Gear: Chapter 5

A pattern for blending in. And for standing out. For images and links go to articlesofinterest.substack.com https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/ Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Did you think it was gonna be easy? Did you think you were gonna waddle your way through it? Prepare yourselves now for chapter five.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Okay, ready?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Pull.

• 0:18Avery Trufelman?

  That was my first time ever shooting a gun. This was my second.

• 0:26Speaker 03

  You're just rushing now.

• 0:27Avery Trufelman?

  That's Fisher Neal. He's a hunter and a hunting coach. A hunter named Fisher.

• 0:33Speaker 03

  Oh, you were really close that one.

• 0:35Avery Trufelman?

  Fisher is being so patient with me. We were on public lands in New Jersey where you can shoot turkey. Or, in our case, shoot clay pucks. Or, in my case, miss clay pucks. I was so bad at shooting.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  You wanna go again? You don't wanna keep trying? I don't know.

• 0:53Avery Trufelman?

  That's my friend Rebecca. She actually is a hunter, even though she lives in New York City, where it's very hard to go hunting. She was here brushing up on her skills with Fisher. This is her hunting lesson. I had just come to tag along with my microphone. And then I got roped into this lesson.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  You guys are talking weapons. I'm like, let's talk about clothes.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  We'll get there.

• 1:09Avery Trufelman?

  I really wanted to ask Fisher and Rebecca about camouflage. I imagined it was an important part of hunting. It's what I associate most with gun culture, right? Hunters wear camo.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Wait, so can I ask you about camouflage?

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 1:26Avery Trufelman?

  I assumed camo would be fundamental. I thought it would be the first thing we talked about. I kept putting my gun down and whining about it.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  When can I ask you about camouflage?

• 1:33Speaker 03

  After we're done shooting.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay, okay.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Take one more, one more.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Pull.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Hey!

• 1:44Speaker 03

  We just had to tell you it was the last one.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Look at that. That was so cool.

• 1:48Avery Trufelman?

  Once I actually hit a clay pigeon, I could see why my fellow Americans love to shoot stuff. It is super fun. It made my arms ache in this delicious way, like I had lifted weights.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Oh. It really hurt.

• 2:00Avery Trufelman?

  But I also think I had such a fun time because we didn't actually kill anything. I think I'm too big of a weenie vegetarian for that. And it was only after this rite of passage that it was finally camouflage time.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Let's talk about them.

• 2:13Avery Trufelman?

  Let's talk about them.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Show me what you've got.

• 2:15Avery Trufelman?

  Rebecca and Fisher laid out a bunch of their camouflage clothes. All of my camo is mostly duck. They had camo printed with reeds and grasses for duck hunting.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  It's camo white.

• 2:25Avery Trufelman?

  For the snow.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  This pattern is actually meant to blend with the sky with the leaves off the trees.

• 2:31Avery Trufelman?

  So this is when you're up in a perch?

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Up in a perch in the late season.

• 2:35Avery Trufelman?

  Fisher's got an early-season perch camo that's green and leafy.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Exactly. This color palette, I'm not so sure that I love, but at the same time, as colorblind as deer are, it may not matter.

• 2:46Avery Trufelman?

  That's the funny part. For some animals, the specificity of the camo pattern barely matters.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Deer are colorblind.

• 2:52Avery Trufelman?

  You could basically wear black and white.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  With turkeys, it's different. With turkeys, they see the full spectrum of color.

• 2:58Avery Trufelman?

  Even so, camo isn't what's gonna catch you a turkey.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Camo is your last line of defense in terms of hiding. Your first line of defense is how and where you set up, more than it's about the camo pattern.

• 3:12Avery Trufelman?

  So it doesn't really matter?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  It matters, but I don't think as much as people may think.

• 3:18Avery Trufelman?

  And yet...

• 3:19Speaker 03

  I have a million different patterns, even though I'm telling you it's not that important. I will wear different patterns for different scenarios, and I have a bunch of different outfits.

• 3:27Avery Trufelman?

  As much as camouflage is supposed to be about hiding, it's very much about wanting to be seen.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  You want to be seen in like the latest and nicest camo pattern.

• 3:37Avery Trufelman?

  I had worn camouflage to hunt that day as well, and it was also, in its way, the latest. May I ask for your opinion on my pants?

• 3:47Speaker 03

  They're cool. Yeah, I would hunt in that for sure.

• 3:48Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah? For like any particular season or time?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Early fall. Yeah, early fall or turkey season. You know what I mean? Because there's a lot of green in the pattern. They'd be good turkey hunting pants.

• 3:57Avery Trufelman?

  I was wearing the most current version of camouflage used by the United States Army. Well, I guess I just wonder what you think of that connection.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  I mean, there really is actually a separation between military and hunting camo. You'll find that most people going hunting are wearing some sort of specific-for-hunting branded camouflage. Not that many of them are wearing Army patterns.

• 4:20Avery Trufelman?

  It makes sense. Hunting and fighting are different activities.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  But in both cases, you are trying to hide from something.

• 4:26Avery Trufelman?

  Although military camo, like hunting camo, also has that element of wanting to be seen. It is, in part, aesthetic.

• 4:37Avery Trufelman?

  Military camouflage is also subject to trends and fashion cycles.

• 4:44Avery Trufelman?

  And that's where it can get dangerous. After the break.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Hey there, it's Robyn from PRX. If you're a longtime listener of Radiotopia, you may know that we had a podcast that ran from 2016 to 2020 discussing every episode of the show The West Wing. Well, I'm excited to tell you The West Wing Weekly is back. Joshua Molina, who starred on The West Wing as Will Bailey, and Rishikesh Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder, have reunited to discuss the hit Netflix political thriller, The Diplomat. Just as they did in their original run, they're discussing each episode of the series in sequence, joined by special guests from the show and from the real world of diplomacy. Rishi and Josh will be wrapping up the first season with a special live taping at Union Chapel in London on November 14th. Subscribe now to The West Wing Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:36Avery Trufelman?

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• 6:14Avery Trufelman?

  That's the realreal.com articals to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at the realreal.com articals.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  So I'm going hunting soon. I wonder if I should get one of these to like, see if it actually can do camouflage.

• 6:32Avery Trufelman?

  I bought those military camo pants with Alex Dragone, the Marine reservist who brought me to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. That's where we went to the military base with the exchange on it. That was the store where you could buy everything from alcohol to bicycles to army combat uniforms, or ACUs, because it's the military and they like to abbreviate everything. The moment I picked up those camouflage pants, they had a whiff of sacrilege about them. I wanted them. But I, as a regular civilian, am not allowed to purchase anything at all from the Army Exchange Store. So of course, I immediately turned to Alex and asked if he would buy the pants for me and I'd pay him back. Oof. Is that not allowed?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  I don't know if you could wear these as a civilian. I don't know if there's any laws against it. I know it would look kind of weird.

• 7:17Avery Trufelman?

  I disagreed. I thought I would look cool if I wore these pants, but it struck Alex as extremely dorky. Especially in the Marines, it is very uncool to wear uniform shit if you don't have to. Like, you will never see Marines in their camouflage off-base. Marines will never go to the airport in their uniforms to board the plane early.

