The Glade 4.0

It's so that they don't wrinkle. Lots of people think merely folding clothes prevents wrinkles; all it does is move all the wrinkles to one spot (which to be fair makes it easier to iron) instead of preventing them, unless you do it right. Now I have a wife who is better at folding clothing than I ever was so my clothes look better, but back when we still wore BDUs I'd get them starched to the point that you had to peel them open when you first wore them just to prevent wrinkles.

As for who'd the boss, Taamar is exactly right, and that's exactly how I handle my 17-year-old. Smarting back means whatever consequence she would have had she gets anyhow, and she's already been told, when she turns 18 the rules (well, most of them) don't change if she expects to live at home without paying rent or otherwise contributing to upkeep and have us help with college. I rarely have a problem because I don't argue. What I say goes, and that's all there is to it. For example, if she feels sick and doesn't want to go to school, and I say "you're going", she goes without arguing (which doesn't come up much because she likes doing well in school and doesn't claim she's sick if she isn't. I only had to do this twice, once because she had standardized tests that day and once because mom wanted her gone to wrap Christmas presents). My wife, on the other hand, argues, puts "okay?" at the end of instructions, and whines when the kid doesn't listen. I try to explain why this doesn't work and she agrees but she can't seem to stop and the difference in attitude shows.

SG:

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I used to dip-starch my ex's DCUs to the point where you could serve drinks on them. The first thing he did before putting them on what crack then over his knee. I also remember ironing my fathers shirts as a child, and god help me if I ironed the panels before the yoke or got the sleeve creases wrong.

The best thing about the old "starch your BDUs until they stand up on their own" thing was that it's against the care instructions and once you've starched them you have to get all new ones if you deploy.

So stupid...it's a utility uniform. It's SUPPOSED to be wrinkled.

Never starched by BDU's. Ever. It was never expected, and as Timmit said, was a waste of a good uniform. Not to mention that it made them horribly uncomfortable.

Never wore BDU's, but I did have to force my foot through many a pair of fatigues.

Then I had to blouse my boots, which never made sense to me - iron the pants rigid then wrinkle them. I always cheated though - I bought the rubberband thingies that you hooked together and then bloused my britches with those.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I wore fatigues (pickle suits?) the first few years.

Only had to blouse the trousers when on some kind of detail (color guard, etc...). I used the little green stretchy things too.

101st Airborne, Air Assault SIR!

(they made you say that all the time, like people couldn't tell. Sheesh! It was Ft. Campbell and I have a screaming bird on my shoulder! What OTHER division would I be in?)

I had to blouse my boots and wear a blue beanie baby bonnet. At least I got this cool screaming eagle patch to wear! I just learned recently that wearing the color version instead of the OD one was something special.



I can look back on those days with ... no, not really. I didn't like the experience. Most of the guys were just back from VietNam and it wasn't pretty.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I lost the "I don't have to starch my BDUs as long as they look good" fight with every supervisor I ever had. Rather than get marked down on my performance report solely for that (because starchy creases in your uniform were more important than every other factor of your performance combined) I gave in and ruined about 20 sets of BDUs before the ABUs came out.

I figure it's only a couple more years until they start making us starch ABUs...

Ours came back from the quartermaster starched like that.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Everyone knows that, but you were expected to look sharp for... walking around in the motor pool during command maintenance. I didn't particularly like wearing them that way in Texas but you pretty much had to.

Thankfully the new uniforms are not to be starched.. one of the few things I like about them.

Taskiss: Sorry bud. Things haven't changed in the light/airborne/air assault world. Still a bunch of self-obsessed morons. My best friend in my unit was an enlisted guy in the 82nd in the Panama invasion. Rules for the sake of rules are still the watchword of Bragg, and one can only imagine, Campbell too.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There is a decent chance he jumped out of my airplane. I was a C-130 crew chief during the Panama party.

