Whether the green recruit trying to stay in formation or the seasoned drill sergeant barking commands, whether the fighter pilot hosed down in a ritual baptism after the 100th mission or the crew who shares the pilot's pride, members of the military, both commissioned and enlisted, share an identity fashioned not only by the jobs they do, but by the rituals they perform, the anecdotes they exchange, the jokes they exchange, the songs that help pass the time and vent their frustrations, and the legends they pass on. To be a member of the military is to live in a world structured by tradition in which every detail, from the crease in a pair of pants to the greeting of a superior, is freighted with significance. This collection of essays offers just a sampling of the rich folk culture that defines military life and that embodies attitudes towards the missions members of the military train for, the rigid hierarchy they confirm or chafe against, and the values they espouse.

Like other groups of workers, military units invent their own language, one that distinguishes them from civilians, adds humor to what is often a tedious job, and relieves anxiety when the tension of war replaces the tedium of peace. The folk speech of military units shares little with correct speech (the formal interchange in the receiving line, for example); it is the speech exchanged in the barracks, in the field, and in the ship's engine room, among coworkers often of fairly equal rank. This author's essay on military speech looks at the ways in which it celebrates the salty, the blunt, the crude, and the transgressive.

To grasp how military culture is transmitted from one generation of recruits to the next, one need only look at boot camp. Boot camp transforms recruits from jocks and nerds, boys from the 'hood and women from the suburbs, into knock-offs of the same model soldiers by dressing them alike, forbidding them their accustomed freedoms, and calling them into the second nature of military discipline. Drill instructors, the engineers of their transformation, control every minute of the recruits' days: they deprive them of sleep, tax them physically, and instruct them in proper speech and the attitudes to accompany that speech. Richard Burns' essay on gunlore shows how the mistake of referring to one's rifle as one's "gun" becomes the pretext for the punishment chant designed, ostensibly, to distinguish rifle from penis: "This is my rifle; this is my gun. This is for shooting; this is for fun."

Timothy Rives' essay on the poetry of World War I conscripts trained at Camp Funston, including a number of African American soldiers, illustrates the integration of folk speech into verse. The compositions of these young conscripts evoke their new identity as citizen soldiers on the homefront.

The final three essays in the collection examine the folk song tradition in the military. Les Cleveland illustrates the ways in which the occupational songs of those who went to Vietnam articulate both a wide range of attitudes about the war--from support, to ambiguity, to cynicism--and a profound sense of identity shared only with those who served. Folklorists Les Cleveland and Lydia Fish have dedicated much of their professional lives to documenting soldier songs, but whereas Cleveland offers a reading of the songs themselves, Fish examines the larger cultural context that influenced their creation and that determined their distribution. She links the circulation of underground soldier newspapers that boasted an account of the war unfiltered by military censors to the makeshift audio distribution networks that broadcast the songs (both popular and folk) that soldiers craved. To complement the comments of two scholars of military folk song Martin Heuer, a veteran of the Vietnam War, recalls how brigade-level song contests spurred would-be singer-songwriters to fashion a new body of aviator songs.

Through the songs they compose for one another, through the poems that voice their longings, even through the witty sarcasm they exchange out of earshot of authority, military personnel affirm a shared identity and reflect upon a shared predicament.