ABSTRACT
So the soldiers were nizi, disempowered plebeians of the Soviet social order. Stranded in an alien institution, the military, and in an alien land, they all the same experienced very different wars. The result was that they were a far more varied group than the use of the neat little tag 'afgantsy' suggests, with its implicit assumption of a single, distinct and unified subculture. Of course, this illusion was reinforced by the veterans' own jargon and customs. All close groups create their own vocabularies of various degrees of opacity to outsiders, from management consultants' 'cash cows' and 'poison pills' to nuclear war-game theorists' 'collateral damage' and 'cee-cubed-eye'. Soldiers are no exception, and every service and every war has its own lexicon. 'Vietspeak', for example, was an eclectic amalgam of US Army acronyms and official designations, garbled loan words from Vietnamese, French, Chinese and Japanese, and transposed and often mutated 'street-slang'.
