Berets—it’s been some time since they were just for baguette-toting Frenchmen and elite members of the Army’s Special Forces. In the summer of 2001, the Army changed longstanding policy and began to put berets on every head. The logic was simple—everyone should be made to feel special, not just Special Forces. It was the military-morale version of our infantile participation-trophy culture.
Soldiers knew silly p.c. antics when they saw them. The Army Times recently conducted a survey of soldiers regarding what they liked and didn’t like about their uniforms. Overwhelmingly, they said get rid of the berets. Or at least reserve them for just a few special classes: actual Special Forces, Rangers, Airborne, and the elite Painters Corps, to wear with their smocks and pencil-thin mustachios. (Okay, The Scrapbook made up that last one.)
There was pushback right from the start, and so years ago the Army replaced, for wear with combat uniforms, the beret with the more practical and less contentious flat-topped, baseball-billed “patrol cap.” But the beret remains the default headgear for the dressier “Army Service Uniform.” It’s a measure of just how hated the black beret is that soldiers don’t even want it for those rare occasions when they break out their blue suits.
Other survey results were intriguing. For example, soldiers want to be able to grow beards, which might be mistaken as an alarming sign the armed forces are being infiltrated by radical Islamic fundamentalists or, worse, hipsters. But in a way, beards are the new berets. The men who wear beards now are the ones out in the field, fighting in inhospitable countries. A few weeks’ growth on the chin is a surer sign of stern stuff than a combat ribbon on the chest. Which is why soldiers are wrong to want to be able to wear beards at their leisure. Beards are for bad-asses and should stay that way.
Some other suggestions were eminently sensible: Soldiers told the Army Times they want to put rank back on the collar, rather than where the symbols go now, just above the stomach: “It’s pretty uncomfortable having to look at a female soldier’s chest to see her rank,” one gallant young man said.
Others weren’t just sensible, but savvy: For their suit-and-tie uniform, soldiers continue to call for the return of the Army’s WWII-vintage “pinks and greens.” “It’s classy as hell,” said one soldier, and “has a solid historical look.” The Scrapbook agrees. Better to look like Clark Gable than a Basque bus-driver.
