The sentence with which I opened means, “We have two wounded and one dead. We need a helicopter.” At the army’s isolated outposts inside Lebanon in the ’90s you heard a lot about something called “Buttercup,” a radar that alerted us to incoming mortar shells, and also about the “Artichoke,” a night-vision system for tank gunners. Not much in our verbal arsenal was warlike—not our call-signs, the names of our bases, or the names of our weapons. There was very little in the spirit of “Hellfire” or “Predator,” names of a U.S. missile and drone. Our base, a rectangle of trenches and machine guns, was called Outpost Pumpkin. The artillery battery that helped us out when necessary was called Sycamore. Near us were outposts Basil, Citrus, and Red Pepper.

In the Israeli army you’ll occasionally find aggressive names like “Samson,” for an infantry battalion, but it’s not common. There is a unit of soldiers sent undercover after terrorists; it’s called “Cherry.” Another elite outfit is “Pomegranate.” And the infantry is replacing the M-16, the American rifle with its cold scientific designation, with an Israeli one that has a typical Israeli name—“Tavor,” a pretty hill in Galilee.

What does this say about Israel’s military? Perhaps something about the agricultural preoccupations of the kibbutz and of the socialist militias that spawned the army in the early years of the state. Even after he became the country’s most famous general and the defense minister in the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan used to say his profession was “farmer,” the point being that war was to be treated as something you were forced to do though you’d rather be plowing. This is still close to what I experienced as the Israeli military’s ideal approach to soldiering or command. The brigade where I served, the Fighting Pioneer Youth, was once responsible for farm work as well as military missions, and though this isn’t true anymore the brigade’s emblem still features a sickle and a sheaf of wheat.

According to the Israeli linguist Ruvik Rosenthal, author of a recent book on military language, the floral euphemisms reflect the fact that while Israelis recognize the necessity of war, they don’t celebrate it and would rather not think about it. The fact of the country’s mandatory draft means that people are too close to the army to wax romantic about the institution or what it does. There are no military parades here and haven’t been for years. So though as soldiers we did violence and had violence done to us, we were armed with peaceful language. A forward operating base sounds dangerous; a “pumpkin” doesn’t. And what harm could be done by something called an “artichoke”?

The origins of a military language, particularly one spoken over the radio, Rosenthal said, lie in a practical need for secrecy and brevity. But, at least in the Israeli army, the language isn’t secret and many of the code words—like prachim, flowers, for ptzu’im, casualties—are no shorter than the word they’re hiding. The explanation lies elsewhere. “This is partly about beautifying things—a ‘flower’ is prettier than a wounded soldier,” said Rosenthal, who lost his only brother in the 1973 war. “And it’s partly about expressing the discomfort that the country feels with war and with the military.”