Gear: Chapter 7

All right, all of you, listen up. Today we are on the eve of something grand, something intense, a day of reckoning. This is our moment. This is the very reason we have trained you so hard. Now is the time we will not be late for our appointment with destiny. On my command, forward, march. Chapter 7. Victoria Chamberlain left the army. I ultimately left because it just was a good time for me, age-wise, to have enough time to try to do something else. She's a podcast producer now, actually. That's how we met. But even now, in her civilian life, Victoria still wears some of her military clothes. Only certain ones. And they're called silkies. Silkies are these lightweight boxer shorts you can wear as underwear. I know everybody wears those. As much as soldiers and veterans, including Victoria, don't like to wear army clothes or army-looking clothes out in the world, Victoria says that she and a lot of veterans do wear their silkies because, one, they're really comfy, and two, they're subtle. Civilians might not even recognize them as military. Same goes for this thermal that Victoria was allowed to keep. It looks exactly like waffle tops she's seen at REI. I had to do a double take because I thought it was the legit tan waffle top that I was issued. And they look the same, and they're like $180. These are the military clothes Victoria continues to wear in civilian life because these are some of the only military clothes she was allowed to keep. Anything that touches your skin, you get to keep. Everything else, soldiers have to give back when they leave the Army. From the moment Victoria got her uniform, she was always told, one day, you're going to have to return all this. When you get to basic training and you're issued that initial dump of stuff and you get the windbreaker, it's a Gore-Tex. They tell you, like, never lose this. They're like, you don't want to know what happens if you lose this Gore-Tex. And like, they're not kidding. 20 years from now, it's going to stop you from getting out of the army when you need to. Really? Like, you can't leave the army if you don't give your gear back? If you are missing something that you have to return, you get a statement of charges from your commander, and you, like, can't leave until you've settled it. I know people who were, like, missing stuff, and it was, like, hundreds of dollars. Victoria was very diligent and kept track of all her stuff. Her gear return was relatively seamless. As was her return to civilian life. That was relatively smooth as well. Victoria had enlisted when she was in her late 20s. Her civilian identity was already pretty well formed. She already had a good idea of who she was before she put on the Army uniform, and so she knew who she was after she took it off. But not all soldiers feel that way. Did you enter when you were 18? How old were you? I was 17 when I signed an ROTC contract at the University of Mississippi, And my dad had to fax his agreement that I could join. This is Stacey Baer. You can go die for your country at 17. You can't smoke or vote until you're 18 and you can't drink until you're 21. Stacey served in Bosnia in 2003. Then he did landmine clearance for a couple of years. Then he served in Iraq. Man, I just loved being a soldier. And that's the thing, Avery. Like, I fucking loved being. I loved being a soldier. I loved putting on a uniform every day. Just incredible people that I am so thankful that I got to meet and work with and learn from. I loved the people I got to work with. I loved the mission. I loved the discipline. I loved that we were all trying to be something bigger together than we ever could be individually. I loved it. Stacey really bonded with the people he deployed with in Iraq. We all told the Army, like, we want to stay for another six months because the group we're with is here for another six months. We would like to stay with them. And the Army was like, yeah, but you've got to go back, turn your gear in, get new gear, and then be open to wherever we need you because we have somebody else slotted in. Because that's the thing. The military is just looking at numbers and big shapes versus like the individual relationships. I hated how we were being used at the end of the day. I thought you wanted to stay. I tried. I tried really hard to stay twice, but I couldn't do the things that the military wanted me to do. And so in 2007, at the age of 29, Stacey found himself back in the U.S., turning in his gear. Although actually, Stacey was allowed to keep a lot of his gear. Because it's damaged and it can't be reused, right? Stacey saw a lot of action. A lot of the stuff was damaged and unusable. Like all my uniforms, all my boots. But Stacey did not want to keep his gear. Not any of it. Like, I just chucked it. He just threw it all away in a dumpster behind a liquor store. I was so over it. I just needed a clear break. But why was that line in the sand between your two identities tied up with the clothes? I just needed it out. I needed to clear the space. And I'm a little regretful of it now. I think there might have been a poncho liner in there. But at the time, Stacy needed to wipe it away so that he could enter civilian life, enter his new role as a grad student, studying city planning and urban design. The faculty and students at that school took the brunt of my coming home and just wonderful people. I wish every veteran could have such a wonderful welcoming home as I got from Penn Design. And I think as a veteran coming home with a lot of anger and drug issues, I can't say enough good things about my classmates who really accepted this like large, angry, coked out vet. Is it cliche if I'm like, you are self-medicating with all your cocaine? