me’ and ‘I.’ We need to break them down to basically nothing so we can build them back up… as one team, one element, to join our Marine Corps. It’s not my Marine Corps, or his Marine Corps, it’s our Marine Corps.”
In Marxist theorist Louis Althusser’s terms, we could say that recruits must “self-interpellate” as cogs in the military machine. Drill instructors never use recruits’ personal names; instead, official regulations permit them to call recruits “recruit [last name]” or to address them by their billet or job, such as “scribe” or “guide.” This practice carries a whiff of military necropolitics, whereby each individual serves a role in the military machine and is easily replaced if they become ineffective or are killed.
To facilitate state necropolitics, U.S. military culture is saturated by “kill talk” among those who serve as instruments of combat. The defining feature of kill talk is its refusal to acknowledge the full relational humanity of and the terrible loss suffered by those on whom potentially deadly violence is inflicted.
I think of kill talk as a kind of linguistic infrastructure—a loose collection of disparate verbal strategies that guide soldiers in how to perceive, feel, think, and ultimately act in combat. This infrastructure underpins the experience of having what the philosopher Judith Butler calls a “frame of war,” which, in simplest terms, is a structure that selectively carves up experience, fostering indifference to certain deaths.
These patterns of language matter partly because they make war more doable. Military combat asks too much of a human being. People’s minds are not well equipped to assimilate the full implications or the moral depth of killing or being killed; such a reckoning could debilitate one’s ability to live, let alone function on behalf of the military machine.
As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton puts it, “There has to be some level of detachment”—some “psychic numbing”—to apply one’s technical skills in war. Military language offers a supreme instrument to facilitate this detachment. Such detachment can potentially enhance military force—the volume of fire in a firefight, the relentless pressure applied during a siege, and so forth—while offering a kind of rescue for the combatant. But there is a terrible cost to this facilitation: If kill talk makes violence more feasible for combatants, it spells more death, mayhem, and misery for the individuals and societies targeted by such violence, and sometimes for the combatants themselves.
While kill talk may feel to combatants like a necessary kind of detachment, it can be jarring—even incomprehensible—to civilians. Just consider, for instance, the public disturbance in 2023 when Prince Harry described his mindset in his memoir as he killed 25 Taliban. He served as a forward air controller and then an Apache helicopter pilot in Afghanistan during his two tours. “You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people,” he stated in his book Spare. “They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods.”
The international shockwaves from this statement suggested many were stunned to hear his account, which seemed to contravene not only popular fantasies of the genteel royals but also the very liberal humanism Harry and his U.S. allies were supposedly fighting for. But from Harry’s point of view, this conceptual framing apparently made the difference between being able to do his job and not.
A young Iraq veteran I call Levi offers further insight into how wording can play a crucial role in a soldier’s ability to perform otherwise unthinkable acts as he recalls his experience during deployment:
“This wasnʼt an ‘enhanced interrogation’; this was a fucking torture. Right? Or—like—I didnʼt just ‘see my buddy take out an insurgent’; I saw him execute a man, right? When we sanitize that language, it fucks with our heads, because we have this deep-down, inherent aversion to killing—our own kind, especially, right? And so when you can indoctrinate somebody to override that barrier that we have, part of how we get them to do it is dehumanizing and by sanitizing, right? You switch that language and all the rhetoric around, becoming something other than what it actually is. So then we use those other words—those euphemisms—for those things, and detach ourselves from it.”
How do combatants learn to assimilate violence into their inner lives so they can willingly anticipate the act of killing and swallow the possibility of dying? As I listened to American veterans describe their military training, and observed glimpses of Marine Corps boot camp, it seemed that necropolitical abjection and the willingness to kill were conditioned not just physically, but semiotically—that is, by way of meaningful signs, in language, and other symbolic forms—before anyone went into battle. In both obvious and subtle ways, language helps combatants imagine themselves as killable killers and manage the moral, emotional, and conceptual implications of this role.
Hannah Arendt once wrote that violence is “mute”; it “begins where speech ends,” after the rational capacity for dialogue fails. Nevertheless, war’s violence is always mediated by language.