• 7:38Speaker 05

  There are some people who like, won't take military discounts because they just don't want to be associated with that when they're not at work.

• 7:45Avery Trufelman?

  Certainly in Alex's experience in the Marines and in a number of other branches that I've talked to, it is not cool to show off that you're in the military. So much so that there's even a derogatory term for it: boot.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  Having a straight-up buzzed head is like the most boot thing you can do.

• 8:03Avery Trufelman?

  Being boot is being like a gung-ho little patriot who's super into being in the military.

• 8:08Speaker 05

  Dorky, eager, new guy. Anything you do in boot camp that is not considered cool.

• 8:14Avery Trufelman?

  A paratrooper named Drew told me that in the Army, they call this "basic", as in "basic training".

• 8:19Speaker 06

  You have probably drank the Kool-Aid a little too much.

• 8:22Avery Trufelman?

  Drew said you can always see this basic attitude in off-duty clothes.

• 8:26Speaker 06

  So they like, tuck their shirts into their jeans and wear their combat boots out in the civilian world.

• 8:33Avery Trufelman?

  This is why neither Alex nor Drew would ever wear camo pants when they weren't working.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  I rarely ever wear my uniform off-base. I don't want to attract any kind of attention.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  It's a really big thing in the military. If you can pass as non-military, that's a good thing. Why, maybe because there's such a well-known thing for people to like, want to look like they're military? And it becomes the opposite reaction. It's like, if you have to try to look military, then you probably don't actually know what it's like.

• 9:02Avery Trufelman?

  I didn't think I wanted to buy those camo pants to look military. I just thought they looked cool. But then, I was like, do I think they look cool because I subconsciously think the military is cool? And then, in wearing these pants, would I both fetishize and disrespect the military? Obviously, as you know, I did end up buying and wearing the pants. And that's only because I was yanked out of my internal reverie by this other shopper who poked his head out of the racks.

• 9:27Speaker 07

  You can wear this all you want.

• 9:28Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, really?

• 9:28Speaker 07

  You can wear it down the street?

• 9:29Avery Trufelman?

  I could wear it.

• 9:30Speaker 07

  Even if you're a civilian? Oh, yeah. Just don't be impersonating a military service member.

• 9:34Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, I don't want to be offensive. This major, named Nate, had come over from Civil Affairs Command in Fort Wadsworth, Long Island, because their exchange out there doesn't sell clothes.

• 9:42Speaker 07

  You can buy them in any Army surplus. Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 9:46Avery Trufelman?

  Was it a fair point? That surplus seller, Logan McGrath, was telling me how hard it is to stock military surplus now. And when I took Bing Dong Duan, that rispy grad student, on that very disappointing trip to my local surplus store, we only found cheap imitation M65 jackets and knockoff mid-century militaria. We didn't find any actual military clothes. But there's like no real Army-- there's no military surplus store anymore that sells like this stuff.

• 10:10Speaker 07

  Not-- probably not around here. Go to other states, you'll find them.

• 10:15Avery Trufelman?

  And so, in search of modern military surplus, I went to the state of Virginia, specifically to the city of Virginia Beach, home to the largest concentration of military personnel outside of the Pentagon. I was like, all right, if it's anywhere, it's here. Let's see if there's a store where I can find these camo pants that I got at the store on the military base. So, once I landed in Virginia Beach, I searched for a well-rated military surplus store. And when I went there, it was not the dark, musty Army Navy surplus store that I was imagining, nor was it the cheap, weird imitation knockoff store that I went to in Brooklyn. No, no.

• 10:56Avery Trufelman?

  The surplus store that I went to in an actual military town is an entirely different military surplus store. And I got to discover it with Claudette.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I get people who get in a car and, you know, they go in interesting places. And I'll go, because I want to see.

• 11:12Avery Trufelman?

  I love it. Claudette was the cab driver who took me to the surplus store. She'd never been in there before.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Why come past here 100 times?

• 11:20Avery Trufelman?

  She parked in the strip mall and came in with me, which I'm really grateful for. Otherwise, I'd just be muttering to myself like I usually do.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  This is like a really different place.

• 11:29Avery Trufelman?

  This store was high ceiling, fluorescent lit, with white walls and concrete floors. Unadorned, but very clean and stark, with pounding hardcore music. It's like the ultimate hiking store, you know? Like, everything's all the modern, heavy-duty stuff.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  All the modern stuff, yeah.

• 11:49Avery Trufelman?

  There were some bins of socks and hats and underwear, but most of the gear was displayed neatly on circular racks.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Look at this raincoat, sis.

• 12:00Avery Trufelman?

  And this gear was much, much fancier than what I saw at Fort Hamilton. The rain jackets were made of buttery synthetics. The fleeces were teddy bear soft. The shoes were feather light. Claudette and I were loving all this top-of-the-line outdoor gear, and we were totally gonna buy some. And then we saw the prices.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  This is nice.

• 12:21Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, my God, look how much it is.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Jesus, this is nice.

• 12:24Avery Trufelman?

  $430.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  This is nice.

• 12:27Avery Trufelman?

  This was not your grandpa's military surplus. This was not the place to get high-quality basics for cheap. Like, Claudette and I weren't even quite sure what this was.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Like, are they new or used?

• 12:38Avery Trufelman?

  That's a good question.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  I thought surplus always meant used.

• 12:42Avery Trufelman?

  I think it's just like extra, you know?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  They made too many.

• 12:45Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, I can ask. I asked. The cashier stammered and said some of it is sometimes surplus, but I didn't see any of that. Everything appeared to be brand-new, and it was all high-end, extreme, outdoor performance clothes that were aimed at police and members of the armed forces, even though anyone can walk in and buy the stuff. $149? This is like REI prices. At this price point, why wouldn't you just buy your extra gear at REI? A lot of service members do. But one reason why you might choose this quote-unquote surplus store is camouflage. Military-grade, licensed, trusted camouflage.

• 13:30Avery Trufelman?

  Camo was everywhere. Check this out, they've got gauze in camo.

• 13:35Speaker 08

  Oh, cool.

• 13:36Avery Trufelman?

  Camo was on backpacks, it was on boot covers, it was on shoes, it was on pants. Although, I could not find the same pants that I bought on the military base. Instead, the pants and nearly all of the camo at the store was a modern camouflage pattern called Multicam. And this is a multicam?

• 13:58Speaker 08

  I like the multicam.

• 13:59Avery Trufelman?

  Multicam camouflage is in shades of green and brown and beige. It looks, you know, it's like a camouflage, but it has a lot of fades and gradients in it. Multicam is a camouflage pattern that was made by a private company.

• 14:16Speaker 09

  Multicam is a camouflage pattern that we created in the early 2000s.

• 14:20Avery Trufelman?

  This is Greg Thompson, one of the co-founders of Cry Precision. Greg and his co-founder Caleb Cry were graduates of Cooper Union. They were design students.

• 14:30Speaker 09

  None of us had any specific background in textiles, apparel, military, anything. None of us were former operators. Everybody kind of assumes that some, some of us were former operators. It's not the case.

• 14:41Avery Trufelman?

  I was talking to Greg in Cry's factory, right here in Brooklyn, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

• 14:45Speaker 09

  We started this while I was still in college.

