Grunt

Rule of thumb, if you don't know how to use it, google it. I know people are skeptical about googling everything, but it beats just blurting out something completely uneducated. And with alot of words, as many things, the situation has alot to do with the use and meaning. I try to follow this as best I can, even though sometimes I get a little cocky still. As I said before, so much of the war and information about the military can be found online, and yet, again and again, I head reporters, staffers, politicians, coffee house loiterers, Capitol Hill barfly wonks and the like use words that I don't think they understand. Grunt is one of them.I am not sure that any civilian should really ever use the word grunt. Maybe a father or a mother, sister or brother, girlfriend, boyfriend or best friend....only out of affection for how hard their work is, but coming out of the mouth of an unaffliated stranger civilian its going to sound like a put down.

Instead of holding your hand here, I am going to just include the link to wikipedia for grunt and let you read. Its a complex story behind the word, and its use is very specific. But its worried me the amount of times I have heard commentators use it. I can't speak for the soldiers, but it makes them sound like "employees" of the country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunt

Another online dictionary defines grunt as "to utter a deep guttural sound, as a hog does". Great. And we wonder why Muslims might not welcome these "grunts" that readily or with affection. Swine people, we have reduced our soldiers to swine. I know Edelmen didn't mean this when he wrote "They were called grunts….They were the infrantrymen, the foot soldiers of the war", but it doesn’t seem to evoke that same respect anymore. Not the way I've heard it used lately.
Another definition aligns it with "an unskilled person lacking technical training", which couldn't be more wrong.

Every single one of the service members I have met and befriended has a skill, if not multiple, that would be more valuable than most of the people I sat in class with at Georgetown. Except for the ability to catch a fish, swim and perform CPR, I am basically useless in a disaster. Fixing a car, building or fixing a radio, understanding electrical current, heck, digging a well are not some of the skills that I would associate with your average civilian. I once held a bar-b-que and amongst the seven guys standing around the grill, not one of them knew how to get it started. Sweet. I once had a friend that, when I told him to "light the pit", I returned 10 minutes later to find him looking for a hole in the ground.

So again, I'm scratching my head as to how this word is accurate or appropriate. Are we belittling basic skills? To me they are not that basic if most of the folks in this country can't do them. A friend of mine is a union electrician. He is white and a college drop out and I have watched as people struggle to talk to him about his job. He went through alot of training and serious education to become a full fledged union member and makes more money than I do. It's amazing to me how so many of the skills that have been characterized as "basic" are so rarely shared by most folks. My friend knows how lighting works in a house, how to fix an outlet and not burn himself or the house down, and how to fix the goddamn Metrorail's electrical current. Do you? What happens if all of the lights go out in the city? Is this basic? Or highly specialized, incredibly valuable labor. In fact, I think Katrina shows us how unskilled most of us are when faced with real survival.

If anything we civilians have become the grunts. Mindless relatively unskilled workers who push paper, buy cell phones and keep the economy moving, while these folks are out actually teaching people life skills and helping them build the means to survive and thrive. What the hell good is a brilliantly written textbook if the classroom's ceiling is coming down and the toilets don't work? People talk about needing to educate the Iraqis, well how do you suppose that should ACTUALLY happen there professor? You think that roof is going to fix itself? Do people really want to walk in a school when they know that it is the first target to be bombed? And yet I have actually heard some PhD on some wonk show calling the folks delivering such skills "grunts". Sheesh.

Now yes, they are working in service of our country, but grunt doesn't really speak to that. I've got conflicting stories even on wiki about the history and origins of the word. Some say it started with the Army, and most of the folks I've asked say it comes from the Marines on the ground in Viet Nam. But the word as of late seems to have changed. It used to be synonymous with "ground-pounder" which to me still seems the most accurate synonym with the service these folks have offered. Service-member is pretty anticeptic, I'll give you that, but grunt just runs in the opposite direction. How bout soldier. Siiiiiiigh…that was hard.

Although I understand there is a fair amount of manual labor and "grunt work" associated with military service, I have just heard it used more and more by commentators, talk show guest wonks and even some higher ranked brass in a way that seems a bit demeaning. It's talking out of both sides of our mouths to say something like "the grunts on the ground deserve better". If they deserve better than describe them better. In this PR battle, the wordsmith in me really cringes when this word is used. If the military wants to use it, fine, but when civilians start using it, I get a little nervous. It perpetuates a myth that the insurgency seems to really love, that American's don't respect their military, that their soldiers are drones, and that they are some mindless employee of the President.

And I'll admit to my own ignorance and misinformation. I have harbored similiar thoughts at times. I won't lie. I think that is why certain comments sting so bad, because we might all be guilty of treating our soldiers like "grunts". When my family first moved to Virginia, despite having thick southern accents ourselves, I was raised in an academically privileged environment. But we all got a pretty serious education in how wrong we were in our perception and judgment of the military by moving to Northern Virginia.

Our neighbors were from various branches, we swam on the swim team and went to school with "military brats" and picked up "slugs" as they hitched rides to the Pentagon. Their kids had seen more of the world than I had and their parents knew more about how the world really worked than mine did. My education about the military started during my commute into school, ironically enough.

These folks talked in a way that normal civilians didn't and about things that I didn't know anything about. Some were high school graduates, drop outs, some had graduate degrees (at least one in some cases) and others even PhDs. They also had gone through all sorts of training I didn't even know existed through other training offices and schools that were available only to them. They just belonged to a different world it seemed. They went through so many ethics classes, whereas my friends in business school were complaining about the TWO philosophy/theology classes they had to take as finance or marketing majors. Oh the irony.

Which is why I would urge caution about the word grunt. Every time I hear it dropped by someone standing in a suit or heels I cringe. I know we are supposed to hold our GI Joe to higher standards than the Average Joe, but no company, group, organization, class, or family is perfect or better than anyone else, especially when their greatest service is giving their life or a limb. Everyone has a role to play. A CEO of a Human Resources company once commented to me (during a hoitey toitey Georgetown cocktail hour) "You know who my most valuable employee is? My janitor. Without him, I'm a literal mess." This same CEO gave Georgetown its largest donation, and only wanted a few sweatshirts for his grandkids in return. He got it.

To call any member of the military a grunt, to me, just smacks of something mildly patronizing and insulting, even when folks aim to speak on "their behalf". So lets just be careful is all, like I've said before, if you don't think its right to say, it probably isn't.