The concept of a “linguistic infrastructure” in kill talk directs attention more precisely to language and to combatants themselves. Imagine this infrastructure as an invisible patterning force that begins with the (re)socialization of those entering the military and continues to evolve in military speech communities during combat. Working in tandem with the political ideologies, military directives, and psychological mechanisms that facilitate inhumane deeds, this linguistic infrastructure offers new modes of consciousness and shared ways of being in the world. It directs and shunts, but rather than steering water, electricity, or vehicles as a city infrastructure does, its contours and dead ends encourage certain flows and stoppages of perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting.
Kill talk aspires to block empathy for “the enemy” and to dull the combatant’s sense of self-pity; it channels and champions the performance of aggressive military masculinity; it embraces the moral void of war so that combatants might not be grief-stricken and incapacitated by it. This infrastructure helps create conditions of possibility for the deadlier aspects of military experience while shifting combatants’ sense of what is thinkable and doable.
By the end of basic training, Randall, an American veteran of Vietnam and Parris Island Marine Corps boot camp trainee, says, “You get programmed. It’s like housebreaking a dog.” He came to accept that he was “a GI, ‘government issue.’ You belong to the USA.”
The bodily entrainment of Marines and other U.S. soldiers is plain to see, from their skills with weaponry to their taut control over their movements. However, the necropolitical role of language in combatants’ experience has scarcely been explored by linguistic anthropology or related disciplines. Randall, for one, understood the point of all the drills, fitness exercises, and weapons training, but he also sensed that something hard to articulate was happening to him during all that yelling, verbal abuse, and mind-game-playing he experienced during Marine Corps training. The way language was being used seemed to offer a connection to the disposability of bodies and erasure of souls. But how, exactly?
Kill Chants
Marine Corps training uses an especially transparent linguistic method to shunt empathy away from the suffering of those targeted in war: frequent repetition of the word “kill.” The first time I heard about this, I was speaking to Jay at a veterans’ writing workshop. A gifted artist and writer, Jay regrets having joined the Corps and now wears creative outfits like colorful bandannas and leggings with pink on the left side and blue on the right. He tells me that in hindsight, he considers boot camp morally appalling. “You can’t believe the things they try to put into you. Like, we greeted each other by yelling ‘Kill!’ You’d just pass someone on the path and you’d both yell, ‘Kill!’ and it was, like, just another Tuesday.”
As if normalizing the concept by merging it with their identity, Marine Corps officers and recruits sometimes use the word “kill” in banal contexts, as in the ritualized greeting described by Jay above. In “The Oaths We Keep”, an account by Jason Arment, who served as a U.S. Marine Corps machine gunner in the Iraq War, recruits were sometimes required to yell “kill” as an affirmative response (e.g., if they wanted to eat at the chow hall). “KILL,” he adds, “was the word companies of Marines shouted at their command when they knew they were supposed to say something but didn’t know what.”
Marine Corps veteran Patrick Turley describes his drill instructor directing a squad to “attack the Chow Hall,” meaning go to the dining hall to get a meal. As they entered, they were enjoined to sit down and “Kill 37,” another platoon in their company. They wound up chanting, “Kill, kill, kill ’em all!” as they marched past the other platoon to eat. During a military history lesson, Turley’s staff sergeant would ask a question, and when a recruit stood to answer, his platoon-mates would shout “Kill!” to motivate him. If the recruit got the answer right, the congratulations would take the form of (you guessed it) “Kill!”
And in her 2015 dissertation, Rachel Lynn Bowman reported that a non-commissioned officer at Parris Island “used ‘kill’ as a throwaway affirmative in a conversation with my escort lieutenant… [T]he term meant ‘great’ or ‘got it.’” At one point in the documentary Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click, recruits clean the floor while chanting, “sweep, kill, sweep, kill.” Here, “kill” is nested into a rote chore, perhaps both being all in a day’s work. When a term is used so casually and associated with so many purposes, it blends into the landscape of cultural expectations.
As kill talk extends into combat, it takes a range of forms. Infantry on ground missions often use bloodless, impersonal jargon when communicating with superiors or when adopting a professional stance. Phrases like “engaging a target,” “neutralizing a threat,” and “conducting a clearing operation,” for instance, can refer to violence while bypassing the fleshy reality of human bodies and their suffering. At the same time, however, a transgressive linguistic register flourishes in the theater of combat. It includes taboo slurs and epithets for the enemy and extravagant profanity that signals the speaker’s military masculinity while symbolizing, in microcosm, the shocking bodily ruptures of kinetic violence.
