Week ending January 26, 2014
There was actually a bunch of ties for top search of the week. ‘Ranger concierge’ and ‘ranger concierge services’ were tied with ‘infidel’ and ‘Iraq’. At the top of it all was ‘there it is Vietnam’.
A little over a year ago I started reading a bunch of books and articles about the Vietnam War and one of the things I kept picking up on was the language. Soldiers in Vietnam had a unique lingo that has pretty much disappeared. It seemed hip and relevant.
One of the phrases I saw over and over again was “There it is.” That phrase was often used as a way to validate the entire experience of the war in a single moment or event. You come in from patrol and find out the chow hall was destroyed in a mortar attack. There it is. Your new platoon leader gets killed in a helicopter crash before even getting to his platoon. There it is, man.
I wrote a post on the phrase linking to another blogger who served in Vietnam who was able to explain its use way better than I could.
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Carrying the Gun 