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, cliches are cliches for a reason, right? I mean, there's oftentimes a lot of truth to them. I mean, there were some very traumatic things that happened while I was in Iraq. And I don't know if it was my unwillingness or lack of capacity to process those at the time. I think it was a feeling of deep unworthiness to accept the love that was on offer and a deep desire to be different and individual. Because when people say thank you for your service, they don't really know what you did, but it's a reflexive, like, I know I should be grateful for what you did. One of my friends called it pet a vet, right? Like, well, I bought a veteran a beer so I can absolve myself of even thinking about their everyday horrors or why we went to war. And I was like, well, if you want to thank me for my service, maybe take a minute to get to know my experience, maybe get to take a minute to get to know my experience with the Iraqi people. And it's one of those things where as an angry young veteran, if I had time with somebody, I'd be like, well, what of my service are you thanking me for? And yeah, I mean, I was also, you know, coked out of my head and drinking a tremendous amount of booze every day. So I wasn't necessarily one for a lot of great conversations at the time. I also used to, when people were like, I can't imagine what you did. I wanted to be like, try fucking harder. But again, I was really angry if you're picking up on that. Stacey started choosing to sleep outside, sometimes in a sleeping bag, sometimes just on the street. You know, it just felt more comfortable. Why? It's a hard thing to explain, but it just felt easier. It felt safer than being in a building. It felt like I was more in control of my situation. Wait, because it's like... I'm not saying it's a logical decision. You drank a lot, you done a lot of drugs, and I was very suicidal. I mean, I had so much love and kindness and so many people wanting me to do well. Why was I so angry? Why was I suicidal when I had all this love and kindness around me? And Stacey wasn't alone in this feeling. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, veterans are more likely to report suicidal ideation than civilians, particularly in that period when they transition back to the civilian world. The majority of first suicide attempts, 57% of them, occur after veterans have been separated from service. Veterans are most vulnerable in their first three months of adjustment. I know I hurt people during that time frame and I'm deeply regretful. There's this gaping rift between the United States military and United States civilians. Soldiers feel alienated from quote-unquote regular life. Civilians feel alienated from war and from the people fighting it. But this is a tear that has to be sutured in a real and pragmatic way because we are inextricable. As you've heard, in the United States, the outdoor industry helped shape the mindset and look of the military and vice versa. Our fates are interwoven. And so rather than ignore the military or pretend I have nothing to do with it, I'm realizing that instead, I should ask more from it. After the break. Who discovered Diane Keaton and put her in Annie Hall? Who found Dustin Hoffman and made sure he played Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy? Who saw Jason Schwartzman and made sure Wes Anderson knew about him for Rushmore? Casting directors, that's who. When the 98th Oscar Ceremony airs on March 15th, the first ever Academy Award for Achievement in Casting will be given in nearly 100 years of Academy history. Five films laden with stars and fascinating new discoveries are nominated. One battle after another, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, The Secret Agent, and Sinners. The Kitchen Sisters take us behind the scenes and into the lives and work of this first ever batch of nominees and into the mysterious and fascinating world of film casting. Fun fact, along with being a Kitchen Sister, Davia was a casting director for over a decade. The Kitchen Sisters present Everyone's a Casting Director, the first ever Academy Award for Achievement in Casting in the 98-year history of the Academy Awards, with host, four-time Academy Award winner, Frances McDormand. At kitchensisters.org or wherever you get your podcasts, don't miss it. When outdoor companies talk about how healthy and beneficial the outdoors can be, they're implying that these activities are done in the right way. The Teddy Roosevelt way. The way where you're supposed to gear up and get in a car and leave the city. Go out into the country. Go do all this stuff in the right place. You're not supposed to do what Stacey did. You're not supposed to fall asleep on the street. And the sad irony wasn't lost on me that on my way to Functional Fabric Fair, on my way to so many corporate headquarters all across the Pacific Northwest, as I walked to all these places that espoused the value of getting outside, I walked by so many people who actually do spend all of their time outside, sleeping in sleeping bags and tents. And unlike Stacey, not necessarily by choice. I make a show actually about fashion. A fashion dropout of Seattle Central. No way! I should have guessed that Leah was a fashion school dropout. She dressed the part. And I repurposed jewelry. She was wearing keys as necklaces and a hoop earring as a bracelet. I asked my friend last night, do you have the other hoop? She's like, lost it. So they become my bangles. Leah dropped out of the pattern-making program at Seattle Central because she already got a job at Nordstrom Corporate. I got actually an assistant pattern-maker position at Nordstrom's. Leah left that job at Nordstrom Corporate to become a paralegal. And now at 47, she is, in her words, unhoused. I've heard unhoused. I guess it's cool because it's one of those PC words. Like, if I was good at knowing all of them and, like, I like learning about them. Leah was living in a fairly typical tent encampment in Burian, a city a bit south of Seattle. There are easily 100 people living in this small, fenced-in area. Some tent brands I recognized, but most names were obscured by the blue tarps which were draped across the top of the tents. The rain devastates us. As high-tech as a tent might be, it's still not a house. It's not meant to withstand Seattle rain 24-7. A lot of people I hear from a crisis, that something happened in their life, a change, a death. Like, they lose somebody or something changes in their life and they don't overcome it. and whether they start using in their old life and that makes things fall apart or they're out here and trying to adapt and they