• 14:47Avery Trufelman?

  As a student, Greg had already started getting into the strange world of military contracts.

• 14:53Speaker 09

  We always had an interest in all things military and all, you know, it's like boy stuff, like monster trucks and that kind of thing. It's like that's all in the same kind of world.

• 15:00Avery Trufelman?

  Greg found his way in, in earnest, through US Army Natick Soldier Systems. It's that military base I went to with the cold chambers and the heat chambers and Andy the Mannequin and the clueless closet for soldiers. It's that place that designs and tests all the uniforms.

• 15:13Speaker 09

  And Natick was having an industry day, so we threw our hat in the ring.

• 15:17Avery Trufelman?

  Greg and Caleb actually got some early bids to do some ideating and some concepting.

• 15:21Speaker 09

  So really, we're just almost creating the outline, if you will, for what they should be doing.

• 15:25Avery Trufelman?

  You can think of Natick like a research laboratory and these students from a prestigious design school like young consultants.

• 15:32Speaker 09

  We were so cheap. We're just a young company going, they're paying us to like solve problems.

• 15:37Avery Trufelman?

  And the advantage that Greg and Caleb had was that in all of their projects they took on for Natick, they attacked each problem like design students.

• 15:46Speaker 09

  We kind of did it on our own in a sense that like, okay, so where are your soldier guys? Let's talk to them, let's understand their problems. Like, what are your general areas of concern? Okay, let's go to every single major tech group at Natick.

• 15:56Avery Trufelman?

  Natick is mostly a research and design laboratory. They have active-duty soldiers cycle in and out for tests, but- Greg wanted to talk to soldiers who were really living their day-to-day lives.

• 16:07Speaker 09

  We didn't see soldiers at Natick.

• 16:09Avery Trufelman?

  They began leaving Natick and taking product development into their own hands.

• 16:12Speaker 09

  We started sneaking down to Fort Benning all the time. So we didn't tell them because that would have pissed them off.

• 16:18Avery Trufelman?

  Fort Benning in western Georgia is where US Army Rangers are trained. Army Rangers are an elite infantry force.

• 16:25Speaker 09

  So we basically got in with the Rangers down there.

• 16:27Avery Trufelman?

  And this group of Rangers became essentially a focus group for CRY.

• 16:33Speaker 09

  We were evaluating stuff with guys who'd just been deployed or were Rangers who had clearly been through a bit. And that way it gave us more feedback.

• 16:41Avery Trufelman?

  Around the year 2000, the feedback from the Rangers revealed a major problem. Camouflage was in crisis. The Army Rangers were getting issued mismatched camo.

• 16:54Speaker 09

  When guys deploy, they're wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor because body armor is expensive and they didn't get around to procuring it.

• 17:00Avery Trufelman?

  And when you mix camouflage patterns, then you stand out. That defeats the purpose of camouflage.

• 17:06Speaker 09

  It does not make sense for any force to be wearing multiple camouflage patterns.

• 17:12Avery Trufelman?

  So how did the state of camo get so messy? Let me tell you real quick. Camouflage is more of an art than a science. And if you need proof, camouflage was actually invented by an artist, the American portrait and landscape painter Abbott Thayer. This was a fine art exercise that Thayer created in 1909 by playing with light and shadow. And Thayer realized he'd discovered something kind of remarkable. So he brought it to the United States military. But Teddy Roosevelt essentially laughed Abbott Thayer out of the halls of government. But the French, however, were way more open to the idea of camouflage, maybe because Abbott Thayer went to art school in Paris and the French really adopted camouflage as their own practice. That's why

• 17:55Avery Trufelman?

  camouflage has a French name, camouflage, meaning the discharge of smoke, right? It hides things. The French military started painting shapes and shadows on their trucks and observation posts and introduced the idea of camouflage back to Americans during World War I, when we realized, oh, the French are really on to something. This is a good idea. You're way less conspicuous if your stuff is not a solid color. But the idea of applying camouflage to clothing really took off in the Vietnam War, where special forces were wearing camouflage to blend in alongside their South Vietnamese guerrilla fighting comrades. And in Vietnam, the infantry started getting issued camo helmet covers. And soon, the Marines and a handful of Army units were wearing full camo fatigues.

• 18:40Avery Trufelman?

  And shortly thereafter, in the 80s and 90s, it became a new practice that for every landscape the United States military planned to deploy to, they should have a new matching camouflage.

• 18:52Speaker 09

  We're gonna have a woodland, we're gonna have an urban, we're gonna have a desert, we're gonna have a whatever.

• 18:57Avery Trufelman?

  While Cry was working with NADAC, 9/11 happened. And with the subsequent declaration of the War on Terror came a new and urgent design question. What camouflage would the Army wear for this new war, which was going to deploy them to Afghanistan, which is an extremely varied terrain?

• 19:22Speaker 09

  Where it's like, you might be down in a village, then you might transition to a river valley, and all of a sudden it becomes very green. And then, two hours later, you're climbing up a mountain, and it's brown again and rocky.

• 19:31Avery Trufelman?

  Was the Army supposed to bring changes of clothes for each terrain?

• 19:35Speaker 09

  It wouldn't have helped you, even if you had all the money in the world to buy eight different sets. You know, I might carry it and switch it.

• 19:40Avery Trufelman?

  Clearly, mixing camos wasn't working. So Greg and Caleb at Cry Precision had this idea. What if there was one camouflage pattern that could work almost anywhere?

• 19:53Speaker 09

  So the point was, multicam was sort of like your 75% solution to environments in general, which is gonna be better than having a really bad camouflage in that particular environment.

• 20:03Avery Trufelman?

  In the same way the M43 jacket was the field jacket designed for all environments, multicam is the camouflage that was designed to blend in with all environments.

• 20:13Speaker 09

  So that was, it's like, that's why we called it multicam.

• 20:15Avery Trufelman?

  Multicam is an effective camouflage. Although, as Fisher the Hunter said, "The pattern of camouflage is just one thing that keeps you hidden. It's also about where you're hiding and what else is covering you. And in the case of the soldier, it's also a matter of hiding from thermal and infrared and ultraviolet sensors and from radar. But if we're only talking about hiding from the naked eye, multicam can do the trick. And here is why. First of all, multicam has the right amount of colors.

• 20:45Speaker 09

  A certain amount of colors. I think seven is probably a good amount. Three would not be enough. 12 would be too many because they would just get lost.

• 20:52Avery Trufelman?

  In the classic multicam pattern, the colors are greens and browns and beiges. These colors are warm.

• 20:59Speaker 09

  Most things in nature have some level of warmth in them. Even like a building that you built, it came from stone and likely grew a little bit of green stuff on it. Everything sort of takes on slightly warmer tones. Very few things remain cold.

• 21:11Avery Trufelman?

  And multicam has a lot of highlights and lowlights and gradients and fades in the pattern. There are a lot of points of interest and no two outfits end up looking quite the same.

• 21:20Speaker 09

  If you have all of your guys kind of looking the same, then as soon as you spot one guy, you can very easily pick out. Right. Right.

• 21:26Avery Trufelman?

  Cry developed the idea of an all-terrain camouflage in 2001. And in 2004, they trademarked it.

