Why did Vietnamese soldiers create so many words?
That’s been true in any war, but there are a few areas that can be grouped together. For instance, from Viet Cong you get to just VC, but the phonetic alphabet used by radio operators quickly added Victor Charlie. Phrases like didi mau came straight, if not with complete accuracy, from the Vietnamese language. And some, like Marvin the ARVN (pronounced Arvin), were just too easy (from ARVN: Army of the Republic of Vietnam). Also, some of the phrases that you think of as being from Vietnam are actually from earlier wars, and perhaps even mis-applied. G00k, for instance, comes from Han’guk, Korea. And boondocks is a term we got from our soldiers in the Phillipines over a century ago, a bastardization of bonduk, Tagalog for “mountain.