start using. For me, that's what happened. My son died, my teenage son died, and then my husband died a year after that. And I was just newly on a medical leave for my job, so I was like, for the first time in life, not working. Not a mom, not a wife. You know, and each person is, we only have things in common with not having a house, but what we have in common is that something happened that we weren able to overcome So and you come out here it quiet people are in bed we just like washing their face and getting up and just regular people And yet what Leah doing is technically illegal The city council in Burian passed an anti-camping ordinance. So Leah is packed into this small, sanctioned space, out of view of downtown, forced to share port-a-johns with a lot of people who she'd prefer not to share port-a-johns with. We're only here because they told us that this is where we should go and we won't arrest you. Burien is following the lead of cities like Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Newark, L.A., and well over 160 other American cities who have passed these ordinances that are called anti-camping laws that are a direct response to record highs in urban homelessness. To give you an idea of how bad the situation is, on a single night in January of 2024, well over 700,000 Americans were unhoused. And the fastest growing group of unhoused Americans are older adults. But still, in the United States, even though we're told that it's healthy to go outside, that sleeping under the stars does a body good, if you live in over 160 American cities, you legally cannot do it where you live. This partition between society and nature is the dark conclusion of the Teddy Roosevelt separation of the outdoors. There's just something about camping where you're not supposed to that drives people nuts. Even during Occupy Wall Street and the Columbia University encampments where protesters were sleeping in tents and sleeping bags, this freaked people out. You're only supposed to camp in the right places. Not that Leah would like to sleep in a tent. She would rather have a roof. But for lack of a comprehensive social safety net, Leah and so many other people can only rely on their gear. I have a backpack that's a body size and has everything I own in it. And we put that somewhere and hide to keep it safe. But a lot of folks are just like backpack, bag and tent and sleeping bag. Granted, there are lots of different reasons why people end up without a place to sleep. But in the case of Leah, I cannot help but see similarities with Stacey's story. Because Leah suffered a series of traumatic losses and is self-medicating. And Leah doesn't have a lot of resources. She spends a good part of her days figuring out how to eat and where to sleep. But Leah would have a very, very different experience of homelessness if Leah were a veteran. A lot of vets are homeless because of their experiences in conflict, and we owe them the service of getting them back on their feet. Jasper Craven, who writes about veterans issues and the VA, which stands for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Veteran homelessness used to be a major, major American problem. In the late 80s, nearly half of all homeless American men were veterans. Because Vietnam veterans were suffering from high rates of PTSD and addiction without institutional support or access to affordable housing or mental health institutions. And the image of Vietnam veterans living on the street became emblematic of the homelessness epidemic in the United States. It was this great American shame that continued for decades. well into the late aughts. But then during the Obama administration, they surged a lot of money into communities, created a lot of interesting partnerships between the feds and local housing authorities and nonprofits. In 2010, there became a coordinated federal effort to truly try to end the problem of veteran homelessness. The Obama administration did not want a repeat of the Vietnam veteran story. Also, cities like Denver and Toronto had tried housing-first models where someone gets housing before they are quote-unquote stable, and that was shown to work. So veteran homelessness was this problem that Democrats and Republicans could all agree they wanted to solve and that the Obama administration felt they could deliver on. There's this program called HUD-VASH, which is Housing and Urban Development and VA coordinating to understand stock and need and care and get people in. HUD-VASH is a way of subsidizing rent for veterans and getting them case managers. Individual veterans were tracked by name. There were street outreach teams. This program was run like an emergency response, not a charity. They also benefit from the fact that landlords are more likely, it seems, to accept a housing voucher from a vet. Veteran homelessness has gone down precipitously. When the program first started in 2010, veterans accounted for 11.5% of homeless adults. By 2024, that was cut in half. It was 5%. It's sort of amazing. It's the one piece of moderately good news as homelessness rises across all other populations, including families, individuals, children, disabled, and elders. Rates of homelessness is rising for everyone except, it seems, for veterans. The VA has done an incredible job in eradicating veteran homelessness in many major American cities. Homelessness can feel so tragic and unsolvable and complex. And I feel so helpless when I see it all around me. How could we live in a society that is this rich and yet surrounded by this much poverty? And yet, here's a case study. For a subset of people, the United States government has kind of figured it out. The VA has shown that it can be done and that the government can do it. It's investing. It's putting people on a health care and housing path. It's making sure that they're being housed close to medical care. It's spending a lot of money. The formula for ending homelessness is at the VA for everybody. But veteran homelessness was solvable because of a bureaucratic advantage. While unhoused civilians have to navigate their own way through a fractured maze of nonprofits, federal Medicaid, state mental health agencies and local city