No, he was in the one unit that was already in Panama at Ft. Sherman, doing Jungle Warfare training, so they didn't get to jump. I don't recall if it was his whole battalion or just a company. He's still a tad bitter about that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Why the hell would anyone starch a BDU? Lord some of you had oddball superiors.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

That's active Army for you. In a lot of units people had "field BDUs" they took to the field and regular ones that got starched for when you were in the rear.

When units aren't training hard enough (and in the Carter years when Taskiss was in and the Clinton era when I was, especially in 4th ID which was the "digital division" test unit and 10th in order of deployability out of 10 divisions) commanders start finding bullshit to worry about when they don't have enough to keep them busy. It's usually fueld by some Command Sergeant Major who is equally bored. CSMs are the worst rank in the Army. NCOs spend their whole careers busting their ***, right up to being First Sergeants where they're busiest of all, then they get that Battalion or higher CSM slot with no actual duties other than "advise the commander on enlisted matters". They get bored and start finding trivialities to worry about.

Heck, even my deployment was like that. The battalion was essentially working as a collection of platoons doing different missions; there was no battalion fight for the commander to worry about, so he proceeded to make a pain in the *** of himself for the staff that was trying to coordinate all this. The CSM was worse. That guy did nothing but terrorize the enlisted men and annoy the officers the entire time. Most battalions, the staff is ready to kill each other by the time they come home just from personalities rubbing together. Not ours. The staff was united by hatred of the Commander and Sergeant Major. You know they're not good when the physician's assistant and the chaplain are more tactically competant than they are.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We painted rocks.

They were large rocks, football size or better in diameter, surrounding immaculate white chat parking lots outside the wooden billet type general purpose building used for everything. They had like a quarter inch of paint already on them, most of them white, but sometimes there were deeper layers of red, blue or yellow. We always painted with white, unless we were painting some sort of vehicle OD green.

Intellectually stimulatin', let me tell you. Oh, and the reason the white chat parking lots were immaculate was 'cause we policed them daily.

That, and we waxed bare concrete. Paste wax layer was 1/16th of an inch thick, and buffed by hand. Thicker than that and we'd strip it down to bare concrete and start over again.

Those were happy, crazy days! Made me want to stay in the military and make it my life's commitment. Not.

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In time, this too shall pass.

This made me imagine my father, gray beard and massive weight and all, in army fatigues, holding a gun, leading troops.

It was hilarious.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Our PA was, bizarrely, a major, and senior in grade to both the XO and the S3. Not only that but he'd had extensive active duty experience, including a combat jump into Grenada with 2nd Ranger Battalion as an enlisted medic. He was the most tactically competant man in the battalion. Our Chaplain had been an enlisted Marine for 10 years. We really lucked out with them.

Taskiss, it hasn't changed much although I don't think buffing floors and policing parking lots are the BS duties anymore. When I was at Hood, we used to get Red Cycle taskings where most of my soliders were tasked out all over post doing maintenance. The only people at formation for the platoon were me and my platoon sergeant. At one point I had to send most of the platoon to the field to eat chow. Some cooks were having an evaluation and chow-eaters were needed. At another point I got in an argument with my platoon sergeant because we had a tasking to mow the grass at a rifle range. Unfortunately, regular commercial gasoline that mowers use is not the fuel that Army vehicles use and couldn't be had except at the gas station... nor was money allocated to the batter yo pay for it. He thought I should pay for it out of pocket.

I informed him that, officer or not, I wasn't paying for the Army's maintenance. He told me it was always done that way. I told him "not anymore". He told me then it would cause problems because we couldn't expect any favors for our soldiers if we made a stink over it. I asked him if he was really telling me that someone was threatening to do something unethical in order to avoid inconvenienceing some colonel somewhere to sign a memo allocating us $10 for gasoline.

The gasoline mysteriously appeared the next day. I have a sneaking suspicion that more was going on to this day, and it was really always available.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."