• 21:33Speaker 09

  We made it because we thought it was smart and we wanted to actually use that pattern in the stuff we were making. So we leaned forward and started printing runs.

• 21:42Avery Trufelman?

  Right away, Cry had customers. But not in the regular Army. Regular soldiers don't get to just go out and buy their own camouflage. However, elite soldiers in the special forces actually can just go out and buy their clothes. You were always talking to the special force guys.

• 22:04Speaker 09

  Pretty much from day one.

• 22:06Avery Trufelman?

  Although Greg began his research by talking to the Army Rangers, who are already pretty elite, he was very quickly introduced to even more elite ranks of soldiers above them: the special forces. We've already talked a little bit about the Green Berets in the Army and the SEALs in the Navy. They did a lot of covert operations during Vietnam. The Green Berets were the ones learning other languages and going across enemy lines. And the SEALs were doing a lot of foreign recon. These missions were top secret. And even personnel within the military hardly knew what these teams were doing. The Navy SEALs notoriously had a code of secrecy amongst their ranks. And after the Vietnam War ended, the Army added on another top-secret, small specialty team.

• 22:51Avery Trufelman?

  In 1977, Delta Force was created to respond to high-profile hijackings and hostage situations. Delta Force is an elite team known as "The Unit", and it's selected from the Army with a grueling screening program that culminates in a timed 40-mile hike with a 70-pound rucksack. But this "super-elite" special team was a bit removed from the rest of the military. And this was revealed in 1980, when Delta Force was sent in to rescue 66 hostages in Iran, and they simply were not trained to communicate with the other branches of the military. This rescue mission ended up being a disaster. Eight service members died in a plane crash,

• 23:36Avery Trufelman?

  and not a single hostage was rescued. It was a catastrophe. And so, that year, 1980, Joint Special Operations Command was established, or JSOC. JSOC is a hub where each branch of the military established their own special operations, their own elite teams, so they could all coordinate with each other. It's like the gifted and talented of the US military. There's the Army's Delta Force. The Navy has SEAL Team Six. The Air Force has the 24th Special Tactics Squadron. These are supposed to be the best of the best from each unit, the highest tier of each branch, all working together. And you get an idea of just how special and how elite these top-tier teams are

• 24:20Avery Trufelman?

  when you realize there are only 400 operators on SEAL Team Six. It's tiny. And the more small and elite and rarefied these teams are, the more freedom they have, including when it comes to their uniforms.

• 24:37Speaker 06

  Every unit has, whether conventional or special, has what's called a tactical standard operating procedure, or also a Drew the paratrooper. In the blue book for special units, it will outline these are the third-party items you're allowed to wear. So their blue book outlines, hey, you can wear civilian hiking boots, but it needs to meet these three criteria.

• 25:03Avery Trufelman?

  In high-level special forces, the criteria are not strict.

• 25:07Speaker 06

  They're usually pretty lenient. I've got a buddy of mine in a special operations unit who wears ultra lone peaks as his boots. And I'm like, dude, that's like a, that's like a running shoe. Another one has a great story about a guy was wearing high-top bands.

• 25:20Avery Trufelman?

  Delta Force guys have so much leeway. When they want to buy gear, they can just plunk down a credit card.

• 25:26Speaker 09

  Those are the people who have the ability to make their own decisions and are also maybe a little more open to some of the crazy stuff that you might pitch.

• 25:34Avery Trufelman?

  Cry had been printing runs of multicam themselves, and Delta Force was very interested in this technology of multi-environment camouflage.

• 25:44Speaker 09

  We're talking to these guys and saying, hey, Kate, we can make you these uniforms. They're like, oh, by the way, we get pouches from those guys. Can they get multicam too?

• 25:50Avery Trufelman?

  The Delta Force guys want some of their other accessories from other companies to come in multicam too.

• 25:57Speaker 09

  So basically, what we ended up doing was selling fabric, one yard, five yards, 10 yards, to whoever wanted it.

• 26:04Avery Trufelman?

  Cry began licensing the pattern. It seemed like this new camouflage was really starting to get some traction. And so in 2004, when NADIC had an open request for companies to put in bids to become the official new camouflage pattern for the United States Army, for the whole army, Cry submitted multicam. It seemed like multicam would be a shoe-in. And then Cry got the news that they lost the bid. NADIC rejected multicam. And this is where all the trouble began.

• 26:38Speaker 09

  It's a drama that you couldn't make up. It's probably the greatest drama we've been exposed to.

• 26:44Avery Trufelman?

  After MultiCam lost the bid, Natick turned around and announced that they had designed an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. And Greg was like, wait, what? That's our concept.

• 26:56Speaker 09

  Like, multi-environment camouflage was something that we protected.

• 26:59Avery Trufelman?

  The United States Army premiered a new camouflage pattern called the Universal Camouflage Pattern. And it's the Army, so it has an acronym, and it's called UCP. But when Greg saw UCP, he was like, there is no way UCP actually works universally. This new Army camouflage pattern was the complete opposite of everything Greg knew to be true about good multi-environment camo. Like, it was not made with warm, natural tones.

• 27:30Speaker 09

  The Army's universal is like, blue.

• 27:32Avery Trufelman?

  UCP isn't actually blue. It's sort of like slate gray to beige, but it's a cold color scheme.

• 27:38Speaker 09

  By the time you've laundered it a few times, it's blue-gray. And that shines very bright and like, it just glows. It's not warm.

• 27:45Avery Trufelman?

  Not only was UCP in all the wrong colors, it didn't look organic. It was stiff and rigid. UCP was a digital-looking, pixelated camouflage. It looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in a really low resolution. What was the logic behind the digital pattern?

• 28:03Speaker 10

  There was some research that, early research, that indicated that it was more effective.

• 28:06Avery Trufelman?

  This is retired Lieutenant Colonel David Acetta. He's the Chief Public Affairs Officer at Natick Soldier Systems Center, where they design and test all the clothes for the military.

• 28:15Speaker 10

  The testing showed us that the Universe Camouflage Pattern had some degree of effectiveness in a lot of different environments. And that's one of the reasons it was chosen.

• 28:26Avery Trufelman?

  And another one of the reasons the Army adopted UCP was digital-looking camos were in. They were a hip, military trend.

• 28:36Speaker 10

  Everybody wanted to jump on the digital bandwagon.

• 28:39Avery Trufelman?

  The Canadian military kicked off the digital camo trend in the late 90s.

• 28:44Speaker 10

  And the Marine Corps, they were the first of the US forces to adopt the digital pattern.

• 28:49Avery Trufelman?

  And when the Marines adopted their digital camo in 2002, the spokesperson for the Marines said, "We want to be instantly recognized as a force to be reckoned with. We want them to see us coming a mile away in our new uniforms." Wild, right? This is camouflage for standing out.

• 29:11Avery Trufelman?

  In the early aughts, pixelated camo became the it camouflage. Every military branch wanted their own digital camouflage. Whether or not it was actually practical, the weirdest example of this was that the Navy developed a blue digital camo uniform and issued it out to sailors. And right away sailors were like, what the hell? We don't want to blend in with the ocean. That's really bad. So that one didn't last very long. But the point is, with some of these digital camos, fashion was taking precedent over safety, which is exactly what Greg Thompson was worried about when, as he saw it, the

• 29:51Avery Trufelman?

