Veronica tells me she is ‘against the war’. At least she hasn’t joined up for the Baath party. While she was making a placard or two on the kitchen table, I have been puzzling over a letter from an anaesthetist. But before that, may I mention a couple more figures of speech that the war has thrown up?
One comes out of an incident near ad-Diwaniyah where an American marine was killed and another wounded by fire from Iraqi irregulars. A marine officer, Lieutenant-Colonel B.P. McCoy, described the engagement as ‘blue-collar warfare’. At first hearing, this was grotesque, but I suppose that the metaphor means ‘workaday’, which is accurate enough.
Worse is a new humorous acronym: KI/CAS, standing for Killbox Interdiction/Close Air Support. It refers to sending coalition aircraft into specific grids or killboxes to destroy (‘take out’) identified targets threatening ground columns.
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