The unfortunate death of Staff Sgt. Louis Cardin revealed three things to the world.

1) There were a lot more ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq than the Pentagon or the president let on.

2) U.S. troops aren’t just advising Iraq forces–they are actually doing some fighting themselves.

3) The U.S. military had set up a secret fire base in preparation for an assault on Mosul.

Obviously, not every military operation can be publicly discussed because of classified information and whatnot. That isn’t the issue here. The rub is that the Pentagon and White House keep using certain phrases to conceal their missteps and downplay American involvement in Iraq. And they are doing it again.

Fire Base Bell, the encampment that Cardin died protecting from the Islamic State, is now called Kara Soar Counter Fire Complex. Just as the existence of Fire Base Bell was never publicly announced, its rebranding wasn’t either.

The term ‘fire base’ refers to temporary camps used during the Vietnam War to provide artillery support for advancing infantry. By definition, they are usually used for offensive strikes, not defensive ones. The discovery of Fire Base Bell appeared to suggest that the U.S. military was preparing for a ground offensive.

Gen. Joseph Dunford denied this last week.

“From my perspective, this is no different than aviation fires we’ve been delivering,” Dunford said at a news conference at the Pentagon. “This happens to be surface fires, or artillery, but certainly no different conceptually from the fire support we’ve provided to the Iraqis all along.”

According to CNN, changing the fire base to a fire complex is supposed help clear up this confusion.

The change is to make clear the base is only conducting defensive missions, one defense official said.

A fire base is generally defined as a small military area where troops fire artillery in support of advancing troops. But defense officials have repeatedly told CNN the artillery guns at the base are firing both defensive shells against ISIS attacks and planning to fire in support of Iraqi forces conducting offensive operations.

We might be more convinced if we hadn’t already seen it before.

In the aftermath of Sgt. Joshua Wheeler’s death in October, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter avoided the use of politically charged phrases like ‘combat’ and ‘boots on the ground’ in favor of more tame ones like ‘advise-and-assist missions.’ Wheeler was the first American to die fighting ISIS, yet Carter couldn’t admit that Wheeler was in combat.

Now the Pentagon is pulling the same stunt by claiming Cardin–a Marine who was secretly deployed to mislead troop counts–died defending a camp that wasn’t supposed to be involved in any fighting.

If a third American is killed by the Islamic State, we wonder what they will come up with next.