shelters, all while finding somewhere to take a shower. Veterans have the VA, which is a single, powerful federal agency with one database and one set of eligibility rules. When you leave the military, you have your DOD veteran card and you are organized in a giant system. Season consultant, military costume historian Charles McFarlane. My joke is like the only way we're going to get universal health care in this country is we draft everybody and then discharge them and then we all get VA. The VA is this big centralized system that could solve a lot of problems that plague American civilian life, like paying for college and health care and affording a home and getting on food stamps. These things are incredibly hard for individual civilians to manage and work through these very complicated systems. And I'm not saying that the military system is not complicated. It certainly is. But when you look at what's on offer, the military is our only really like socialist, socialist government that we have in the United States that operates outside of the civilian world. Some of what is on offer is through the VA for veterans. Different offerings are through the DOD for active duty soldiers. But all of it is part of what some academics call the military welfare state. Everything from child care to marriage counseling to base housing, all of this stuff is covered. They have created a system that actually works. Are these systems perfect? No. No way. They're super flawed. The VA is chronically underfunded and a lot of soldier services have been contracted out to private sector businesses. I know a lot of people who are in the military, used to be in the military, and they all complain about the VA or they complain about their housing, like all these things, right? Which is normal. It's the same way people in the UK like to complain about their national health service. I'm not saying they're just crabby complainers, but like at the end of the day, it's like these things are being taken care of for you in a way that no other American has access to. This is part of the military-civilian divide. We functionally live under different governments. But I really don't think we have to. I think things can change in a way that would allow everyone to feel as secure and as frustrated with their health insurance as people who are in the military. Rights have been extended before. Just think all the way back to chapter one of this series, when historian Kristen L. Hoganson was telling us about how voting back in the 1800s was considered a privilege reserved for soldiers and veterans. The valorization of force is often used as a justification for keeping women out of politics because voting rests on physical force. It rests on guns. It rests on the capacity to kill. Which seems wild now, but how much weirder is it that health care and housing is contingent on fighting? And yes, some veterans really hold on to those benefits and they don't want them expanded. Jasper Craven again. One thing that I've really been thinking about a lot recently is this whole idea of the military-civilian divide. And it's sometimes described as a crisis that civilians aren't connected to the military in the way they should be. They don't know people who served. But I think, frankly, the larger problem is that the military injects its people with all of these big, lofty ideas and self-importance that many in the military have complete contempt for civilians. And they think that they are doing so much to protect these cowards out in the civilian world because they feel that they're somehow superior to civilians, which is a toxic belief. Many others don't. This is something I've heard from a lot of soldiers, this resentment towards the lazy, narcissistic American civilian who is shopping, taking selfies, eating snacks, oblivious and unaware of the difference between Sunni and Shia. Because most people didn't understand what it is we were doing. I would remember naming battles or naming situations thinking it was national news back home. And people were like, what? Stacey Bear again. Well, I think that's where that thank you for your service, like and me being upset about it. That is my contempt, right? Like, I'm upset that you haven't taken the time to understand what I've gone through and why have I gone to war. Do the work, yeah. This is not a uniquely modern problem. It's always been a little hard to get regular civilians engaged in war. Who benefits from any war? The reason that only 3% of the American population or whatever cared about the Revolutionary War is because most people were just trying to get through there every day. And that's me. I am one of those civilians who wakes up preoccupied every morning by my to-do list and my little life. I mean, I'm trying not to be too oblivious. I pay my taxes. I try to keep up with current events. But looking forward. Okay, humor me. I don't quite understand what sacrifices the members of the armed forces are making for me. I don't mean to sound disrespectful. I understand that members of the armed forces have given up a lot of their autonomy. They are making personal sacrifices. They're living very hard lives. They are doing lots of drills and they are getting really, really prepared. But like, prepared for what? You'll have missiles flying way behind enemy lines. You'll have cyber attacks on American cities. This is Shashank Joshi, defense editor at The Economist. So there's a kind of quality of total war that we have only last seen in the West in the 1940s that is very, very distinctive from the contained wars that took place far away in the 2000s. And it's like, what? How did that happen? Shashank is saying we're suddenly threatened with like World War II style total warfare. And it makes no sense this is on the table, because for my whole lifetime, the United States has been able to ward this off with the threat of our big scary weapons. Nuclear deterrence seems to have been able to keep this kind of warfare at bay. Deterrence is working. Deterrence works. And you can't prove that it works because you can't prove a negative. And there's a great scene in The Simpsons where Lisa has a magical rock. I think she's trying to persuade Homer