Gear: Chapter 4

The end of the draft leads to the yuppification of the field jacket. Images links and more atarticlesofinterest.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

  Platoon, halt, right face on my command. Chapter four.

• 0:10Avery Trufelman?

  This gentleman you hear doing the drill sergeant introductions for each chapter is Ray Christian.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Just for shits and giggles, as we used to say in the army. Trophyman, front and center. What the hell are you even doing here?

• 0:24Avery Trufelman?

  He's good, right? Ray is a professional podcaster. That's how we know each other. He has a beautiful show called What's Ray Saying? But he's also the real deal.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  I spent a couple of years as a drill sergeant. Like all people in my occupation, I was an infantryman.

• 0:39Avery Trufelman?

  An infantryman is a ground combat soldier. The infantry is the foundational element of the army. They're the ones who actually pull triggers. When you think of an infantryman, you can think of those little green, plastic army men. But there aren't as many little green army men as you'd think. The infantry is only 15% of active duty army.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  So there's only a few people that serve in that. There are probably more policemen in New York City than there are infantrymen than the whole United States Army.

• 1:11Avery Trufelman?

  Really?

• 1:12Speaker 00

  So everybody is in support of that tip of the spear. And I happen to have been one of those. You know, I was in the infantry. So I was a rifleman and a grenadier and a machine gunner, all that pretty much at the same rank, private, then sergeant in an airborne infantry unit.

• 1:31Avery Trufelman?

  Were you like aspiring to ascend through the ranks? Or is that just something that happens if you stick around long enough?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Well, you have to aspire because there's certain points. It's kind of like up or out. You don't get to stay as long as you want to stay. At certain ranks, you have to go. If you don't.

• 1:48Avery Trufelman?

  So you wanted to stay.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  I wanted to stay because that's all I had to do was to stay. Cause I grew up in the army. I joined the army when I was 17. So it was the only adult life I'd ever known. Every major milestone that you could think of, that you have as a young adult from 17 to 21, all that happened to me in the army.

• 2:12Avery Trufelman?

  This is when Ray gets asked.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  So Ray, what made you decide that the ghetto life was not for you? Being a criminal was not for you?

• 2:22Avery Trufelman?

  Gets this idea that like the military saved you.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  I was breaking into somebody's house one day and it just struck me, this country has done a lot for me. I'm gonna change my ways and I'm signing up.

• 2:36Avery Trufelman?

  Obviously Ray's joking. Ultimately, the military was just a good fit for him.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  I was a kid climbing giant buildings, you know, to get pigeons. I was crawling on the underpass of a highway once, under the bottom, like Spider-Man, you know? But that was, that was me. I was that kid. And when I joined, I was around other people like that. Broken football players and high school wrestlers and hunters and guys who ran and boxed. And grew up a little edgy, you know? So why do you do it? If you come from my background or people who come from blue collar backgrounds, who do dangerous work anyway. If you work in mines, if you work in tunnels, if you work on the roadways, you work on top of scaffolds, putting buildings together.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  The blue collar world is already dangerous.

• 3:29Avery Trufelman?

  And unlike working in a mine or digging tunnels or working roadways, the army had lunch.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Lunch. Yeah. You don't have to be hungry all day. You could actually have a mid-break in there. The military regularly made sure that you had three meals, always. That to me was like really over the top because I never ate like that ever.

• 3:54Avery Trufelman?

  Like you didn't eat lunch?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Three, uh, lunch was, school, maybe summertime, never. Holidays, never. But, phew, the army lunch. Three guaranteed meals a day, getting you up to nutritional standards, eating them good meals every day. Say fix your teeth, fill all your cavities, get you off of drugs and alcohol, get you the program. It didn't matter what you said was wrong with you, they would look into it. It's that kind of leapfrog into the middle class. It's, it's as simple as that.

• 4:31Avery Trufelman?

  The army introduced Ray to all these middle-class norms and expectations that he'd never, ever thought about before.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  It's these little details of what the rest of the world held as standards of behavior, life, that I didn't even know existed. One of them was sheets, two sheets on the bed, changing sheets every week, mind blown.

• 4:53Avery Trufelman?

  There was laundry day, there was regular cleaning day.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  I definitely learned how to mop, clean, wax, strip, buff floors like an expert.

