On: I survived a missile strike in the Strait of Hormuz, but my friend has not been

Diary Entry

“Survived.” That’s the verb they’re using now. “I survived a missile strike.” It’s a good verb. Active. Heroic, even. It suggests agency. A story of grit. A tale for the grandkids.

But let’s audit that verb. “Survived.” What did you survive? A missile strike. Who fired the missile? Unclear. Why was it fired? Unclear. At what? An oil tanker. Carrying what? Oil. For whom? Unclear. But the verb is clear: you survived. The focus is on the individual endurance, not the collective insanity that made the endurance necessary.

And your friend. Your friend “has not been found.” That’s the other verb phrase. “Has not been found.” Not “is missing.” Not “is dead.” “Has not been found.” It’s a phrase of administrative patience. It suggests a search is ongoing, that there’s a paperwork process in a tidy office somewhere, that a status will be updated in due course. It turns a violent, sudden absence into a clerical oversight.

Shell shock was two words. Now we have “survived a missile strike” and “has not been found.” We’ve added syllables and removed the cause. We’ve added bureaucratic distance and removed the war. Because it’s not a war. It’s “the Iran war.” No, it’s “the start of the Iran war.” Even that’s too clean. It’s the start of another chapter in the endless, nameless, profitable thing we don’t call a war anymore. We call it a Strait. We call it a tanker. We call it a job. “Sunil Puniya was on his first sea job.”

His first sea job. Not his first voyage, his first job. He was working. On a floating bomb carrying the lifeblood of the machine that will eventually, inevitably, need to create more phrases like “has not been found” to describe its other employees.

They’ll find him. Or they won’t. They’ll upgrade the phrase to “presumed lost” or “declared deceased.” More syllables. More Latin. The weight that’s removed is the weight of a young man on his first job, who learned the hard way that some job descriptions include missile strikes.

And the machine will note the loss, file the form, and send the next tanker out. With the next young man on his first job. And the language will get longer, and smoother, and even more comfortable. Ask yourself why.