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Concept
Dog tag
Summary
Dog tag is an informal but common term for a specific type of identification tag worn by military personnel. The tags' primary use is for the identification of casualties; they have information about the individual written on them, including identification and essential basic medical information such as blood type and history of inoculations. They often indicate a religious preference as well.
Dog tags are usually fabricated from a corrosion-resistant metal. They commonly contain two copies of the information, either in the form of a single tag that can be broken in half, or as two identical tags on the same chain. This purposeful duplication allows one tag, or half-tag, to be collected from an individual's dead body for notification, while the duplicate remains with the corpse if the conditions of battle prevent it from being immediately recovered. The term arose and became popular because of the tags' resemblance to animal registration tags.
The earliest mention of an identification tag for soldiers comes in Polyaenus (Stratagems 1.17) where the Spartans wrote their names on sticks tied to their left wrists. A type of dog tag ("signaculum") was given to the Roman legionary at the moment of enrollment. The legionary "signaculum" was a lead disk with a leather string, worn around the neck, with the name of the recruit and the indication of the legion of which the recruit was part. This procedure, together with enrollment in the list of recruits, was made at the beginning of a four-month probatory period ("probatio"). The recruit obtained the military status only after the oath of allegiance ("sacramentum") at the end of "probatio", meaning that from a legal point of view the "signaculum" was given to a subject who was no longer a civilian, but not yet in the military.
In more recent times, dog tags were provided to Chinese soldiers as early as the mid-19th century. During the Taiping revolt (1851–66), both the Imperialists (i.e.
Official source
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