• 5:03Avery Trufelman?

  Shirts had to be folded, pleats had to be ironed.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  That's the ticket punch for those of us who don't go to college. So it's a start for those of us who come from that background and we trying to get that government job, that city job, that business job. I can work in your factory and be a mailman. I was a proud American service member too, sir. Clean, cut, good, all American Negro. That is the reason why blacks have always served.

• 5:29Avery Trufelman?

  The Buffalo soldiers were there on the front lines in Cuba. The NAACP encouraged black Americans to join up in World War II. Military service was indisputable proof of worthy citizenship. You could rub that in the face of any racist.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Because they would always throw up the fact that we contribute nothing. Blacks don't do anything, they never contribute.

• 5:51Avery Trufelman?

  And Ray thinks this is precisely why there's always so much political tension around who can serve in the US military.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Trans people, gay people, even when I served, there were just, they're always just mumbling and then, you know, damn, black people and Hispanics. Goddamn women and homosexuals. That all comes back to what I said before, because if they serve, they're gonna say we contributed to society. So that's the motivation for keeping them out, because they might do good shit and ask for rights.

• 6:24Avery Trufelman?

  Social advancement, respect, lunch, dental care. These were all reasons that Ray and his fellow blue collar soldiers joined the military. A burning desire to defend the homeland? Less so.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Very few people joined with any understanding of that kind of global ideas. The politics is so probably low down on a scale in terms of people having views about the right and wrong of deployments and the US military actions abroad. You know, what they're thinking about is getting a low interest rate on the car. If your life is a little more privileged, the motivation for the guys from the middle and upper middle classes and the guys in the upper classes from the officer ranks, their motivation may be a little more patriotic.

• 7:17Avery Trufelman?

  Sure.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  But the attrition rate amongst them on that is high, too.

• 7:22Avery Trufelman?

  Because being a soldier, as Ray found out, is a very hard job.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  You're bitching and complaining on a regular basis. You just can't function without complaining, because everything is stupid when you're a private. Everything, because you do things that don't make no sense.

• 7:38Avery Trufelman?

  Like what?

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Cleaning garbage cans until they're spit polished.

• 7:42Avery Trufelman?

  What?

• 7:43Speaker 00

  And picking up trash all the time. Military bases are just sparkling clean. Hard to be patriotic when you're cleaning out garbage cans, you know? And then you may not be feeling it when you are freezing to death on an ambush patrol on a demilitarized zone in Korea. You're in the army talking shit. Because we're, we're, we're on the shitty end of the stick. For everybody else, it's theoretical. You know, and political and slacktivism. When you're in the shit, you could say, this is fucked up.

• 8:15Avery Trufelman?

  And so you're like in battle, being like, this war is fucked up.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty constant. The people who tell stories that are super hyper positive are the stories that I'm suspicious of.

• 8:30Avery Trufelman?

  And yeah, Ray knows what you're wondering.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Probably everybody who ever served across all times. That's the number one question. Did you kill anybody? That's the number one question. Usually it's kind of just, they're just throwing it out there or there's morbid curiosity. Some people are more thoughtful. I should say, thoughtless people ask those questions. So the answer would be, I'm gonna say yes directly and indirectly. When I was in it is all I wanted.

• 9:03Avery Trufelman?

  You wanted to see combat.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's career enhancing.

• 9:06Avery Trufelman?

  After months of cleaning garbage cans and menial tasks, Ray wanted to fight.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  And we talk about and have conversations about other people are scared to do this and they won't do it. Never, that's when you're in it.

• 9:19Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Some people want to test it. Find out. Could they do it? Could you? Would you run? Would you curl up in a ball?

• 9:31Avery Trufelman?

  I just, it just feels so antiquated to me, Ray. I'm like a proud coward.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Well, this is the same thing that makes people shoot people. A few people will go, I won't. You're gonna have to kill me. I won't kill anybody. But test it? It takes a great soul to be tested truly in your belief in, I don't want to be aggressive. I don't want to do this. You might probably get to a point where you're gonna go, no, I want to stay alive. You'll want to live. Instinct. And of course, after that, you're gonna hate everybody for what you had to do to stay alive. And you survive and you're very bitter.

• 10:09Avery Trufelman?

  Are you very bitter? You don't seem, you seem the opposite of bitter.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's in a place.

