15 Memorable Slang Terms From the Vietnam War

American soldiers in Vietnam communicated using so much slang and shorthand that it almost seems like its own English dialect. Their language, often both flippant and matter-of-fact, sheds light on how they coped with the horrors of war. Here are 15 memorable terms, from ball game to unbloused.

1. Ball game
2. Band-Aid
3. Butter bar
4. Dap
5. Didi mau
6. Funny papers
7. Klick
8. Lurp
9. Monday pill
10. Number ten thousand
11. Peanut
12. Shake and bake
13. Turtle
14. Two-stepper
15. Unbloused

Ball game

Any military operation.

Band-Aid

A medic.

Butter bar

A second lieutenant, the lowest-ranking officer. The uniform insignia for second lieutenants is one gold bar, which looks like a stick of butter. Second lieutenants were also known as brown bars, since the bar on their camouflage uniform was sometimes brown.

Dap

The dap, now ubiquitous in Black American culture, originated with Black soldiers in Vietnam. “At a time when the Black Power movement was burgeoning, racial unrest was prominent in American cities, and draft reforms sent tens of thousands of young African Americans into combat, the dap became an important symbol of unity and survival in a racially turbulent atmosphere,” LaMont Hamilton wrote for the Smithsonian’s Folklife Magazine. “Scholars on the Vietnam War and Black Vietnam vets alike note that the dap derived from a pact Black soldiers took in order to convey their commitment to looking after one another.”

A dap could (and can) basically be any greeting that involved hands, but wasn’t a traditional handshake. It’s been suggested that the term dap is an acronym for dignity and pride, but it may have also arisen as a variant of tap and/or dab.

Didi mau

“Go away” or “go quickly,” borrowed from Vietnamese. Ði means “to go,” and a second đi in the same sentence implies a command. Mau means “quickly.” Americans pronounced it “dee-dee mou” (as in mouse) and sometimes used it as a phrasal verb. Naval officer Jim Davy recalled in Iron Butterfly, coauthored with Ralph Christopher, that members of the Viet Cong had once entered a bar while he was sleeping upstairs. “They stayed down there what seemed like forever, but was only an hour or so,” he wrote, “then they didi mau-ed, left.”

Funny papers

Maps, particularly topographic ones. According to Paul Dickson’s book War Slang: American Fighting Words & Phrases Since the Civil War, the term was inspired by the maps’ “comic book colors”—and they were sometimes just called “comics.” It’s also been suggested that the nickname alluded to soldiers’ lack of faith in the maps’ accuracy.

Klick

A kilometer.

Lurp

A member of a long-range reconnaissance patrol, or LRRP. These patrols were small groups of soldiers that trekked deep into enemy territory to gain intelligence and carry out guerrilla warfare. As veteran Gary P. Joyce put it, “They were adept at the art of ambush, the quiet kill, unseen movement and survival. They wafted through the jungle like a solitary breeze, briefly felt, quickly gone. They were the eyes and ears of a roaring, earth-splitting, technological typhoon of destruction—the killing machine that was the U.S. military in the Republic of Vietnam.”

Monday pill

A large, bright orange pill containing two anti-malarial medications—chloroquine and primaquine—that everyone took on Mondays. In a setting where all the days blended together, the Monday pill became a way for soldiers to keep track of time passing.

Number ten thousand

Number one meant “good”—the best a thing or situation could be. Number ten, by contrast, was the worst. But American soldiers also had a term for something exponentially worse than a number ten: number ten thousand (or number ten thou, for short).

Peanut

A soldier wounded in action. As Frederick Downs Jr. explained in his memoir The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War, “We tried to say nothing over the radio that could be understood by the enemy. Thus, we used code words for certain things. A ‘Kool-Aid’ was a dead soldier and a ‘peanut’ was a wounded soldier.”

Shake and bake

Shake ’N Bake, which General Foods debuted in 1965, is a seasoned breadcrumb coating that takes the hassle (and the frying) out of making dinner: You just shake whatever meat’s on the menu in a bag with the breadcrumbs and then bake it. Vietnam soldiers adopted the name for officers who had earned their rank right out of training courses—particularly sergeants, who are non-commissioned officers in charge of soldiers (as opposed to commissioned officers like lieutenants, majors, and generals, who are essentially upper management).

As Roger Hayes explained in his memoir On Point: A Rifleman’s Year in the Boonies: Vietnam, 1967–1968, “At the conclusion of the course, the attendees—who were brand new in the service, had conducted no missions other than training, and had no practical experience—were promoted to sergeant and subsequently assigned to positions of authority over experienced soldiers … The instant NCOs, whom we called ‘shake & bakes,’ received their rank quickly but did not receive the experience necessary for effective leadership in Vietnam.”

Turtle

A replacement for a soldier at the end of their tour. “[T]hey are called by this name because they are often very slow in coming,” Philip D. Chinnery wrote in Full Throttle: True Stories of Vietnam Air Combat Told by the Men Who Lived It.

Two-stepper

American soldiers nicknamed the bamboo pit viper “two-stepper” or “two-step” because its bite was purportedly so lethal you’d be dead before you could take two steps. It’s an exaggeration, but the snake’s venom can potentially kill you.

Unbloused

Unbloused described pants not tucked into boots. Unblousing gave soldiers’ legs some room to breathe in the hot, muggy jungle; and they also kept water from ballooning their pants when they were wading through flooded rice fields and other wet terrain. But that comfort came at a cost: easy access for leeches. “Whenever we waded in the water, we invariably became covered with the leeches, which found openings in our clothing and snaked their way inside to sink their ugly faces into our flesh. It was not uncommon to pull ten or twelve from our legs and buttocks and to find just as many on our clothing. They crawled all over us in search of an unbloused pant cuff or tear in our fatigues,” Charles Gadd wrote in his memoir Line Doggie: Foot Soldier in Vietnam. Soldiers were known to burn the leeches off their bodies with cigarettes.

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