  Army was adopting a digital camo and just calling it universal. The Army, however, stands by its universality.

• 30:00Speaker 10

  It's in the name, a universal camouflage pattern.

• 30:03Avery Trufelman?

  The United States Army spent $5 billion developing and producing these new uniforms in the new digital UCP. And when they were widely adopted in 2005, it was undeniable that UCP was hated.

• 30:24Speaker 11

  Immediately, it is trashed.

• 30:26Avery Trufelman?

  Costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane.

• 30:28Speaker 11

  It's probably like one of the most dunked on camo patterns of all time.

• 30:31Avery Trufelman?

  Charles also wrote an article for The Baffler about UCP called "Universal Failure."

• 30:36Speaker 11

  And I think a lot of it is bound up in the media coverage of the worst years of the Iraq War.

• 30:41Avery Trufelman?

  It was a hated camo for a hated war, a bad look for a bad war.

• 30:46Speaker 11

  Burning Humvees in the streets of Baghdad, or bloody bodies being dragged out of houses in Fallujah.

• 30:51Avery Trufelman?

  And there were our soldiers, among that chaos, standing right out in their UCP. I suppose UCP was truly universal in that it universally blended in with nothing.

• 31:02Speaker 11

  And you'd see these photos on the cover of The New York Times, you know, of soldiers in these heavily wooded valleys in Afghanistan, just all browns and greens, and then like just sticking out in this like nearly white looking pattern.

• 31:18Avery Trufelman?

  Anyone who could opt out of wearing UCP did.

• 31:21Speaker 11

  The first people who are able to do anything about that are US Special Forces.

• 31:26Avery Trufelman?

  Delta Force really leaned into wearing multicam. And even though Delta Force operators made up a teeny tiny fraction of the troops in Iraq, multicam started to spread.

• 31:39Avery Trufelman?

  And it would continue to spread farther and farther within the special forces and then beyond the special forces and then beyond the United States and beyond the military. Eventually, everyone would want to buy and wear multicam. And this is because the special forces became, within and beyond the military, style influencers.

• 32:05Avery Trufelman?

  America began an infatuation with special operators, including with the way they dressed. And it all started with the War on Terror, because this was the war that really changed the role of special operators.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  The special ops, which you saw these questions of like, who are these guys?

• 32:22Speaker 12

  Well, the special ops fetish is a huge thing, yeah.

• 32:26Avery Trufelman?

  Author and marine veteran Phil Clive.

• 32:28Speaker 12

  We... So in theory, it is Congress that declares war.

• 32:34Avery Trufelman?

  After 9/11, Congress basically gave the executive branch carte blanche.

• 32:38Speaker 12

  Congress wrote an authorization for the use of military force in 2001 that was extremely open-ended, right? After the terror attacks. And administrations have been using that all over the place since then.

• 32:52Avery Trufelman?

  American presidents don't really have to ask Congress to vote on wars anymore. They don't have to defend or justify them in terms of cost or effort or loss of life.

• 33:03Speaker 12

  We have military campaigns that are ongoing, which American presidents never asked Congress to authorize, which means there was never an active debate, which means there's actually little political will behind the campaigns.

• 33:15Avery Trufelman?

  As long as the American public is relatively unaware of the costs of the campaign.

• 33:19Speaker 12

  We don't like forever wars. We don't like having troop deployments. But we also really don't like the bad guys winning. We don't like it when ISIS rise up. We don't like the Taliban taking over. This has... Created this sort of odd set of incentives where American presidents never want to say that we're at war, but they always want to say that we're killing the bad guys.

• 33:41Avery Trufelman?

  And so how do we have it all? How do we keep a small army and a small footprint and a small death toll while still trying to kill the quote unquote "bad guys"?

• 33:51Speaker 12

  When ISIS rose up in Iraq, the Obama administration relied on earlier authorizations for the use of military force to justify going back in without asking Congress to actually vote on that. Instead, they introduced special operators and started ramping up airstrikes while arguing publicly that this didn't really count as war.

• 34:10Avery Trufelman?

  Joint Special Operations Command became a way that American presidents can just quietly, low-key wage wars.

• 34:18Speaker 12

  Joe Biden bragging about not being at war while we're actually doing on-the-ground raids in East Africa. The Trump administration is currently attacking the Houthis in Yemen.

• 34:34Avery Trufelman?

  A huge change happened in the way special forces were used. And the War on Terror was a big pivot point. Because during the War on Terror, the number of special operators grew. And so did the number of their raids.

• 34:55Speaker 12

  Joint Special Operations Command goes from, I think, something like 12 raids a month in early 2004 to closer to 300 by late 2006.

• 35:04Avery Trufelman?

  Special forces were sent out day and night to perform raid after raid after raid, helicoptering under rooftops, breaking down doors, storming houses of suspected terrorists, yanking them out into the streets, grabbing their hard drives. The special forces had never been so busy. And they had never been so visible. It wasn't so secret what Delta Force and SEAL Team Six were doing. The whole military could see them now.

• 35:34Avery Trufelman?

  And also, during the war on terror, the American public at large was also getting a grasp of who these teams were. Because the United States military was also pushing special forces into the spotlight.

• 35:50Speaker 13

  They sort of used the SEALs as a recruiting tool because like, what's a better story than just like a badass SEAL going and killing Osama bin Laden?

• 35:57Avery Trufelman?

  Jasper Craven, reporter on veterans issues.

• 36:00Speaker 13

  So they like saw this as a way to goose recruitment, improve the military's image.

• 36:05Avery Trufelman?

  One of the first big breaks in the Navy SEAL's code of silence was the 2007 book and 2013 film Lone Survivor.

• 36:14Speaker 14

  There ain't nothing I can't do, no sky too high, no sea too rough.

• 36:17Avery Trufelman?

  The author of the book Lone Survivor is Marcus Luttrell. He was the recipient of the Navy Cross, which is the second highest award you can get below the Medal of Honor. And yes, Luttrell was the lone survivor of a firefight in Afghanistan. And the SEALs asked him to write his personal account during his enlistment. Like arguably, this book was funded by the American taxpayer.

• 36:41Speaker 13

  Yes, yes, they like gave him book leave to write this book because they were like desperate for some redeeming story in this failed war.

• 36:50Avery Trufelman?

  Which is wild. Like, this is a story about all of Luttrell's friends getting killed. It's in essence, a story about how a lot of things went wrong. You wouldn't think that this would exactly be recruitment material. But the military was clinging to the iconography of the badass special operator.

• 37:08Speaker 12

  Special operations often offers a neat, clean story.

• 37:11Avery Trufelman?

  Phil Cly again.

• 37:12Speaker 12

  So if you think of a lot of the media, television, movies, a lot of them focus around special operations.

• 37:19Avery Trufelman?

  Think about Zero Dark Thirty, Black Hawk Down, American Sniper, and Act of Valor, which was a movie featuring actual, active-duty Navy SEALs. The SEAL code of silence has been completely smashed to smithereens. It's like a tired joke now that you're not a Navy SEAL unless you have a podcast. And it was like a fixture of stories in magazines and late-night news reports that followed Navy SEALs as they conducted. A raid.