• 10:16Avery Trufelman?

  Do you think you knew what you were signing up for? Cause you had heard stories about the military from your family.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  You hear a romanticized version. These are World War II footages and you see the black men looking very dignified and courageous and beautiful and just wonderful. And you can look at those photographs and go, this is my granddaddy. This is my great grandfather. Look at him. Wonderful. We're so proud of his service.

• 10:44Avery Trufelman?

  But Ray was also hearing another version of what he was signing up for.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  From guys who served in Vietnam, who wouldn't have been but five, six years older than I was, who were getting drafted and hated in.

• 10:56Avery Trufelman?

  When Ray enlisted in June of 1978, it was three years after the Vietnam War ended. So he went in with lower expectations and sobering warnings.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  To where you're a dead goddamn fool for serving in the military. In the black community, I'd be, why would you serve for the white man? Why would you serve for a country that doesn't give a damn about you? Are you stupid? Are you stupid? So I knew that.

• 11:22Avery Trufelman?

  And around this time, the funny thing was, no matter their opinion of the war, no matter if they were in the military or not, no matter if they had fought in Vietnam, by the late 70s, everyone was wearing army field jackets.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  They, John Lennon used to wear.

• 11:40Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was in the army, but like, I would go home on leave or be out, you know, I'd have on my field jacket, my jeans.

• 11:48Avery Trufelman?

  After the social and political upheaval of the 1960s, there was this odd flash of unity before the death of the military surplus store. After the break.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  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 Rishi Kesh 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.

• 12:50Avery Trufelman?

  I always thought that brands like Prada and Louis Vuitton and Tiffany were way beyond my pay grade. But they're actually not, because at The RealReal, you can get all of these name brands that you know and niche designers you don't yet at up to 90% off retail. And The RealReal is so serious about authentication, you know that every single thing is guaranteed authentic. 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 therealreal.com articals. That's therealreal.com articals to get your $25 off.

• 13:33Avery Trufelman?

  Start shopping now at therealreal.com articals.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  These are mostly 41 jackets, McAnaws.

• 13:41Avery Trufelman?

  Journalist and costume historian Charles McFarlane has a number of authentic field jackets, some that were precursors to the M43, a number that came after.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  I love the kind of sporterized version of the 43 jacket.

• 13:53Avery Trufelman?

  And then Charles laid out this one 1940s field jacket that was in terrible shape.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  The lining is in bad shape and it's been repaired. It's not a great example, but...

• 14:02Avery Trufelman?

  Charles flipped the jacket over. That was such a good reveal. There's a peace sign on the back.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's a peace sign on the back, probably done in some kind of marker.

• 14:12Avery Trufelman?

  Really janky.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is a really great example of a jacket that was acquired by someone in the 1960s and worn during the counterculture movement.

• 14:21Avery Trufelman?

  In the 1960s, there was still tons of military surplus left over from World War II. But unlike the previous generation, the generation that had treated this surplus like good, quality, cheap basics, the anti-war movement of the 60s flaunted these old field jackets and fatigues. They weren't playing down the fact that these were military clothes. They were playing it up. They enjoyed actively messing with the symbolism and uniform of the United States Army.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  The counterculture that existed during Vietnam just completely like copped all of the swag that the military had, you know?

• 14:57Avery Trufelman?

  This is Jasper Craven, a journalist who covers the military and veterans issues.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  My dad was deeply involved in the anti-war movement to the point that he dated Jane Fonda for a time. Get out? Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  There's a terrible demonstration going on outside.

• 15:11Speaker 06

  Well, in that case, I better call out the 3rd Marines.

• 15:13Speaker 05

  You can't, Richard.

• 15:13Speaker 06

  Why not?

• 15:14Speaker 05

  It is the 3rd Marines.

• 15:17Avery Trufelman?

  Famously, in 1971, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland toured an anti-war comedy show across Southeast Asia called FTA, or Fuck the Army, and stationed soldiers loved it.

• 15:30Speaker 07

  There are apparently several thousand more GIs outside that can't come in, so we're going to do a second show.

• 15:37Avery Trufelman?