or something. She says, I've got this magical rock. I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away Oh how does it work It doesn work It just a stupid Uh But I don see any tigers around here do you He sort of pauses for a minute and then says Lisa, I want to buy your rock. I want to buy your rock. It's a good encapsulation of deterrence. You can't prove that it's working. But by and large, I think that these military capabilities are important. But if we can't prove that these rocks keep tigers away, and no one wants to actually use the rocks, Couldn't we all just get rid of the rocks? I think that you can always imagine a world beyond it, but you also have to imagine the pathway from here to that world and ask, what does that pathway look like and how do we get there? This world of conventional disarmament is, we are so much further away from it today than we were in the 1990s. We envisioned that world in Europe. We went for it. Europe pared down most of its militaries and disarmed. That's why the Netherlands, to take one example, got rid of all its tanks. It got rid of every single one of its tanks. The whole promise of nuclear deterrence was that wars would never be the same. Peer-to-peer ground combat was going to become a relic of the past. And then the war in Ukraine was like, nope, wars can still look a lot like they used to. Eventually, the Netherlands had to lease tanks from Germany. What happened? The Russians continued to arm. They didn't give up any of their weapons. And Europe was basically caught short. And as many European countries are starting to rearm, the United States is no longer offering them as much military protection. It leaves allies profoundly vulnerable because we are so greatly dependent on American military, particularly in Europe, but also in Asia. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. has been pulling back defense for allies, with one tremendous exception being Israel, even while multiple international agencies declare Israel's actions in Gaza to be genocide. But everywhere else, the U.S. is taking military protection away just when Europe is feeling the most vulnerable and unprotected. So on the one hand, you know, yes, this is a story of European fecklessness. Why should America be devoting these huge resources to the protection of a wealthy continent that has lots of people, lots of money, and in theory, lots of weapons should it choose to build them? However, translating money and resources into capability doesn't happen overnight. And my gut feeling is it would take Europe 10 years to be truly capable of defending itself if America were to pull out tomorrow. And Shashank warned me this like global rearmament thing isn't just some abstract policy. This might impact me more than I think. If the U.S. indeed relinquishes its role as a world police, the average American will be affected too. Like countries don't give Americans special privileges because they like our movies. American hegemony for the last 80 years has not just been some generous favor to the world. It's been a package deal in which allies have often, if not always, shown deference to American leadership on a range of issues. I, as an American, have lived in a world where I can assume everybody cares about my politics. Everybody speaks my birth language. I can travel, for the most part, where I'd like to. The rest of the world has lived in this world for 80 years. We've lived in a world where if you travel to the wrong jurisdiction, American secondary sanctions, American extradition, American political reach can get you. That's unnoticed in America because it's just like gravity. I've reaped the tremendous rewards of this American hegemony, which have come in part from our expansive military enterprise. I can pretend I have nothing to do with America's global military dominance and that I don't care about it, but I benefit from it. It's all around you. It's the default state. If you flip that and ask, what about a world in which it's China that calls the shots? I think that the world looks a lot less comfortable. You get your way less often. I think it's a world in which you have less freedom of maneuver. Whether or not the U.S. military goes fully isolationist in the coming years, the truth is the American military already has been scaling down. We live in a society that is pretty demilitarized by the standards of the last 80 years. Even though it super doesn't feel like it to me, American military spending has gone down significantly. In the United States today, you spend about three and a half percent of GDP on defense, right? Right. At the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you spent nearly five percent. This is not ancient history. This is 2010. And go back before that point, in the 80s, you were spending upwards of 6%. In the 60s, at the height of Vietnam, you were spending upwards of 9%. Go back to Korea, it's like 13, 14%. I repeat, American society is relatively demilitarized compared to the Cold War. War, generally, has less of a presence in American life. Sure, our government continues to carry out pointed killings and raids and insisting we're not at war. And we remain in this twilight between war and peace. But there's this very, very, very strong desire that if we are going to actually get entangled in a true ground conflict again, it should be for a very, very good reason. I think that there is a widespread view that waging the global war on terror compromised our ability to prepare for more serious and less optional campaigns for which America is now unprepared because it spent 20 years in the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan. You have a generation of Iraq and Afghan war veterans who feel that ultimately it was all for nothing. I don't know. Right. I mean, the strategy of the war changed three times while I was there. Stacey Baer again. When I got to Iraq, we were still fighting weapons of mass destruction. Turned out not to be there. Then we were fighting the global war on terror. We ended up creating financial resources to train more terrorists. And then we were fighting for democracy. Very, very different than the democracy that we were protecting back