• 37:45Speaker 12

  The kind of quintessential element of the special operations community is the raid, right? There's a bad guy somewhere. And usually, they are a really bad guy. You know, most of the special operations guys can tell you about the torture house in the basement. And a bunch of tough American warriors gear up, they go get the guy, and they go home. And that has a nice, neat narrative structure. It's got a beginning, middle, and end in wars that have no beginning, middle, or end, really.

• 38:12Avery Trufelman?

  Special operations provided heroes to believe in. While the rest of the army ended up looking like unfortunate, lost Americans caught up in the confusing forever wars, which seemed not to be going well at all, special operators were out there doing their thing, hunting down bad guys, taking care of business, kicking ass.

• 38:31Speaker 13

  If you're really searching for some progress that the military's making, it's, yeah, it's sort of like knocking out some guys here and there, and they can still do that.

• 38:39Avery Trufelman?

  The United States wasn't necessarily winning these wars or finding any sort of overarching sense of meaning in whatever it was we were fighting for, but at least with these special forces guys, if nothing else.

• 38:53Speaker 13

  The look is undeniably cool.

• 38:59Avery Trufelman?

  With their new increased visibility, the special forces developed an aesthetic, which they did not used to have. Again, they used to be a secret. They didn't used to have a style.

• 39:11Speaker 11

  Look at photos of the first special forces units going into Afghanistan in 2001, and they look like a suburban dad on a fishing trip.

• 39:21Avery Trufelman?

  Charles McFarlane again.

• 39:22Speaker 11

  Compare that to what the fuck's his name, the Chris Kyle kind of like look, right?

• 39:26Avery Trufelman?

  Chris Kyle was the SEAL who American Sniper is about. He had the special forces look. Bearded, brawny, backwards baseball cap, lip full of dip.

• 39:37Speaker 11

  Dudes with like huge beards and like long hair and totally ripped and just wearing like lots of technical gear.

• 39:44Avery Trufelman?

  Elite special forces have long been allowed to have tattoos, before conventional soldiers were allowed to have tattoos. They wear a lot of outdoor gear from high-end equipment stores. They're the only guys in the military who get to have a rebellious spirit. They call themselves cowboys, or pipe hitters, or pirates. And while there are women in special forces, and there have even been some special forces teams made entirely of women, by and large, it is an extremely hyper masculine culture.

• 40:12Avery Trufelman?

  And not in a dad's on a fishing trip kind of way.

• 40:15Speaker 11

  It's a very different world.

• 40:16Avery Trufelman?

  And a big part of the special forces look was multicam. You could really tell that someone was a badass special forces guy because he was decked out in the cool camo that he clearly got to choose for himself. He wasn't walking around in that ugly digital UCP pattern that everybody hated. This was how he announced, I am a special operator, which in the military is one of the coolest things you can be. Cry's timing had been impeccable. To put it crudely, they got in on the ground floor of a style movement. They started multicam right around the start of the war on terror. Special forces hadn't been a market that anyone was catering to yet.

• 40:55Speaker 11

  The 2000s blew it up.

• 40:57Avery Trufelman?

  And you just found out by talking to people.

• 40:59Speaker 11

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's really, it's happening while you're doing it.

• 41:01Avery Trufelman?

  Delta Force first started wearing it, then the Army Rangers started wearing it, then it trickled down into the Army. When infantrymen needed gear, they'd buy their extra accessories in multicam. And the multicam trend hopped to different countries.

• 41:16Speaker 11

  So the British Special Forces start to adopt multicam because they're hanging out with Americans.

• 41:21Avery Trufelman?

  The special forces in Poland and Norway and Australia and New Zealand and other NATO countries' special forces also adopted multicam.

• 41:27Speaker 11

  Special forces is a very small community. They have their own fashion system, their own trends.

• 41:32Avery Trufelman?

  And then in foreign militaries, when they saw their special forces in multicam, they liked it so much, they took it a huge step further. A number of countries actually adopted multicam as the official uniform for their whole armies.

• 41:47Speaker 11

  And then the British conventional forces, Contract, Cry, to make a multicam for them. They want this cool, very in camouflage, but they also want to preserve some sense of national identity.

• 41:59Avery Trufelman?

  Australia also hires Cry Precision to make a custom version of multicam for them. And then so does Georgia and Denmark and Belgium and Portugal and Lebanon and Argentina and Chile and Malta and France.

• 42:08Speaker 11

  So we had to kind of make it for their country, which is fine.

• 42:10Avery Trufelman?

  Aside from the fact that multicam was cool and in, it was also a very smart diplomatic move for a country to buy their uniforms from a United States company. It signaled a political alignment with the United States. Which is ironic, considering that by 2010, multicam is pretty much everywhere except on the backs of the American Army. We were still in the digital hated UCP, which is just starting to look embarrassing and bad. And so at long last, Nadek finally began to pivot away from the digital pattern.

• 42:44Speaker 10

  Through our research, we've found that there is essentially no real advantage to having a digital pattern.

• 42:52Avery Trufelman?

  It baffles me that that didn't come up the first time around in the Army's billions of dollars of research developing this pattern, but-

• 42:58Speaker 11

  You know, this is right at the era. This is 2010, 2011.

• 43:01Avery Trufelman?

  Charles McFarlane also theorizes that the United States Army needed a new camouflage because now Obama is president and he needs to rebrand his war.

• 43:13Speaker 11

  Obama is really trying to own Afghanistan. It's the good war. Iraq was a mistake. Afghanistan, that's where we're supposed to be. So how can we quite literally differentiate what the soldiers look like in Afghanistan from what they look like in Iraq?

• 43:28Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, shit. We need to show Americans that there is a change on the ground now.

• 43:33Speaker 11

  The US Army is looking to adopt a new pattern. They've been told they need to get this camo into the field as soon as possible.

• 43:40Avery Trufelman?

  And so the search begins for a new camouflage pattern for the United States military. But, ugh, that's going to take such a long time. The Army just really wants to get a new change out as quickly as possible. Just anything to get rid of the UCP. So they put something out in the meantime, just something as a placeholder while the US military is developing its next camo.

• 44:03Speaker 11

  It's named OEFCP, so Operation Enduring Freedom. So that was the operation in Afghanistan camouflage pattern.

• 44:10Avery Trufelman?

  OEFCP. Catchy. That's the name of the little intermediary pattern.

• 44:14Speaker 11

  Armies love acronyms, right? Because you can hide behind confusing language.

• 44:18Avery Trufelman?

  And what the Army is hiding behind that confusing language is that OEFCP is just a fake name they made up for Multicam. Literally Multicam. The Army just bought Multicam in bulk and they issued it to all US soldiers deploying to Afghanistan at the peak of Obama's surge. Just to get them in something that was not UCP. So obviously Cry made a boatload of money. That's a lot of shirts and pants. Things were looking really good for Cry. And then in 2014, the United States Army finally announced their long awaited new camouflage.

• 45:03Avery Trufelman?

  It looked a lot like MultiCam.