  Like there was an anti-war movement within the Army.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  The military was used to fawning coverage, boys desperately running up to the recruitment station the day they turned 17. So they always assumed that they would hold a soft place in the heart of America. And when they lost that, they became pretty spooked. And because so many people all of a sudden became acutely aware of how the military worked, because they were getting drafted into it and seeing its barbarism and its brutality and the emptiness of the mission and everything else, it just, it created this massive movement.

• 16:17Avery Trufelman?

  Exhibit A, a vintage Zippo lighter that Jasper has.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  It says it on the Zippo, and it's been in Vietnam. It's like this insane artifact from that time and that place. It says on it, "Ours is not to do or die. Ours is to smoke and get high." That is all I need to refute someone's argument that like man is inherently violent.

• 16:39Avery Trufelman?

  The Vietnam War is this revolution in aesthetics, right? It's this move from do or die to smoke and get high.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  To talk about like, style for a minute, it used to be that at West Point, one of the few perks of being a West Point cadet is that on the weekends, you could take a bus or a train down to Manhattan and be treated like royalty. You put on your uniform and you could get free drinks. Cadets would sometimes get free hotel rooms. You were a hero. You were 18, 19. You were in Manhattan. You had the time of your life. It was incredible. But then Vietnam happened and all of a sudden, there were people protesting outside of the gates at West Point. And if you went out of those gates with your uniform,

• 17:30Speaker 04

  chances are you would get screened that. And all of the girls at Vassar and the women's colleges, all of a sudden were like, "We don't want to actually hang out with the West Point guys anymore. You know, we want to go smoke pot on the lawn and sing Peter, Paul and Mary." And the uniform lost its luster and a new style that was an explicit reaction to it came into vogue.

• 17:55Avery Trufelman?

  It was in vogue to wear the military-issue field jacket with long hair, to wear it with jeans, to draw on it, to put a patch on it, to wear it wrong. And by the 1970s, a new version of it had appeared in surplus stores. There was an updated field jacket for the Vietnam War, the M65.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Derivative of the 43 jacket.

• 18:18Avery Trufelman?

  The M65 was the latest version of that green M43 field jacket. M still stands for model. This one, made, of course, in 1965. It's essentially still the olive-green, scientifically-tested, layered military jacket that you are probably imagining. But the M65 has some cool new features.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  And then the M65, that one's getting even more technical. That one's probably like, the closest to like, GORP stuff that you could find in the 60s, right? Where you have this collapsible hood that zips into the collar of the jacket, creating like a Mandarin stand collar. And then there's Velcro along the cuffs, which are designed to hook into large mittens.

• 18:59Avery Trufelman?

  And so, it's amazing. The M65, this Vietnam-era field jacket, is practical, it's cutting-edge, it's affordable, and it's extremely cool in the counterculture. It's the ultimate subversion.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  You have movies like Serpico.

• 19:12Avery Trufelman?

  Al Pacino is wearing a beanie cap and an M65.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Supposed to be like a real outsider, New York City cop, fighting corruption. He's wearing military surplus.

• 19:21Avery Trufelman?

  It's what the faux-hopped Robert De Niro is wearing in Taxi Driver. I mean, the jacket is all over the trope of the mentally scarred, unhinged young veteran coming back from Vietnam. And so the M65 becomes what grizzled outsider rebels wear.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  It's a way of dropping out of American consumer culture. They're hard-wearing uniforms that you don't have to replace, that it's taking you out of the fashion cycle. It's allowing you to opt out.

• 19:50Avery Trufelman?

  When asked about the uptick in sales, one Army Navy store manager told the Boston Globe in 1970, "The kids tell me they're boycotting fashion and rebelling against the system. I believe them."

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Truly the dream of the counterculture is to drop out of the system. This is one way to do that.

• 20:05Avery Trufelman?

  And increasingly, dropping out of the system also meant going outside. Sleeping in a tent under the stars, foraging for mushrooms, building a yurt, planting a farm with all the seeds and tools you ordered from the Whole Earth Catalog.

• 20:20Speaker 08

  Americans became more interested in pursuing outdoor leisure in the late 60s and 1970s as a part of the broader rise of popular environmentalism.

• 20:28Avery Trufelman?

  Rachel S. Gross, author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods.

