Boot the “Boots” 1
Drs. Joel Howell and Sanjay Saint think that the phrase “boots on the ground” to mean persons in the military needs to be retired as demeaning and dehumanizing. I certainly do not think of Captain First Son, USA, as a “boot” (though there were times I was inclined to give him one).
Methinks they have a point. Here’s a bit of their column from the Detroit News:
Some will die there. Some will return home injured; many will receive care at VA facilities.
These people have lives, friends, loved ones, and all too often dreams lost and hopes abandoned on account of what happened to them.
“Boots on the ground” implicitly invites the reader to think not about the many individuals who serve, but instead to reduce those people to a single article of clothing, one that in its uniformity belies the many different types of people who wear those boots.
I will give a dollar to a doughnut that most of those who so casually use the phrase “boots on the ground” have not served. They would send the children of others into harm’s way.
November 13, 2014 at 4:10 am
It certainly is awful. It’s a product of the war on terror. I can tell you as an ‘expert’ at Globalsecurity it showed up as a buzz phrase for Afghanistan and then metastasized everywhere else. It’s a now sickening American term on many levels. People who use, and I have never been one, need boots where the sun don’t shine. It encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the idea of American military supremacy: the idea that you can avoid risk and pain and averse consequence from not putting -too many- people into the theatre of combat, the delusion that war without consequence is possible if the infantry deployment is small, etc… It’s all bull, a cowardly construction unique to the US of A.