home. And that's what I mean when I say, what do you mean? thank you for your service, because most people didn't. And I don't blame them anymore, but didn't understand what it is we were doing. And I wonder if perhaps this helped contribute to the deepening military-civilian divide, that in wars that lacked purpose or where the purpose was shifting all the time and it was hard to keep track of what was happening, civilians felt more distant from the fight, and soldiers turned inwards and felt bonded to one another, like a closed ranks fraternity. Do I think my service was worth it in Iraq? Absolutely. And I'm very proud of my team and what we did. I did my best to make sure that as many Americans got home as possible and that as many Iraqis got home. And so now, in an attempt to heal all of this, The army has been trying to say, look, let's move on. And now soldiers can trust that we will only ask them to fight for really good reasons and citizens can look upon their army with pride and confidence. And the way the army has been trying to relay this message has been with a massive fashion makeover, which I will tell you about after the break. I just want to read what it says. To our customers, wearing the uniform of the United States Armed Forces is an honor and a privilege. The exchange takes great pride in being the only approved source for you to purchase your military uniforms. When Marine Reservist Alex Dragone took me to the exchange, which was the store on the military base where I bought my Army pants, there, in the uniform section, was a big display about the new Army service uniforms. A service uniform is when you're presenting yourself as a professional and it's supposed to be like, yep, I'm here on business. The service uniforms are different from the combat uniforms. The Army combat uniforms are the ones that are camouflage. Those are for everyday wear. Those are what you actually wear to fight. The service uniforms are the nicer business suits for attending weddings or funerals or parades or fancy meetings, like everyone at the AUSA conference was wearing their service uniform. But the Marines who testify on Capitol Hill will wear their service uniforms. So I think this is what the Army's got. I mean, Alex doesn't know. He's a Marine. He has his own service uniform. Every branch of the military does. And for the Army, their service uniform used to be blue. It was this blue suit with gold buttons and gold-rimmed epaulets. It sort of made soldiers look like very decorated airline pilots. But then, in 2018, a new service uniform design was introduced. And it was slowly rolled out in 2020. Yeah, it says like all new Army green service uniform coming soon. And it looks like, and I say this with so much love, cosplay. Like it looks like they're in a movie. This is like a retro. This is like, this was brought back from the Second World War. It looks exactly like the jacket that General Littlejohn designed. It's a version of the ETO jacket or the Ike jacket. It's kind of wild. But it's not like this is a triumph of General Littlejohn. He would be turning in his grave knowing that his beloved design is not being used for combat. And also, in addition to the Ike jacket, soldiers can choose a cut that looks more like a four-pocket tunic. But both styles are dark green, slim cut suits that make everyone in the Army look like General Eisenhower or General MacArthur or General Littlejohn. Now all Army soldiers walk around looking like officers from the 1940s. And even though the official name of this service uniform is the Green Army Service Uniform, you'll hear it called the Pinks and Greens. Why are these called pinks and greens? They're just like sepia-toned. They're more just like green and tan, green and khaki. I don't see any real pink on there. They're called pink, but it's like a khaki with a pinkish hue to them because of the way they're dyed. Our civilian layperson expert Joshua Kerner says that in World War II, officers wore khaki-ish pants. To make sure that, let me say, you wore out your trousers quickly than your jacket and you couldn't get trousers that matched perfectly with your jacket. so it would be an intentional enough mismatch. As opposed to a traditional suit where the color match is supposed to be perfect. So the pinks and greens are truly supposed to be a reboot of a design from World War II. My team didn't really design that uniform. Annette LaFleur, the clothing designer for the military. It really came from an existing design from the past. Annette and her team actually created a new updated design for the Army Service uniform. but in the end, Army leadership just went with the old pinks and greens. We've helped with improving the fit and some different characteristics of it, and then it was kind of modernized a bit. Obviously, they are a throwback to World War II uniforms, but they are also so incredibly bad. Costume historian Charles McFarlane again. They look like shit. Like, they are absolutely atrocious looking. But, ah, the military, as ever, is a reflection of society here. If you walk down the street and you ask anybody what their suit size is, I think very few would know what their size is. We don't wear these things. We civilians are also really bad at wearing suits now. The military, they're just like us. How many companies are making suits in the United States today? Like one or two. And as a result, these are being made by non-suiting manufacturers in the United States to comply with the Berry Amendment, which is great. And they fit like trash bags. And civilians and soldiers alike were all starting to dress a bit too casually for work. Soldiers were just starting to wear their camouflage fatigues all the time, like they were dressing for combat to file paperwork. People just want to go to the office wearing their comfy, casual combat uniform instead of wearing a suit and tie. And Charles thinks part of the change of the Pinks and Greens was to get the army back into a suit and tie again. It's putting the army back into fancier, more ornamental dress again. Trying to reposture the military towards more of a peacetime look. Which I get, but that didn't mean they needed to dress like World War