• 20:32Speaker 08

  In other words, Americans were paying far more attention to their relationship to nature, to what they called Mother Earth. And so going hiking, visiting a national park, going camping, were all ways to reconnect with what they felt they had lost. That's not too different in some ways than the kind of elite northeastern men who were saying, "We lost our virility and therefore must go to the woods to regain it in 1890." The difference here is that it's a much broader swath of the American population, who feels this sense of loss and desire for reconnection.

• 21:06Avery Trufelman?

  More Americans are now able to get that reconnection thanks to lightweight gear from Jerry and Holubar and new clothes made with Gore-Tex.

• 21:14Speaker 08

  There are not other waterproof breathable rain jackets before Gore-Tex in the 1970s. That change should not be understated, in part because it reflects new safety for outdoors people who spend a lot of time in those kinds of situations.

• 21:29Avery Trufelman?

  And these new materials and brands all mean that in the 70s, there are so many new options for what to wear outdoors. The North Face was founded in 1966. Bass Pro Shops is founded in 1972. Patagonia, Inc. is founded in 1973. But among this profusion of exciting new brands comes the collapse of an old one.

• 21:53Speaker 08

  Whereas other outdoor companies are growing because they continue to specialize in outdoor activities, Abercrombie & Fitch goes in another direction. By the early 1970s, they're selling fashionable bell-bottom pants, but not necessarily hiking pants.

• 22:09Avery Trufelman?

  In the Abercrombie catalog titled, "The 70s of Christmas", you can buy clothing with built-in electric heaters, a floor-length velvet caftan, a gold giraffe brooch, a blue fox fur coat lined with new synthetic silk from DuPont, alongside a light-up globe, a hammock, a massive automatic can opener, a flashlight that runs on water, a lamp that doubles as a gun rack, and, my favorite, an ATV that can turn into a boat.

• 22:33Speaker 08

  So they're quite eccentric in the goods that they sell, and they're trying to maintain a very elite customer base, but not one that's based in any kind of specific sport. This is actually what brings on Abercrombie & Fitch's bankruptcy in the mid-1970s.

• 22:48Avery Trufelman?

  Paving the way for Abercrombie & Fitch to be purchased and rebranded and reborn in time to terrorize me throughout my middle school years. But in the 1970s, the demise of Abercrombie & Fitch was a clear warning to the other outdoor brands.

• 23:01Speaker 08

  They see Abercrombie & Fitch's failure as a cautionary tale about what happens if outdoor companies lean too far into the trends and styles of the day.

• 23:12Avery Trufelman?

  And maybe this is why these outdoor brands play it pretty safe. Just a few years into their existence, Patagonia releases their classic fleece. So classic, it seems almost trendless.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  So Patagonia snapped you this, like their classic fleece, right? Has the five snaps.

• 23:30Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  You pull over.

• 23:32Avery Trufelman?

  To Charles McFarlane, this design is awfully familiar.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  That is essentially a five-button US Army sweater. Instead of it being fleece, it's wool, but it acts the same purpose. It is that mid-layer between your base layers and the outer wind-resistant layer.

• 23:49Avery Trufelman?

  By the 1970s, you could buy outdoor clothes, even military-style-looking outdoor clothes, at a lot of different places. The military surplus shop was no longer the de facto place to get gear, like it had been in the 1950s. This means, in the 1970s, if one chose to wear military surplus, that was a deliberate style decision. That was a statement. And it was an interesting statement, right? Because it could be anti-war, but not necessarily anti-soldier.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Once vets started getting in on the action and throwing their medals on the steps of the Capitol and wearing their fatigues in protest movements.

• 24:35Avery Trufelman?

  Jasper Craven says the US military lost control of their own symbolism.

• 24:39Speaker 04

  And so they kind of had to just be like, we need to stop the draft. We need to sort of like duck down, recalibrate, reconsider ourselves, and sort of rebrand.

• 24:52Avery Trufelman?

  It wasn't only a triumph of the counterculture that ended the draft. There were also a lot of conservative thinkers who were against the draft, but for very different reasons. They thought the drafty army was too big and unwieldy and opinionated and unprofessional. Soldiers were forming their own underground presses. They were making their own attempts at unionization. They were straight up refusing orders.

• 25:15Speaker 09

  Back in the world, they call rebellion here. It's just downright refusal.

• 25:18Avery Trufelman?

  This is a soldier in Vietnam, as captured by a report from CBS.