Dehumanization: Slurs, Epithets, and Profanity
Although military culture prides itself on being distinct from civilian culture, it still has to respond to some winds of change in the wider world. To be sure, gender-based insults and other demeaning terms have remained a core structure of the formative language used in the military. At the same time, while racism and ethnic discrimination remain forces in the military just as they are in the wider society, the Department of Defense has—until Trump's re-election, anyway—made sustained efforts to crack down on racism in training. All members of the military are supposed to be hard (and hence masculine), but the military needs bodies of all ethnic and racial extractions. Military branches have also seen the growth of Defense Equal Opportunity Institute-designed trainings around racial and ethnic sensitivity and diversity. Contemporary drill instructors know that racist and ethnic insults pose a particularly high risk to both morale and their own careers.
At the same time, service members have experienced a long-standing tension between ideologies of racial inclusiveness and actual verbal practice. In the Marine Corps, the official line since the Vietnam era has been that the Corps “does not see race,” instead perceiving all Marines as “green” by virtue of their uniforms. John Musgrave, who enlisted in 1966, reported all kinds of demeaning feminization, infantilization, and other put-downs in boot camp. But his drill instructor liked to say there should be no “racial crap” in the Marine Corps, for there are “only two colors [:]… forest green, the color of your uniforms, and red, the color of your blood.”
Yet historically, there have been many reports of service members of color being treated as materially and symbolically “less than,” and many who served in Vietnam reported blatant discrimination that reflected the broader culture of racism. One Vietnam veteran I spoke to says, “It was a racist system, and many of the trainers were white guys from down South… They would use all those ugly words you would expect on us.”
The insults drill instructors direct at recruits set the stage for the dehumanizing language combatants use in referring to the enemy. When trainers use “ugly words” to debase the recruits they wish to control, they model what it looks like to erase the personhood of the other—and this becomes immediately relevant in combat.
Just as drill instructors are formally prohibited from using racist language, they are also not permitted to use profanity during training. Nevertheless, some persist in doing so. The tension is evident in the 2005 documentary Ears, Open. Eyeballs, Click, filmed at the San Diego Training Depot. In one segment, the camera follows a platoon on a training hike. It’s hot, it’s dusty, everyone is heavily laden, and the recruits are clearly on their last legs. Several drill instructors can be heard trying to motivate them. The profanity rains down—“fuck,” “puss,” “damn,” “shit.” There’s no one reason profanity like this is common; there are countless reasons for drill instructors to use it. Drill instructors might use profanity because they instinctively grab the most emphatic words at their disposal to transmit their urgent affect to recruits. Profane language also mirrors the harsh realities they want Marines to get used to. The use of profane insults might count as an example of what I call “semiotic callousing,” the dynamic in which harsh signs (in this case, profanity) supposedly inure people (in this case, future soldiers) to onslaughts of whatever kind. Bombarded with harsh language, recruits should learn to inure themselves to feeling hurt, responding with action rather than nursing their wounds.
Furthermore, since dirty words refer to shared and sometimes taboo experiences of the body—sex, genitalia, and excretion—they belong perfectly in the military, where privacy is hard to come by and bodies are often filthy or desecrated. Unadorned and profane language also tends to be associated with those with less class privilege, in contrast with the refined or respectable language people use to self-elevate. Finally, at the semantic level, profanity often fixates on things entering or leaving the body—a crude analog of violence itself.
The forms of kill talk described—slurs and profanity, kill chants, euphemisms, and more—help create a social and psychological context in which taking lives in war becomes easier. But they also carry a cost. Those who find themselves broken by remorse after service are sometimes not merely guilty about what they (and the entire military apparatus) did to others, but also how they labeled and conceptualized those others. Wartime epithets, for instance, seem to have collateral damage—civilian lives, yes, but also, more subtly, some of the service members who did this cruel labeling. When they look back in hindsight, some are appalled by their deeds and their own past mindset. Recovery thus requires new language, new stances, what social theorist Alfred Schutz called a “Thou-orientation” that grasps the human existence of the people once so vilified.
Language plays an essential role in transforming a person into a combatant, helping subsume their purpose in the broader framework of military necropolitics. Part of the military contract—especially for those destined for close combat—involves a process of resocialization that sidelines individuality, desensitizes the self, and alienates the person from thoughts and feelings that once felt authentic. To militarize the self is, in part, to become callous to the feelings of certain others.