• 45:07Speaker 11

  So the Army basically makes their knockoff MultiCam pattern, which they call OCP, or Operational Camouflage Pattern.

• 45:13Avery Trufelman?

  OCP, not to be confused with the name of that old digital pattern. That was UCP. This is OCP. And Charles McFarland says OCP was a great way to get all the benefits of MultiCam without having to pay a licensing fee to Cry Precision.

• 45:28Speaker 11

  It's basically MultiCam without the branding.

• 45:30Avery Trufelman?

  Which pissed off Cry Precision.

• 45:32Speaker 09

  Only after they had seen how well MultiCam was working and decided they probably ought to do something like that.

• 45:38Avery Trufelman?

  But when I talked to David Acetta at NADIC, he offered up a different version of events. I have to ask about the relationship with MultiCam.

• 45:46Speaker 10

  We worked with MultiCam to develop a version of this original pattern. The original pattern was called Scorpion, and it was developed here at NADIC.

• 45:55Avery Trufelman?

  NADIC will tell you that both MultiCam and OCP share a common ancestor, a pattern called Scorpion.

• 46:05Speaker 10

  Cry came in to work with us on Scorpion. You know, we did the research to figure out that that was the best pattern for the environments that we thought we might be having to send soldiers to at some point or another. The result was what they called MultiCam, and they trademarked as MultiCam.

• 46:25Avery Trufelman?

  I reached back out to Greg Thompson at Cry Precision to ask about Scorpion, and I got no reply. There are a few niche corners of the internet that are still debating if Cry trademarked Natick's research, or if Natick stole Cry's trademarked pattern. Here's what I can discern. Yeah, this pattern, Scorpion, is indeed the granddaddy of both OCP and Multicam. Cry introduced this idea back when they were a little baby company, being contracted by Natick. The Scorpion pattern was just one part of a whole bundle of ideas that Cry had proposed for a vision of what the soldier of the future would look like. Cry had always intended to patent multi-environment camouflage, and they did.

• 47:09Avery Trufelman?

  So I can see how Cry feels completely screwed over. And I can also understand why the United States Army wouldn't want to pay an expensive license fee to a private company that they feel they've already invested in. But it's really not for me to say if the government has the right to claim OCP. The point is that they've claimed it. What matters is where we've ended up through this whole drama, which is that there is a very popular, very cool, private pattern that's extremely easy to purchase, and an official Army camouflage pattern that look more or less identical.

• 47:45Speaker 15

  You can tell if they're next to each other. That's about it. You kind of have to have them, yeah, like touching.

• 47:49Avery Trufelman?

  This is Nick Edler, the general manager at Eastern Costume in Los Angeles. They're a costume house that specializes in uniforms for war movies and police procedurals.

• 47:58Speaker 15

  OK, there you go. Multicam, OCP.

• 48:01Avery Trufelman?

  So OCP is browner.

• 48:03Speaker 15

  Yes, there's more brown in it. There's more green in Multicam.

• 48:06Avery Trufelman?

  They are indeed nearly identical. And although Eastern Costume has almost every kind of regional camouflage from around the world, Nick says internationally, most other armies tend to wear a version of OCP or Multicam.

• 48:22Speaker 15

  A lot of other countries just wear our stuff.

• 48:25Speaker 06

  Oh God, don't get me started.

• 48:27Avery Trufelman?

  Logan McGrath, the surplus seller predicts that in 20 years, like every military, especially in Europe, is going to be wearing some version of multicam.

• 48:35Speaker 06

  All of the cool, unique stuff, like the French woodland, it's all going to be multicam of some type and it's going to get pretty boring. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to that.

• 48:44Speaker 11

  There's a lot of multicam in Ukraine.

• 48:45Avery Trufelman?

  Charles McFarland says today soldiers fighting for both Russia and Ukraine wear multicam, to the point where they have to wear colored armbands to tell who is on what side. The Taliban wear multicam.

• 48:57Speaker 11

  When Afghanistan was falling to the Taliban, a lot more images of Taliban soldiers were coming out for the first time. They all look like American special forces. They all are copying that style. They're all wearing multicam and they're wearing backwards baseball hats. It almost looks like they should be like packing a lip too. Like it's just, it's so weird. Special Forces culture is culture in the way that like everybody is trying to emulate it, no matter what side.

• 49:25Avery Trufelman?

  You can find multicam in a lot of places domestically, too. There were examples all over Eastern Costumes Warehouse. Nick had uniforms for police and FBI teams and US Marshals and Drug Enforcement and Border Patrol, all of whom have started wearing multicam. This is all SWAT teams.

• 49:43Speaker 15

  This is all KRI as well.

• 49:44Avery Trufelman?

  It's like actually what SWAT teams wear.

• 49:45Speaker 15

  Yep.

• 49:46Avery Trufelman?

  And it's basically the same structure as the military.

• 49:48Speaker 15

  Yep, that's the exact same uniform, just in green. This is the LAPD one.

• 49:52Avery Trufelman?

  And it's made by KRI and it looks exactly the same.

• 49:54Speaker 15

  Correct.

• 49:54Avery Trufelman?

  In the lead up to Biden's inauguration, the National Guard in DC announced that they would wear black vests over their camouflage so that you could tell them apart from local law enforcement, who were wearing nearly identical camouflage. And that was January 6th, when the Capitol was stormed by a bunch of extremist groups and militias, many of whom were wearing multicam. Everybody looked very similar.

• 50:16Speaker 15

  And every branch wears this now.

• 50:17Avery Trufelman?

  Which?

• 50:18Speaker 15

  This one.

• 50:18Avery Trufelman?

  Multicam?

• 50:19Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 50:19Avery Trufelman?

  Oh my God.

• 50:20Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 50:21Avery Trufelman?

  KRI is killing it. During Black Lives Matter protests, federal agents were deployed to American cities wearing OCP, looking exactly like police multicam.

• 50:31Avery Trufelman?

  "The public could not tell who were police and who were from the federal government." "It's not good for our democracy," said David LaPan, a retired Marine Colonel and former Department of Homeland Security spokesman. "The public should not feel there's a militarized response to civil unrest." Cut to, right now, and this is the reality in the United States, as the National Guard is being brazenly marched into American cities, where local police are openly cosplaying, like Delta Force, and where, it turns out, a lot of military surplus ends up. American police can get military equipment from the Department of Defense entirely for free. They just have to pay for shipping.

• 51:13Avery Trufelman?

  Well over 8,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states and four US territories participate in this program, called the 1033 Program, where they can get everything from office supplies, to computers, to vehicles, to night vision, to tactical gear, to ammunition, from the Pentagon. I mean visually, these entities have become indistinguishable. Multicam has gone through the whole trend cycle. It was niche, and now it's everywhere, which means it's inevitably getting a bit passé. Certainly to the originators of the look, the special forces, who are moving on to the next thing. I don't know what that next thing is yet.

• 51:53Avery Trufelman?

  I hear some special operators have switched back to classic 80s woodland camo. But whatever the special forces adopt moving forward, I'm sure I'll eventually see it trickle down into my local police. The military has trends, just like the civilian world has trends. It's just that in the former, the stakes of these trends are much higher. And they risk severing our trust in each other.

• 52:23Avery Trufelman?

