By William Safire
Published: February 26, 1984
Never Call Retreat
When President Reagan made his decision to remove the United States Marines from their hooches at the Beirut airport, he then faced another decision: what to call the action removing the Marines from the action.
Not even the most cockeyed optimist or euphoric euphemist would call the planned operation an advance , but it would be unfair, or perhaps too painfully pejorative, to call the disengagement a retreat . What were the President's choices?
The difficulty of finding nondiscouraging words for the end of a military affair is not new: When Gen. George McClellan thought it the better part of wisdom not to assault the Confederate defenses at Richmond in June of 1862, he conducted what he called a ''change of base.'' This official description of the movement away from the enemy's capital received a skeptical reception in the Northern press.
The neutral term for turning troops away from the enemy and moving them rearward is withdrawal , a word that preceded retreat by more than a century and was first recorded in a military context in 1475: ''None suche were never sene withdrawers or fleers frome batailes.'' Over the centuries, withdraw has gained in dignity, separating itself further from the craven flee . But withdrawal is a word for neutral observers to use and may not be le mot juste for participants who want to put a good face on the move backward.
That's where redeployment comes in. Deploy , from the Latin desplicare , ''to scatter,'' means to position forces on a wider front; redeploy originally meant to do that again when a new general wanted to scatter his forces to his own design. Although British use spreads the action over labor and material management, American use is mainly military: The term was first sighted in a Feb. 12, 1945, issue of Time magazine: ''The new blueprint for U.S. redeployment calls for an army of 6,500,000 men to defeat Japan.''
However, redeployment has gained a new connotation of ''reassembling in a new position farther from the front.'' The Israelis used that euphemism in 1983 to describe their movement of troops from close to the Beirut airport to a position behind the Awali River. Accordingly, President Reagan chose that noun for his decision: ''I have asked Secretary of Defense Weinberger to present to me a plan for redeployment of the Marines from Beirut airport to their ships offshore.''
Since repetition weakens euphemisms, Mr. Reagan needed a synonym for redeployment in his statement. In a phrase submitted to him by national security adviser Robert McFarlane, a military man, he said: ''Even before the latest outbreak of violence, we had been considering ways of reconcentrating our forces . . . .''
Reconcentrate does not mean ''I have to think hard about this again.'' It is a verb that has been in business for more than three centuries, meaning ''to bring together,'' and for the past century has almost exclusively been applied to military affairs: ''He abandoned further attempts on Kintang,'' wrote Archibald Forbes in 1884 about Gen. Charles George (Chinese) Gordon, ''and on the 24th had reconcentrated at Liyang.'' By choosing reconcentrate , Mr. Reagan sought to give the impression that the force was just as effective but in a different place, out of harm's way.
This attempt made sense, especially in light of the President's dismissal as ''surrender'' of House Speaker Tip O'Neill's suggestion of a few days before that the Marines be moved to ships offshore. He could also have chosen retrograde movement ; when I called Gen. Maxwell Taylor for suggestions about advances to the rear, he said, ''Off the top of my head, the best I can think of is retrograde , but that's no good.'' He's right: As a verb, retrograde is intransitive, often used to describe the receding action of a glacier, and reaches too far for a suitable euphemism.
In The New York Times, headline writers accepted redeploy as a suitable description of the move of Americans, but preferred pulled out , a more neutral term, to describe the removal of the British troops. The Washington Post, searching for an accurate and neutral phrase to describe the withdrawal, aptly headlined ''U.S. Marines to Leave Lebanese Soil'' - the land, not the area.
Pull out , the verb meaning ''extricate,'' has been in colloquial use for a century. Jack London's 1907 use first attached the term to the military: ''While there, we met McAvoy, Fish, Scotty and Davy, who had also pulled out from the Army.'' The noun pullout is more exclusively military than the verb. Pullout was later softened by New York Times headline writers to pullback , a word used for setback as early as 1591, but more recently used for military withdrawal : The Baltimore News-Post commented in 1951 that ''those who think the Red pullback is leading up to something don't put so much stock in the Reds' abandonment of prepared defenses.'' A less well-known term, exfiltrate , the opposite of infiltrate , is used by commanders who want to pull out of an area in a very quiet way.