• 25:22Speaker 09

  Yeah, there's a whole company. CEO says, okay, we're gonna walk through it. And the whole company says, no, negative.

• 25:28Avery Trufelman?

  The draftee army, it seemed, was careening towards a complete breakdown. And also, conservatives who believed in small government thought that government shouldn't make citizens fight.

• 25:41Speaker 10

  The use of compulsion is repugnant to our society, except in cases of dire emergency.

• 25:46Avery Trufelman?

  The conservative economist Milton Friedman had a big role in ending the draft. He argued that if the US government just spent more money on military salaries, they could attract and retain an army of 3 million soldiers, who would be more professional and serve longer. And ta-da, we could get rid of the draft.

• 26:03Speaker 10

  And return to a voluntary system.

• 26:05Avery Trufelman?

  And sure enough, in 1973, when the American Army became an all-volunteer force, annual pay and housing compensation for soldiers went up by 80%. Enlistment bonuses shot up. VA healthcare got invigorated. The military offered low-interest home loans. The end of the draft basically helped create that package of incentives that appealed to soldiers like Ray.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  As a professional soldier, the idea of draft army was just, no one wanted that.

• 26:33Avery Trufelman?

  No one. Even though everybody had their different reasons for it, after Vietnam, everyone was on the same page. And this meant, purely aesthetically, the anti-war stance and the anti-war look became accepted enough and safe enough that it became mainstream. The style of actively messing with military surplus, wearing it wrong, putting patches on it, writing on it, was no longer as threatening or radical or disrespectful. It got to the point where military surplus stores themselves were hopping on the trend.

• 27:15Speaker 11

  And then someone had the bright idea, let's be a little fashionable.

• 27:19Avery Trufelman?

  This is Carl Goldberg. His family owned iGoldberg Army and Navy. It was the premier military surplus store in Philadelphia.

• 27:26Speaker 11

  It was a huge store and it became the place to shop.

• 27:30Avery Trufelman?

  Carl had a bunch of the catalogs from iGoldberg.

• 27:33Speaker 11

  Let me find a really old one. This is 58. That's the year I was born.

• 27:37Avery Trufelman?

  The 1958 catalog is an outdoor equipment catalog. iGoldberg calls itself Camp Town, USA. It looks like the old mailers from Jerry or Holubar. It's all gear.

• 27:50Speaker 11

  Here, this is a camper's bag.

• 27:52Avery Trufelman?

  What it says is all rubber, water and airtight. And then you can see in these catalog covers what happened over time.

• 27:58Speaker 11

  My father turned it into a fashion business.

• 28:00Avery Trufelman?

  On the cover of the winter 1977, 1978 iGoldberg catalog, now billed as Army and Navy and Everything, there's a chic model with a blonde bob wearing a military beret cocked like Bonnie Parker.

• 28:14Speaker 11

  You took something that was basic and utilitarian and you could zhuzh it up. I'm gonna take this stuff and I'm gonna make it look cool. And that's what my father did.

• 28:24Avery Trufelman?

  Carl's father imported exotic surplus from Europe, where more countries were becoming liberal democracies and paring down their armies.

• 28:32Speaker 11

  He found things that were much more interesting in Europe.

• 28:34Avery Trufelman?

  He would dye the surplus clothes fun colors.

• 28:37Speaker 11

  You get a cool patch or something, a fun belt or whatever it was, make it look cool.

• 28:42Avery Trufelman?

  And before long, there would be competition.

• 28:45Speaker 11

  It just felt so stylized and contrived to me.

• 28:51Avery Trufelman?

  The "it" that Carl is referring to is a store that Patricia Ziegler started in the late 70s.

• 28:58Speaker 12

  The surplus stores were selling things for the lower prices. And I figured that we could actually sell the same pieces for a lot more if we added style.

• 29:08Avery Trufelman?

  Initially, Patricia wasn't a fan of military surplus herself.

• 29:11Speaker 12

  I was such an anti-war person because it was the Vietnam War period and my friends were getting drafted. So I didn't really have a warm feeling about military surplus.

• 29:21Avery Trufelman?

  In the 1970s, Patricia was an artist. She was working in-house as an illustrator at the San Francisco Chronicle. And that's where she started dating a reporter named Mel.

• 29:30Speaker 12

  I met Mel and he would buy things at surplus stores.

• 29:34Avery Trufelman?