II officers. Well why are we making this style choice Why are we making a style choice at a particular time Former naval officer Andrea Goldstein When the pinks and greens came about it was also as the war in Afghanistan was driving down You know, the war in Iraq had largely ended, but the conflict has continued. We still have Americans on the ground in Iraq. But it was largely seen as a let's engage in World War II nostalgia because we haven't won a war in a while. Dressing nostalgically for a war that felt like it had a clear reason. A war that felt right and justified. Which, you know, dressing for it won't make it so. Especially since this is so obviously ceremonial. The army doesn't fight in suits. Soldiers fight in Gore-Tex. They fight in gear. the pinks and greens are an anachronistic costume that hides the truth. Which is that soldiers and civilians don't dress that differently now. We all wear fleeces and rain shells and camelbacks and gaiters and hiking boots, many made by the exact same companies. We don't dress that differently. And yet, that did not stop Stacey Baer from chucking all of his stuff in the dumpster behind the liquor store. I was so angry and so pissed off, and I could not see through the fog to accept what was being offered. Fully. I could not fully accept it. and the feelings of suicidal ideation. I think there is something there of like, how close do you touch that line when you peer over into the abyss? And what is actually holding on? What is holding you? Did you tell anyone? I said, you know, I wanted to die, but that's why my buddy Chuck got me out rock climbing. After grad school, Stacy landed in Boulder, Colorado. And Chuck was like, go buy some climbing shoes. Chuck is my size, right? This big, tall, lanky, redheaded dude, also a veteran. He took Stacey to the Flatirons, which is this beautiful mountain peak in a city park. It's a great place to learn to climb. He wrote me up and he puts anchors on the wall in case we fall so that you only fall to your closest anchor, right? And so you're on the side of a mountain. On the side of a rock. But at the time, like I said, I was very suicidal. But every time that I felt like I was going to fall, I'd yell up to Chuck and I'd say, take. And that means take the rope so that the rope is very tight, right? because if it's slack, you're going to fall. I kept saying take. And so I was like, fine. I didn't want to die. And we moved so slowly. And the thing about climbing is you're together but not because you're feet away and then you come together. By the second pitch, Stacy started to gain confidence. And so a pitch is the length of a rope, right? And then he led and then you're apart. And then I came up. By the third pitch, his breath began to even. And it was so painstakingly slow. By the fifth pitch, his mind shut down. And you've got to move softer and allow your body to soften. And then, at the end of the climb, the reward. And it was at that moment where I got up there and the sun clears and you're on this beautiful rock face and you can see the entire front range in front of you. You know, you can look down and see the prairie coming up and then you can look in a different direction and see the Rocky Mountains. I saw and was overwhelmed by beauty and was overwhelmed about what I could do in this body that I assumed was broken, in this mind that I assumed was broken. Because somebody had reached out and I had actually taken their help. I had actually accepted their love. And it was this deep somatic experience and I'm shaking. And that's awe, right? That was an overwhelming sense of awe. And so that moment has really reverberated throughout my life. Stacey started a nonprofit dedicated to helping veterans heal through the outdoors. He's even led skiing trips to Afghanistan and Iraq so that veterans can experience the beauty and culture of places they had only associated with violence. I've done all these amazing things in life that you could look at and be like, wow, you've done landline clearance. You've gone back to ski in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the VA is, without a doubt, the hardest expedition and journey I've ever been on. I went to the VA for the first time and followed through to get my benefits this year. His experience accepting help and opening his heart in the outdoors allowed Stacey to get to the place where he could accept help in his life. He signed up for therapy. I should have got my benefits 10 years ago, 18 years ago, but I didn't have the, for whatever reason, I didn't have the capacity. And that capacity was built over the years through veterans and non-veterans alike and over time that became people I met in the outdoors. Over time it became the activity of the outdoors. For a long time I thought the outdoors was so great for veterans because it replicated the things that we learned at war, right? Camaraderie, sense of purpose, physicality, mission. But what I've come to realize is that the military actually is a shadow of what we can have outside. But the military is a lot easier to access than the outdoors for most people. Because the military pays you. The outdoors costs a lot of money. We're like, oh, the outdoors is free, but it's not. You're going to need sun protection and shoes and sunnies or a winter jacket. And those things cost money. You know, the gear industry has done such a good job promoting such a very intense version of visual awe that I think we end up creating these classes of people such as yourself where you're like, I don't really see myself as outdoorsy. Oop. Stacey let the cat out of the bag. I'm not an outdoorsy person. At least not in the traditional sense. I never really have been. And I never understood why I didn't like it. And for a while I was like, maybe I'm asexual, but for nature? I mean, I get the appeal. I'm not a robot. I too love sunsets and beautiful landscapes. But after making this series, I realized my problem is the gear. I don't want to buy all that stuff. It's not my style. And, like, I don't know where I would put it. And I don't like the way that you're supposed to do it. I don't want to go shopping and get in a car and drive an hour or two out of town and walk