Janet McIntosh's Kill Talk is a remarkable and highly readable exploration of a phenomenon that is commonly represented in movies and popular media but seldom analyzed in any detail, namely, the talk employed by the military that helps to make civilians into killable killers, what she terms “kill talk.” In this book, McIntosh shows how kill talk functions as an infrastructure that is just as essential for state-based killing as the bombs, bunkers, and bullets that materialize the death and destruction of modern warfare. Kill Talk includes a trove of empirical data, a rich and varied theoretical framework, and wonderfully clear prose. The empirical data supporting McIntosh's analysis includes in-depth interviews with 50 veterans, interviews with former Drill Instructors (hereafter, DIs), observations of basic training, observations at an artistic collective for combat veterans, social media observations, and a substantial engagement with numerous books and narratives produced by military veterans. Kill Talk's theoretical richness is evidenced by 50 pages of endnotes and 23 pages of references that span the fields of psychology, anthropology, history, linguistics, and the humanities. Regarding the clarity of prose, I assigned a few chapters for an advanced linguistic anthropology class that included undergraduate and master's level students, and Kill Talk was a favorite text of theirs that they found to be both accessible and engaging. The stories and experiences of military personnel take center stage in Kill Talk, while theoretical framings linger just offstage in the footnotes. Rather than focusing too heavily on the explanans, Kill Talk repeatedly and quite compellingly shows us the explanadum: how recruits are socialized through kill talk into becoming killable killers, and further, how kill talk shapes veterans' subjectivity during and following combat. Importantly, there is abundant evidence that McIntosh was well connected with and respected by this community of veterans. One veteran described her as someone who “gives a shit enough to translated the process of militarization through kill talk” (p. 11). In the dedication for a poem (see Chapter 9), another veteran simply wrote, “For Janet McIntosh, who gets it” (p. 167). Chapters 1–5 introduce the phenomena of Kill Talk as military recruits first encounter it in basic training. Chapter 1 introduces the overall themes of the book while also providing powerful and poignant examples of the forms and consequences of kill talk. This is one of the chapters I had my Linguistic Anthropology class read and it worked well as a stand-alone chapter. Chapter 2 “Yelling” narrates the new recruit's experience in boot camp as a rite of passage, documenting the dis-integration of their personhood as they are trained to be killable killers through the DI's staccato yelling—understood to function like flying bullets, only less dangerous (and hence not worth complaining about, see Chapter 5). Chapter 3 “Insults and Kill Chants” explores the process of “semiotic callousing” that produces a double movement in which recruits dehumanize themselves thus accepting their own killability, while also providing a how-to model for dehumanizing others. This double movement happens through masculinist and racialized language that depicts femininity as weakness and non-White races as inferior and worthy of elimination. Chapter 4 “Broken Rules and Head Games” describes the process by which the DI's rule-breaking becomes a model to socialize combatants into a deeply ambivalent relation to rules that will provide the basis for future norm breaking that combatants will do as part of making war. Here, McIntosh illustrates how the constant enforcement of a state of moral ambiguity helps recruits accept their own killable status as well as the killability of others. Chapter 5 “Mothers of America” and “A Woke, Emasculated Military” describe two tropes that many in the military see as oppositional to their work: mothers and “wokeness,” both of which embody the ideological enemy of warfare, empathy. Chapters 6–8 consider language in the context of combat, as described by combat veterans. Through a number of horrifying examples, Chapter 6 “Dehumanization in Combat” illustrates the combat parallel to the dehumanizing of the recruit in which kill talk is put to use to dehumanize “enemy combatants.” Chapter 7 “Language as a Shattered Mirror” explores the “evasive language, ubiquitous profanity, and nihilistic slogans that are part of kill talk.” Here, McIntosh introduces the flipside of the profane and racist terminology, namely the euphemisms and dysphemisms that flip or distort the meanings of kinetic violence, torture, and killing and serve as a way of managing the killing of others, the death of one's friends, and one's own possible death. In the process, war is turned into a masculinizing game of “making men.” Chapter 8 “Frame Perversion: The Twisted Humor of Combat” describes how military gallows humor, strange to civilian eyes and ears, creates a twisted framing in which antisocial or hostile actions are characterized as prosocial and positive. Having described the horror of kill talk's power to dehumanize, Chapters 9 and 10 offer some possibilities for rehumanization, both of combatants themselves and their “enemy” others. Chapter 9 “Poetry of Rehumanization” describes how some combat veterans accomplish this through poetry. Chapter 10 “Combat Paper” documents how one group of combat veterans has re-deployed the term “combat paper”—a term used to describe the worthlessness of enlisted combatants—to name the act of pulping their uniforms into paper on which they print deeply personal and expressive art and writing, thus providing a humanizing rite of passage “out of” the military. As McIntosh has noted elsewhere, kill talk reaches well beyond just military training. Variants of kill talk can be found in social media discourse about immigrants, international others, religious others, or, increasingly, domestic political others through which speakers implicitly eschew or even demonize empathy while dehumanizing these others. In some cases, such language even renders these civilian others as killable. As an interactionist (and interactant who engages with such talk), I would be interested in how McIntosh might think about kill talk in conversation. How might an interactional partner productively respond to one of these kill talk variants, whether from an associate, colleague, neighbor, or friend? In other words, how might we engage these war words without reverting to our own other-dehumanizing version of kill talk? Another crucial question that McIntosh is only briefly able to consider is: What happens to kill talk when the majority of killing happens at a distance so remote that one cannot make out, much less look into, the eyes of enemy combatants (as in many grayscale video clips available on social media showing US military in Iraq and Afghanistan “eliminating” “suspected insurgents” from nearly a mile away)? This is a crucial question since, as McIntosh documents, one of the most common experiences of humanization happens when combatants have to actually look into the eyes of “the enemy.” McIntosh offers some insight into this noting both that the racial epithets are much less commonly used in killing at a distance, and that there are still moments when humanization can happen at a distance, for example, when, drone operators doing reconnaissance see their “targets” hug their children or engage in other deeply human behaviors in the minutes or days before they kill them. One wonders how kill talk will be adapted to these new technologies of killing. Kill Talk is especially refreshing because McIntosh has undertaken what has been taboo in much of social science, namely, a careful and thoughtful study of people with whom, following Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Susan Harding, and Joel Robbins, we might call anthropology's “sordid” slot—those “repugnant” others among us whom social scientists see as morally corrupt and irredeemable and thus unworthy of empathy. In engaging in this study, McIntosh is careful not to “conflate the strategies of the state with the souls of the infantry doing its dirty work,” warning that such a conflation would “encourage an uncurious and strangely dehumanizing” practice of anthropology that would leave anthropologists “at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding the dynamics of oppression” and “the complex subjectivity of those who wield power.” Echoing Renato Rosaldo, she further reminds us that “understanding how something works is not the same as agreeing with it.” Overall, this is an immensely important book, deeply humane and humanizing, as full of insight as it is empathy; an utter rejection of dehumanization in all forms.
Gregory A. Thompson (Wed,) studied this question.