NEW YORK -- In April, when a young Palestinian woman blew herself up, killing and wounding many Israelis, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "The president condemns this morning's homicide bombing."
A flurry followed in the mass media about the term that seemed intended to replace "suicide bomber." But perhaps because it was redundant (a bomber is homicidal) or too one-sidedly condemnatory to be politically sensible, the term did not survive for long.
That led me to one of the more durable books to come out of Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific: "Kike Wadatsumi no Koe" (Listen -- Voices from the Deep). It contains the musings of some of the members of the special attack forces, commonly known as kamikaze.