THE GULF WAR : No Surrender, No Retreat

Two words that apparently are not part of the Pentagon’s vocabulary: RETREAT AND SURRENDER. At least, no such listings can be found in the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Official Dictionary of Military Terms. However, the book does contain “WITHDRAWAL OPERATION,� which is defined as “a planned operation in which a force in contact disengages from an enemy force.� When asked about the missing words, a Pentagon spokesman replied, “Up until this point, those two terms have not been defined in our dictionary because their standard English definitions were considered sufficient.� But he pointed out that they may be included in future editions.