in a circle and then drive back home. You know what I mean? There's something about it that feels so artificial to do something that's supposed to be so natural. I would prefer to just take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge or bike to Queens wearing my own clothes that I already have. But to your point, there are oftentimes material needs to be able to access some of these bigger moments, right? But I think that's a lot of the work that Friends of Grand Rapids Parks has helped me show. Stacey is now the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Grand Rapids Parks in Michigan. You can have really meaningful outdoor experiences with the trees on your street and the plants near your apartment. And you deserve that beauty. And we all deserve that beauty. I think everybody deserves awe. And it doesn't have to be Denali. But the great thing about America and our public lands is we all own that. That's yours too. That is, ultimately, what Stacy and so many, many millions of others before him have fought for. The land, whose beauty should be open to everyone. By the great good fortune of being alive on the planet, all of this is already yours. The outdoors are your birthright. You live in it, whether you dress for it or not. I'm Avery Truffleman. I report, produce, and make articles of interest. But I'm going to do some kind of long sappy credits here, if that's okay. because the series sort of took a lot out of me and I'm very grateful to the people who helped out. I always like to read the acknowledgements at the ends of books and stuff, and maybe you do too. So this is going to be like that. Biggest thanks to my partner in crime on this, Alison Berenger, who is my editor, running with me stride for stride, step for step, being both my cheerleader and my taskmaster and making sure I never got away with a lazy script ever. And also on this last episode, I was edited by the brilliant Sarah Covedo, Your poetic soul never ceases to amaze me. And fellas, he's single. Thank you, Charles McFarlane, for nerding out with me most weeks and taking me to class on the military. I feel like you gave me your master's degree. Thank you for being so generous with your knowledge. There's so much more to say about the military and fashion that I couldn't possibly get into. If you want to know more, there are endless rabbit holes. Follow Charles' writing at combatthreads.substack.com. Thank you so much also to the attention and care of fact checker Yasmin Al-Sayed, especially since you got a new job while this was happening and you continued to work on the show. Thank you so much. Thank you to my friends Ray Royal, Sasami Ashworth, and Sean Seymour of Lollatone. Scoring these stories is always so much fun. Thank you all for letting me talk over your work. huge huge thanks also to jocelyn gonzalez who is saintly in both her patience and ability to perform miracles thank you for mixing and mastering these stories jocelyn they are so safe in your capable hands can we also give ray christian like the oscar in podcasting for those drill sergeant announcements raise a star and his podcast once again is called what's ray saying generally a huge thank you to the outdoor recreation archive in logan utah and its founders clint pumphrey and especially Chase Anderson, who has been my guide in the outdoor world and led me to so many interesting people who I talked to for this series. Special, special thanks this particular episode to Will James and Sydney Brownstone. These are two Seattle-based reporters who have worked extensively on homelessness. They were the ones who helped me approach encampments and talk to Leah, as well as a bunch of other people. Will and Sydney made sure I went about this the right way and not just like barge into people's homes with a microphone. If you'd like to learn more about the situation in Seattle and hear from Will and Sydney a bit themselves, check out their remarkable podcast, Outsiders. Also, special thanks to actor and audiobook narrator, Ari Fliakos. I had interviewed this top-secret defense expert who needed to remain anonymous, and Ari actually imitated him perfectly and did such an amazing job, and then I didn't even use it, which is such a tragedy. So thank you, Ari. And I'd like to take this moment to give a huge shout-out to the many, many people who I didn't get to include in this series, including George Sandler, Alex Carlton from Filson, Stephen McCullough of Functional Fabric Fair, the inventor of the sports bra, La Jean Lawson, fabric tester, Diana Wyman, fashion icon, Julian Carter, Brad Garman of the Michigan Outdoor Recreation Office, legendary uniform designer, Stan Herman, Ken Fisk from Primaloft, Oliver Berkman, author of 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, and Will Dunn of REI. I really could have made a whole second series with all the voices I had to cut. And I learned so much from you, and I really enjoyed spending time with you. I'm so sorry. I just had to whittle things down. And thank you so much, Radiotopia, for being the best partner a podcaster could dream of, especially to Yori Lasordo, Audrey Davidson, and Melissa Garcia-Hoole. And special shout out to Audrey Martovich. Welcome to the world, Wendy. Can't wait to meet you. Thank you also to Surefire Media, especially Greg Jakubik and Henry Thomas. You rule, guys. And I know I thank my fiance, Drew, in every episode, but it's not to be like, I have a fiancé. I mean, the reason I've been able to make this work is that Drew functionally turned my life into a writing residency and allowed me to give up all my other responsibilities so I can just stay inside and work all day. So thank you so much, dear Drew. I know you gave up a lot for this. And most of all, thank you. You, listening to this right now. Wow, you listened all the way to the end. That's really cool. That means a lot. I know these episodes are kind of intense and that it asks a lot of you. They're not exactly like passive listening. I feel like I'm giving you all my effort and you're giving your effort back to me. And I feel very connected to you. So thank you very much. Drop me a line. Stay in touch at articles of interest dot sub stack dot com.