does thye Army still usae the old piss cuter type hat?
If by that you mean the garrison or overseas hat, resembling that worn by your local soda jerk, the answer, I believe, is no.
Navy officers and chiefs still wear them with khakis or flight suits
USAF still has them too. The last time I saw a USA troop with one was about a year ago, but I don’t see troops very often anymore, so that year gap is more my fault than the Army’s
The Marines still wear them.
Right. In all of the armed services (except apparently the Army) there’s one or another category of personnel that still wears it as “everyday” headgear for their equivalent of Class A or Class B uniform. The Army started going to all-berets (even with battle cammo, when not in the field) during Shinseki’s term as COSA.
Every service for quite some time has had the “everyday” headgear of many of their people be something you can fold and put in a pocket or tuck under your belt or that can stay on your head w/o interfering with your work (utility covers, berets, garrison caps, sailor hats), rather than have to find a hatrack or keep on top of your desk (peaked caps).
Okay, I’ll be the dumb one and ask: how in the world did they get the nickname “piss cutter hats”?
We always called them c*nt caps. For obvious reasons. I have never heard them called piss cutter hats.
“Piss cutter” is what they called them way back when. My generation called them cunt caps. My father’s generation called the piss cutters.
I have heard it was from the ships with a pointed bow which were “sharp enough” to “cut through a stream of piss”. Possible references to dense fog as “piss” also. Exaggeration, of course, but the sharp fore and aft of this cover is reminiscent of a sharp bow.
If you’ve never owned one the name “piss cutter” isn’t obvious.
From the side, as seen on sombedy else’s head, the cap has a sharp vertical front and rear edge, like a ships’ bow, as Uncle Bill said. But I don’t think that has anything to do with the name.
Seen from the top, or as you’re handling it to put it on, the cap is a complicated piece of cloth origami that looks like female genitals, with two layered folds of cloth that spread apart to convert the cap from something flat to something round enough to fit on a head. And as they spread, the inner parts of the cap are revealed.
later, when you take it off and flatten it, the folds close, hiding the recess within. In the all-male world of the mid-20th century US military, the name piss-cutter makes a bunch of sense.
The current generation, having even earthier sensibilities than the soldiers before them, call them c*nt caps for the same obvious reason.
I’ve also heard these called “pussy cutters”.
Army soldiers still in BASIC training wear them. Only at graduation and during pass though. Any other time they’re in BDUs.
Everyone else wears those stupid berets. It’s all part of the Army’s recent changes to make everyone feel special. :rolleyes:
Everyone gets to wear BDUs at work, even though they have office jobs. Everyone gets a beret even though they did nothing to earn one. Everyone now wears a flag on their shoulder whether they are on a deployment or not.
Ummph. The “BDUs all the time thing” really irked me. Towards the end of my enlistment, the AF started to drop the old olive drab fatigues and make everybody who had been wearing them switch to BDUs. I was always like “So, what, the guys pulling maintenance need camouflage so you can’t see 'em rolling around under the trucks?” “What, all these AF guys who don’t go into the field and don’t go on maneuvers need to wear camouflage while mooching around the air base?”
We had the choice of wearing blues (short sleeved light blue shirts and dark blue slacks) or fatigues. I was primarily an office worker with occasional outside jobs. When they started the change over, I went to wearing blues all the time and changing to BDUs if I were going to do something where I might get dirty. Not that that was all that much better. At the time, we were supposed to have our BDUs dry cleaned - but I could machine wash and dry my blues.
The Army guys really had it bad. They had to have neatly pressed BDUs, but were forbidden to starch the damned things. Starch would show under UV light, and that is not a good thing if you go sneaking around after dark.
Fatigues were a good uniform for anything short of actually sneaking through the forest to attack the enemy. You could keep them pressed nice and neat and look good in the office, and you could just walk out and go do something where you would get dirty without worrying.
The piss cutter cap was incorporated into military costume by the French in World War One, as a simple alternative to the kepi at the same time the blue tunic and red trousers were replaced with all sky blue. When the American Expeditionary Force arrived and were discovering that their Montana-peak campaing hat (today known as the Smokey the Bear hat, and in WWI as the lemon squeeze hat by the New Zealanders who also wore it) was incompatible with helmets, the overseas cap came into use. The old campaign hats were recycled into felt hospital slippers and cut into beanies.
The old campaign hats had, exept for Marine enlisted, a cord aroung the brim, ending with “pinecones.” yellow for cavalry, blue for infantry, etc. A vestige of this feature was retained on officers’ overseas cap in the piping along the seams of the upper folds. You guys who wore them will remember that the oficers had metallic trim. Originally that was a fancy rope around his hatband.
For those (like me) that wondered what the hell you were talking about, here are some pics of Garrison (piss cutter) caps.
Mort, blame your woes on the geniuses at DoD procurement in the mid-1980s. They decided that EVERYONE in land-based forces would wear the exact same woodland BDU as working uniform, which may have made great economic sense – they probably figured they’d save money by having the Army and Marines use one single outfit for both combat and manual-labor, and stop making making green utilities. Thus leaving the other services stuck with BDUs. The Marines barely saved their hats on that one (and only regained their distinct combat fatigues last year). Of course, simultaneous with that the Army did adopt a good USAF uniform idea, the mix-and-match blues(greens) , again saving money by eliminating “summer” khakis (that’s where the Marines and Navy apparently drew the line)