O 39;dark Hundred
Leda Billock
In addition to zero dark thirty, another term is zero dark hundred, or more commonly oh dark hundred, which, according to a qualified paratrooper (Army, Airborne) and former soldier (MI, Armor, Engineer):
In military (US) slang that period [between midnight and dawn] is referred to as "oh-dark hundred" or sometimes "zero-dark hundred". On the 24-hour clock the hours before 10 am start with a 0; so 1:00 am is 0100 and said as oh-one-hundred and so forth. Thus oh-dark hundred is anytime after midnight while it is still dark:
Being in the Military I have rarely heard "Zero Dark Thirty" it is almost always pronounced as "Oh Dark Thirty," "Oh Dark Hundred" or mainly "Oh Dark Stupid". It refers to simply the 0 before the time in 24 hour time. Example:0100, 0230, 0450 would all be pronounced in the above fashion and NOT by "One Dark Hundred" or "Two Dark Thirty". It is simply military slang or humour regarding getting woken up in the dark hours of the morning.
"0 dark 30" is a term commonly used by the military to refer to a non-specific time when it is dark outside, either very late or very early. However, the prevailing pronunciation is "oh dark thirty".
Military women need the example of Army nurse Beatrice MacDonald, who returned to service at the front lines after she lost an eye to German shrapnel in World War I. They deserve the opportunity to laugh with WAVES petty officer Josie Dermody Wingo, whose memoir of teaching naval gunners how to aim at enemy aircraft made us shout and high-five in the quiet library of the Women in Military Service for America Foundation and brought several archivists running to see if we were okay. They, too, should cry tears of joy upon reading about the liberation of Army and Navy nurses held prisoner for three years in Manila by the Japanese Army. They will admire and wonder at the worn-out soles on the shoes of nurses who hiked eight hundred miles behind German lines to return to service after their airplane went off-course and crashed in the mountains of Albania.
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