  Mel and Patricia fell in love and together they quit their nine to five jobs.

• 29:38Speaker 12

  We want to see the world. And so we quit. But then freelancing, you know, can get a little tough.

• 29:44Avery Trufelman?

  They just wanted to make enough money to paint and write and travel.

• 29:48Speaker 12

  But then Mel got another freelance assignment in Australia. And when he came back and he was wearing this British Burma jacket.

• 29:56Avery Trufelman?

  Mel had gotten it at a surplus shop down there. And to Patricia, this jacket had a really different vibe.

• 30:02Speaker 12

  And I noticed it right away, not because it looked military, it looked really safari rugged.

• 30:08Avery Trufelman?

  Mel looked really dashing and swashbuckling in this jacket. Patricia changed the buttons and added suede patches.

• 30:15Speaker 12

  And at a certain point, we said, this is our business. We've got to find more of these jackets.

• 30:21Avery Trufelman?

  Okay, they couldn't find those exact jackets that Mel found in Australia, but they did the best they could in California.

• 30:27Speaker 12

  Surplus is kind of a secret world. You have to find the dealer. And we did, of course, Mel being a journalist, researched a lot.

• 30:36Avery Trufelman?

  They found a local dealer who was offloading 500 Spanish military paratrooper shirts, which makes sense when you think about it. Franco had just died in 1975. Spain was getting rid of surplus from the last regime. Mel and Patricia bought all 500 shirts.

• 30:53Speaker 12

  We had $1,500 left in our bank account between the two of us. So this was a substantial investment.

• 31:01Avery Trufelman?

  And they sold these shirts at the Sausalito Flea Market.

• 31:03Speaker 12

  I put one on Mel with the sleeves rolled up and the collar turned up. And I put on one with tight jeans and belted it. And we sold over 100.

• 31:13Avery Trufelman?

  It was just little touches of style, but these flourishes were all Patricia and Mel needed to stand out.

• 31:19Speaker 12

  So I went home and took two shirts apart and put them together to make a four-pocket safari dress. And some other ones, I took off the epaulettes and made a waistband, took off the arms. I said, doing our part for disarmament here. And we made a skirt. And so Mel said, oh, we've got a business. And found a store that was 400 square feet.

• 31:40Avery Trufelman?

  In 1978, Patricia and Mel set up a tiny shop in Mill Valley.

• 31:45Speaker 12

  I started cutting up jackets and sleeping bags and we started dying things. And also we'd sell like gas mask bags that didn't have any gas masks in them anymore, but they made great purses. It was just a matter of looking at things in a fresh way.

• 32:00Avery Trufelman?

  There were a number of boutiques like this. There was Commander Salamander in DC, The Cockpit in New York, Camp Beverly Hills in LA, all who stocked recut, redyed, zhuzhed up military surplus. It was such a phenomenon that it was actually spoofed on Saturday Night Live.

• 32:18Speaker 13

  I got Rhodesian fatigues. I got the Italian camouflage jackets. The kids are crazy about them. They're buying them like hotcakes.

• 32:26Avery Trufelman?

  Walter Matthau, who was hosting SNL on December 2nd, 1978, played the grizzled owner of a traditional military surplus store and the owner of a newfangled boutique called Shot Down in Soho is trying to return a bunch of military water canteens that she's painted neon colors and tried to sell as purses.

• 32:44Speaker 14

  Everyone said the colors were dynamite, but these holes, they're too small. I mean, you put your car keys in it, see, look, and then you can never get them out. Never.

• 32:56Avery Trufelman?

  In 1977, a fashion retail executive told The Boston Globe, "In the 1960s, students wore old army jackets with peace signs on them, more to make a political statement than to be chic. Students have since tired of protest, but the fatigue look is back." What had been countercultural had become fashion.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  At this point, too, we have the yupification of military clothing.

• 33:21Avery Trufelman?

  As Charles McFarlane put it to me, "The students who were wearing field jackets in the 1960s grew up. They cut their hair, they got jobs, they became conventional bourgeoisie."

• 33:32Avery Trufelman?

  But they kept their Grateful Dead records and their penchant for surplus field jackets.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  You have Woody Allen wearing military surplus to go to the Art House Theater in Annie Hall. You have Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer, playing a father going through a divorce, living on the Upper West Side, and he's wearing an M65 field jacket. It's really in the post hippie, post Vietnam era when these things start to go mainstream. And I think the key to that is the brand Banana Republic.

