My husband has lost a lot of weight lately and his uniforms aren’t fitting properly so we were talking about buying new ones this morning. Paying for uniforms out of the family budget was never a big deal to me before, plenty of people purchase their own work clothing in the medical fields and many other areas of our work force. Being in the Army was my husband’s job too…….no big deal. Military Army Officers purchase all of their own uniforms unless they are going to Iraq, then they are issued uniforms that they return when they return. Doesn’t seem like the Army is a “job” though anymore with this war in play…….it feels like a sentence, it feels like a millstone around the family neck. Being in the Army was already a job that my husband just couldn’t up and quit when and if he felt like it, but I had been able to adapt to that because we had four or six year commitments and you could be any place in the middle of those when you may realize that you want to do something else and then you just plan accordingly, but we have stop/loss now so those four or six year commitments don’t mean shit anymore either. They own my spouse and in a way my family too and now I have to pay so that my spouse is properly outfitted for their owning of him?!?! Steam is pouring out of my ears!
BDUs are about $70.00 for the top and bottom and you have winter BDUs and summer BDUs, a soldier is supposed to have a total of four sets of BDUs. Officers buy their own and enlisted get $125.00 a year for uniforms. So here goes another shade of steam because $70.00 x 4 = $280.00, so grunts buy a lot of their own uniforms in this Army too and get paid SHIT in the process. If you change units, and that can happen at anytime, that comes with different patches and if you are promoted you have to have all of your uniform insignia for your rank changed and it all has to be sewn on very precisely. I sew well so frequently I do my husbands but if you aren’t so lucky it will cost you $5.00 per patch or insignia so expect to spend about $20.00 to $30.00 per uniform and upgrades can vary. You have to buy all of the patches and insignia also and that can vary from $2.00 to $10.00 per depending on what it is. A baby grunt can probably get away with having to spend about $10.00 per uniform purchasing all that stuff, but if you have been anyplace in this Army and done anything of merit you had better bring your Visa card because I don’t know if they take American Express.
Now can we talk Iraq (I call it Icrack lately because everytime I think about it I crack!)? A soldier gets issued 2 BDUs and one desert cap in desert camo to go to Icrack, not sure about boots but in 2003 it was one pair and they were all sized very small and some soldiers didn’t figure that out until they were wearing them daily and no place to trade them in at. It may be possible to buy extra uniform and boots now, in 2003 it was not because they didn’t have enough as it was. The summer temp in Icrack can hit 110 degrees and my husband had to spend a fair amount of time in an aircraft sitting on the tarmac waiting for the “call” and the sun bouncing off of the pavement could reach a frying 130 degrees, so may I assume that an M.P. standing on the street is experiencing something much the same and going inside for the worst of the heat is not one of his or her options. Two sets of clothing that you melt in and people shooting at you……it just sounds so fucking swell to me I can’t contain myself. While you dodge bullets remember to do your laundry! They do have a newly designed uniform over there now. In 2003 the uniforms only held up for 6 months, my husband said that guys had to walk around sometimes with their crotches ripped out and pockets hanging off and hopefully these uniforms stand up a little better now.
One last thing before I go take an Extra Strength Excedrin, and that is the all new wool beret that our Army wears now. The old camo cap wasn’t perfect. It was made by three different suppliers too and that meant three different “sizings” and soldiers simply got good at asking where this cap was from and knowing which size to get. The new beret is made in the U.S. and Canada and Sri Lanka and with those different suppliers comes three different “sizings” again, but an extra challenge is thrown in because the damn thing isn’t the right size when you get it no matter where you get it from. It has to be boiled and shrunk down and hopefully you will come up with the sized beret that you needed. To play beret roulette that will cost you $7.00 per beret or you can special order a $10.00 beret that is consistently sized and boils better. The beret soaks up water when rained on and stinks…….it is a much better choice than the old cap and I really want to thank the wacko general at the Pentagon that had to have berets, cuz that is where the new beret comes from everybody. I don’t know his name, but he couldn’t have his Army in anything less. They don’t have enough clothing or fucking armor but by God they have berets! It wasn’t enough that special forces already wore them. At first my husband would come home and say, “the military french chef is here!” I told him that now he looked like the military regime of every other dictator on the globe and that didn’t go over very well. Gotta go, my beret is boiling over.