  But I'm not telling you to throw out camouflage or that you can't wear it. There's more to it after the break. I first heard about The RealReal, I think, a decade ago. Suddenly, it was this place where you could get Prada pumps and Burberry jackets and Gucci handbags for a song. Like, I recently got this vintage 90s Yoji Yamamoto skirt that I wear constantly. The RealReal is adding thousands and thousands of items every single day. So it really does still feel like a treasure hunt, even though it has all the convenience of shopping online. And I periodically use it to clean out my closet. They make it so easy. The RealReal sends a representative to my tiny apartment to pick up my things and assess them for me. And then it's done. Money just appears in my account.

• 53:07Avery Trufelman?

  The RealReal is the most trusted name in authenticated luxury resale. With over 10,000 new arrivals daily, no one does resale like The RealReal. And now, get $25 off your first purchase when you go to the realreal.com articals. That's the realreal.com articals to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at the realreal.com articals. Sometimes, when I am feeling bold, I wear my army pants around in Brooklyn, and they get a ton of compliments. OCP might be passe in the military, but in my neighborhood, camouflage is cool. Ask a cool Brooklyn person like Tim Hotepaku.

• 53:52Speaker 16

  My name is Tim Hotepaku. I'm a writer, I'm a cultural worker, I'm an editor, and I'm a person who is from Brooklyn.

• 53:59Avery Trufelman?

  As we were talking, Tim was wearing a camouflage patterned rain jacket.

• 54:03Speaker 16

  It is a Columbia jacket. It's kind of a duck camo. And I gravitated toward the camo because I'm a person who's been wearing camo for a long time because it is part of my, like... Signature, even amongst my friends, like Tim wears camo a lot, right?

• 54:16Avery Trufelman?

  So the question is, of course, why? I mean, I'm asking Tim, but I'm also asking myself and all the designers at Columbia and every other company who keeps putting camouflage on everything.

• 54:27Speaker 16

  Even high fashion has camo prints or expensive streetwear has been doing it for a long time.

• 54:32Avery Trufelman?

  Some of these streetwear brands are like scholars of camouflage.

• 54:35Speaker 16

  I think Supreme literally just put out some new collaboration. Maharishi did it for a long time.

• 54:40Avery Trufelman?

  Why could I not resist the urge to buy those army pants? Why do we, you and me, Tim, love this pattern so much?

• 54:47Speaker 16

  When people ask me about camo and why I like to wear it, I think my influences are Rastafarians from East New York. They wore camo, they wore a lot of army surplus stuff.

• 54:59Avery Trufelman?

  Or street artists, like in a photograph by Martha Cooper that Tim saw.

• 55:02Speaker 16

  And I think the photo was from like the early 80s and it depicted three graph writers on a subway car.

• 55:08Avery Trufelman?

  Graph writers?

• 55:09Speaker 16

  Graffiti writers. And one of them is wearing a pair of camo pants with tennis shoes. So like for me, camo represents things that I really looked up to or was interested in as a child, that I think were models of how to exist.

• 55:25Avery Trufelman?

  And probably the most important models to Tim were the members of Boot Camp Click.

• 55:30Speaker 16

  Oh, Boot Camp Click. That was another major influence in terms of making camo something cool.

• 55:35Avery Trufelman?

  A collective of rappers and producers in Brooklyn.

• 55:38Speaker 16

  They didn't invent wearing camo, but they were the people who kind of made it their identity, part of their visual ID. Like camo is associated with ruggedness. It's associated with preparedness, with masculinity. Boot Camp Click as a coalescence of friends who all rapped and produced and made songs together, their approach to coming into music was like, we're almost like the military in that we have our stratification and our ranks and that we're disciplined in these ways. But it wasn't straight head to toe, like we're dressing like fucking soldiers everywhere. It wasn't that.

• 56:14Avery Trufelman?

  It wasn't cosplay.

• 56:15Speaker 16

  It wasn't fucking stolen valor. And I think even in a Boot Camp Click, they make that clear. They're like, nah, we're our own kind of military entity. Their whole style was like mixing it up with different things. It'd be like big t-shirts, it'd be streetwear, Rastafarian-inspired stuff, you know, like everything that's fashion or expression, whatever, is all about the context in which it exists and what people project onto the thing based on the perspective they come from. Hip hop is a composite culture. It's about mixing disparate elements, putting them together and giving it your context that you put in it. And that's what I do fashion wise anyway.

• 56:52Speaker 16

  Like for me, wearing camo means hip hop, Brooklyn, like rosters, boot camp, click, all that. But if I'm in the Caribbean, Caribbean for my people in Brooklyn, certain islands, you cannot wear camo. And they will tell you, take that shit off. I went to Trinidad for carnival in like, maybe oh six, oh four, or whatever. And literally cats with, with fucking machine guns will roll up to you and be like, yo, you need to take those off. You need to change your pants because these are places that have had military coups.

• 57:25Avery Trufelman?

  Well, I mean, we also live in a nation that had a coup. And I do, no, really, like, don't you think that that's changed the way that you see camos since January 6th?

• 57:36Speaker 16

  I mean, when I see a black person in camo, right? I think either military or a person wearing it for fashionable reasons or utility. When I see a white person in camo, I'm like, oh, militia men. While camo might be a privilege for the civilian to wear, I also feel like it's free marketing for the military. America's very much into war and it's militarism. I'm very critical of militarism, but at the same time, I do have maybe a nostalgia that informs my aesthetic. Because I associate it with boot camp, click, or the rosters or like the coolest people in the world who look like something between like a general and like some Ethiopian sage.

• 58:19Avery Trufelman?

  The military is still baked into all these cultural references, even if they've gone through a few layers of interpretation. And Tim knows this.

• 58:28Speaker 16

  I think being a person who examines their fundamental and foundational like beliefs about the world and themselves. You have to get to a point where you are accepting of the water you swim in. And I can talk about why I wear it and I can understand what I think I'm communicating when I wear it without being subsumed by meaning. And I think I can walk and chew gum when it comes to, you know, wearing camo. You know what I'm saying?

• 59:16Avery Trufelman?

  Articles of Interest is made by Avery Trufelman. My story editor is Alison Behringer, especially on this one. Sorry, this one was a lot of back and forth, Alison. This was also a lot for season consultant, costume historian, Charles McFarlane. Thanks, Charles. The fact checker was Yasmin Alsayad. The music is by Ray Royal, Lulatone, and Sasami. The engineering and mastering was by Jocelyn Gonzalez and her team at PRX. And a very special thanks, this episode, to the icon Amber Brookman, who was one of the first to help Cry Precision print multicam. She has an amazing personal story about finding her way from the world of high fashion modeling into the performance textile printing world. You can read all about it in her memoir, "Nobody's Girl." Thanks so much, Amber. Also, huge thanks to the journalism of Wesley Morgan,

• 1:00:00Avery Trufelman?

  who has written a lot about camouflage, and his journalism was a big resource for me. Thanks as well to Maxwell Neely Cohen for pushing me in a lot of right directions. Thanks also to Hannah Cressino. Thank you also, Drew Haupt, and thank you, dear listener. For images of what multicam and OCP look like next to each other, go to articlesofinterest.substack.com.