Wow. That looks an awful lot like they’ve returned to the BDUs I wore in the early 90s?
Do you still have summer and winter weight? We had two of each; the fabric was different weight, and looked different close up, and one was more suitable for warm weather, the other for cold. It was up to each soldier what you wanted to wear on any day (unless your DS was feeling particularly dickish), but you couldn’t mix a summer top with winter bottoms, or the other way around.
If anyone cares, men are issued underwear, but women get a clothing allowance, and buy their own. Back then, the rule for us was no thongs, and underwear had to be white. Bras had to be white, brown, or some shade of brown-- they could technically be called beige, or whatever. The idea was to say they could be skin tones, without coming out and saying that, because someone was bound to ask if it had to match your skin tone. Which it didn’t. And they didn’t want you to have black bras, although the truth was that in basic, you had what you could buy at the PX, and after that, no one ever saw what was under your uniform.
I remember BDUs. OCP will be my third Army uniform. It is by far the best so far and I’m just so happy to be finished with ACU. What a joke that was! OCPs do not have the summer/winter weight versions. It’s just the one material.
In the Royal Navy, each different dress code has a specific number
No1 Formal Dress uniform - ceremonial
No2 This is a formal working dress uniform, stuff you might see for shore patrols - similar in style to the No1 dress but not as classy
No 4 General working dress - consist of pants and shirt. This has recently changed, the old No8 dress was found to be dangerous during the Falklands war, it was made from a polyester mix and not a good idea when dealing with fire, so it was modified to revert to the much older version of the same thing which was made of drill cotton, and now its been replaced with the aforementioned No4
This is the stuff you will find most RN staff wearing most of the time
Things have changed since my day, but it still looks to me as if you would have at least 6 different dress codes, with variations on a couple such as shorts.
For regular working dress you’d need at least 3 sets of it, but only one best No1, you’d likely have two or three sets of whites cause it need frequent washing
You might also have job specific dress codes, including boarding party, tropical whites, shorts may also be part of the code, usually denoted by an A on the dress code number, so Number 4a is working dress with shorts, you will also have things such as jumpers, specific raincoats, waterproofs and the like.
It does not give you much room in your locker to stow your civvy clothes
Officers will also have mess uniforms, these often have waistcoats, some might have sashes or cummerbunds.
I never did either, for a very long time. Then, a long time after I had disposed of the dungarees, peacoat, and other shipboard Navy gear, the regiment decided that a seabag layout was just the ticket, and that everyone E-6 and below would be required to have a “full seabag” that included uniforms that none of us had worn in 15 years (see comment above about Seabee attire). The few items that I still had would have fit my 125 pound boot camp self, but were laughable for my then 200 pound self. Not only did we have to lay them out, but they had to be stenciled with our names. :rolleyes:
I hit up all my friends for their old uniforms, found some adhesive name tags, and used them to cover up the friends’ names. The run up to the regiment inspection was brutal: squad inspections, platoon inspections, company inspections, battalion inspections, with everything laid out on the asphalt using a tape measure for alignment. What a complete clusterfuck and waste of time.
After my first platoon inspection, I went to the company Chief and told him that as a platoon commander, I refused to lay out my shit a second time, and that I would take a fucking court martial before I did it again. Surprisingly, he agreed. Apparently, somebody higher up also thought it was a stupid idea and it never happened again after the regimental inspection, which had us standing out there for some five hours.
Somewhere in Colonel John George’s Shots Fired In Anger is a photo of this piece of garrison tedium being performed in Burma, almost within sight of the enemy. “Our thoughts on this … were better imagined than described”.
Yes. Due to complicated legal reasons, the Army went with an internally developed pattern, Scorpion W2 (OCP), instead of paying to license the use of Multicam, a commercially protected pattern owned by Crye Precision. The patterns are almost identical to everyone except the Army’s lawyers. Its very hard to tell the difference, even if you know what to look for. The biggest difference is the lack of vertical camo designs in the OCP. Here is a picture of Multicam on top of (in the middle) of OCP. Notice the how the Multicam has a those vertical splotches that are absent in the OCP. That’s enough to avoid licensing fees apparently.
It was very similar to the ERDL Woodland camo used by some units in Vietnam, except it had larger splotches and the borders were made more irregular. The colors and pattern were pretty much the same, other than that.
When I was on sea duty - boat or skimmer - I never wore my peacoat. If I needed something heavier than a utility jacket, I wore the foul weather jacket issued by the command. One of the reasons I said I couldn’t have passed a seabag inspection was that I didn’t replace the RM3 crow on the peacoat until a couple years after I made RM1.
For your inspection did you have to lay out your uniforms in a specified manner? When I was in fifth grade (mid '60s) my brother gave me his '50s Bluejackets Manual, which included precise directions for rolling everything for routine stowage, and the prescribed layout for inspections - something like in this WWII photo.
As I understood it, the annual uniform allowance (paid at the end of your anniversary month) was based on the number of each item you were supposed to have, how long it was supposed to last, and what it would cost to replace it. For instance, if a shirt cost $10 and was expected to last five years, and you were required to have four of them, then ($10 x 4 / 5 +) $8.00 was added to the clothing allowance. According to this chart, the current boot camp clothing issue is valued at at $1797.42 for men, and the standard clothing allowance is $427.50 for men.
In my time we were issued plain green fatigues in boot camp and got tropical weave rip-stops when we got off the plane in Nam. I got some tiger stripes on the local economy out of my own pocket.
