What is a “Hurt Locker” anyway?

The title of Best Movie Award at the Oscars left me completely baffled. A quick internet search has revealed the following facts on the meaning of this phrase:

• If someone inflicts pain on someone else, they are said to be putting them in the ‘hurt locker’.
• It is military slang that is thought to have been used in Vietnam for the first time.
• In Iraq the military slang has survived and it is typically said that explosions could send you to the ‘hurt locker’.
• The term does not only refer to physical injury, but also to mental or emotional suffering.
• The common denominator is that the pain, of whatever kind, is caused deliberately by someone else.
• “Hurt locker’ was used as the title of a poem by Brian Turner in 2004 on his return from Iraq.
• The award-winning film’s writer was an embedded journalist with an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in Baghdad in 2004, which is where he picked up the phrase.
• In the world of the bomb disposal squads the full phrase that is usually used is “any mistake could put you in the hurt locker’.
• In the time in between the two wars mentioned above, the term was often used as sporting terminology for inflicting loss on your opponents.
• The word ‘hurt’ speaks for itself, but ‘locker’ is not only where soldiers or sportsmen keep their kit, it is also a place that could be difficult to get out of, such as a prison.

(Sources: cue-network.org; yahoo.com, visualthesaurus.com; cnn.com, bbc.com)

(Susan Erasmus, Health24.com)