Posted on 10/05/2006 12:20:43 PM PDT by 68skylark
West Point, N.Y. IT would be shallow to say that I fell in love with the soldier I married because of his uniform, but it would also be partly true. Its Cupids oldest trick: dress a man for war and love walks in.
Every girl whos had her head turned by a uniform has her favorite, and for me there is nothing quite like the command of camouflage. A fitted, heavily starched long jacket and bloused trousers in a dark green, black and brown woodland pattern over polished black boots, the Battle Dress Uniform, to me, is the American soldier.
But the B.D.U. is being phased out. Soldiers have been ordered to purchase two sets of the newer Army Combat Uniforms by next May, and soon, like the brown leather boots of the early cold war, the Vietnam-era pickle suit and the chocolate chip Desert Storm camo, the B.D.U. will be history. And I will miss it.
My husband and I are, in the eyes of many, an oddly matched Mr. and Mrs., an Army intelligence officer and a pop-culture-obsessed writer. To paraphrase an old recruiting slogan, ours is not just a marriage, its an adventure, a two-person cultural exchange program. Because of him, I can identify a Blackhawk, Apache or Chinook helicopter by the sound of the blades slicing the air overhead. Because of me, he exfoliates.
In the beginning, I favored the B.D.U. because it acutely highlighted the differences between us as individuals, but over time, it has also come to underscore the contrast in our roles.
Spouses dont experience firsthand the bombs-and-bullets Army we see only the ceremonial ribbons-and-medals Army, the workaday pack-and-move-every-few-years Army and my husbands B.D.U.s were my connection to the viscera of soldierdom. They were honest....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This thread is useless without pictures!
1st Sgt. Jamie Nakano, from the 10th Mountain Division, blends in with the mountainous terrain of Nuristan Province, Afghanistan, during a patrol. This photo appeared on www.army.mil.
by Spc. Eric Jungels
October 4, 2006
You are just terrible....
Nah.
"We" know a guy's favorite uniform is undress mess.
(That is, of course, when you're wearing the undress and he's making the mess.)
please note how you basically killed the thread with that last posting ... :)
LOL...ah well...there is ALWAYS too much of a good thing...:)
Pick on the Airforce.
Heh ... bicycles for PT.
It's all in good fun though, we're the brain dead grunts that charge machine guns.
"This one was for flying door gunner in the Space Shuttle..."
"And this one was for spotting hosemonsters."
Funny!
Never again. I still hold a grudge against the zoomies for not letting us eat in their chow hall at Talil air base in 2003 (among other things), but when I was at FOB Bernstein in 2005 our EOD guys were USAF. They were outstanding at their jobs and were a real asset to our mission.
From that point on I decided that I don't rag on anybody else who is running missions far from home.
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