This was originally a CGI script from October 2001:
http://www.ftrain.com/cgi-bin/l_operation.cgi?num_ops=10
At the $ command prompt:
$ ./amongd.pl
Expected results:
Operation Evangelical Frenzy
You can also provide an integer in order to generate multiple military operating names at once.
At the $ command prompt:
$ ./amongd.pl 10
Expected results:
Operation Bowel-loosening Gorgon
Operation Black Liberty
Operation Destructive Privet Bush
Operation Hungry Nakba
Operation Piercing Weasel
Operation Strong Frenzy
Operation Endless Tiger
Operation Indestructible Gorgon
Operation Don't Piss off the Delirium
Operation Brutal Chick Pea
This software program was written in late 2001 when we were all pretty depressed about the turn of events and everyone in positions of power in the media and in government appeared to have lost their minds. And still appear to have lost their minds, frankly.
I had been working at a startup in Israel and thinking about the way that European and Middle Eastern cultures interact. I lost my job in Tel Aviv on September 13, 2001 and went home to Brooklyn. Downtown Manhattan was a huge smoking hole and everything smelled like burning concrete everywhere you went. I talked to people on the phone a lot and sent many long emails during that era.
I was 26 and there was no work anywhere, so I made this CGI script and put it on the web. Some people found it in poor taste. It was in poor taste. But it was also an era where New Yorkers would go to the gym together and stand on the ellipticals and watch the billowing-flag graphics on TV, and whisper to each other "Freedom!" and laugh. Freedom, let's roll, let the eagle soar, justice--these became words often-used by people who did not live here, used to justify a global network of tremendous and disturbing things in the months and years following.
Not that New Yorkers didn't want justice, or freedom. We wanted both of those things very much.
Reactions were mixed. Some friends who had been in the middle of the attack reloaded and reloaded the page and laughed. One friend of mine who lost a number of people in the attacks looked at the web page generated by this code and gently said, "it's a little too soon for it to be funny for me."
Before we started bombing Afghanistan, she called me on the phone to read me an email from a friend of hers who worked somewhere in the middle of the government, a place where big decisions were made. They were still formulating their response.
"Nuclear weapons have not been ruled out." That was a thing she read over the phone to me, that someone wrote to her in an email.
This script now has a weird second-life on the Internet as a tool for various people who need military-sounding names for work or hobbies, including military history re-enactors.
At some point, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be fair game for the re-enactors, with the same fake weapons and the same enemies. And Americans will put on the clothes of the Taliban. Maybe American women (or men) will wear burqas as part of the reenactment. We're not there yet, it still feels almost impossible. But things like that always come around much sooner than you think.
Maybe this Perl script, which was intended as a parody of the news during the miserable early fall in October 2001, when New York's throat burned, can become part of that very advanced form of play.
This code is released GPL3.