• 34:02Avery Trufelman?

  Yes, Banana Republic.

• 34:04Speaker 12

  As soon as we decided to have a store, we said, okay, well, what are we going to call this? And Mel just intuitively just said, oh, it's Banana Republic because it's struggling young countries that want to sell the surplus from the last dictator. I mean, it was very uncool to say this, very unwoke, you know? But at that time, we were having so much fun with it, and we weren't politically correct at all. We were an artist and a writer. We weren't business people.

• 34:34Avery Trufelman?

  How Banana Republic went from irreverent, swashbuckling surplus to just khaki.

• 34:42Avery Trufelman?

  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. The RealReal is the most trusted name in authenticated luxury resale.

• 35:24Avery Trufelman?

  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 therealreal.com articals. That's therealreal.com articals to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at therealreal.com articals. Okay, so you just ripped a sleeve off?

• 35:48Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 35:49Avery Trufelman?

  I'm watching Bing Dong Duan, an industrial design grad student at RISD, rip apart an authentic M65 field jacket.

• 35:58Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, you just ripped the whole front pocket off.

• 36:00Speaker 15

  Yeah, the front pocket, and there is another front pocket.

• 36:05Avery Trufelman?

  It's actually so dramatic. It just looks like you're ripping apart this whole jacket. Don't worry, surplus heads. Bing Dong took this original M65 jacket and made all the elements of it removable with Velcro, so he could take it apart and put it back together again and see how it works.

• 36:20Speaker 15

  So I'm quite good at a sewing machine.

• 36:23Avery Trufelman?

  The M65 jacket, to him, is a pinnacle of design.

• 36:27Speaker 15

  I'm fascinated to use the Vietnam gears, like some M65 jackets or some lightweight backpacks.

• 36:34Avery Trufelman?

  Bing Dong has a massive collection of American militaria. When we met up, he was dressed more like a sniper than an industrial design grad student.

• 36:41Speaker 15

  At the very beginning, I started collecting Vietnam gears. I love collecting military things, and most of them is still in my home in China.

• 36:49Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, do people in China think it's weird that you collect all this stuff?

• 36:53Speaker 15

  Yeah, people think I'm nuts.

• 36:55Avery Trufelman?

  But I was like, why United States military? Why not Chinese military, you know?

• 37:00Speaker 15

  The reason I didn't like collecting Chinese military gears, because those gears are not designed for the extreme violence, because you didn't test. It's all about the testing, because military gear is a tool. Otherwise, a tool is decoration.

• 37:17Avery Trufelman?

  And for Bing Dong, the tools and gear of the Vietnam War were of special interest.

• 37:22Speaker 15

  The Vietnam War is have more unique taste for me. Yeah, because they all start from special forces, US special forces in Vietnam War.

• 37:30Avery Trufelman?

  Special Forces units. Put very simply, these units do specialty tasks that regular infantry cannot do. They sort of started during World War II, when groups like the Army Rangers were established to perform very specific raids, like it would be a group of Army Rangers who would go rescue a bunch of Americans from a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and there were underwater demolition teams who would go dismantle bombs with a knife. Really badass stuff.

• 37:56Avery Trufelman?

  But the Green Berets are considered the first modern special operations unit as we know them. Soldiers in the Army have to audition to become a Green Beret. Green Berets get extra years of training. Green Berets learn foreign languages. They go off to other countries and they establish relationships with foreign militaries. They were created to engage in unconventional or guerrilla warfare. They were meant to go behind enemy lines. And their timing could not have been better for the Vietnam War. These were the ones who were going to go and work with the South Vietnamese fighters. As President Kennedy said in a 1962 address to West Point,

• 38:32Speaker 16

  This is another type of warfare. New in its intensity, ancient in its origin. War by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins. War by ambush instead of by combat.

• 38:48Avery Trufelman?

  The same year Kennedy made that speech, he created more specialty teams. He made SEAL Teams 1 and 2 for maritime reconnaissance. So this is what special operations are for. They're smaller, more elite teams that operate outside of normal military procedures. They don't have to use standard military equipment and they don't have to wear standard military clothes.

• 39:10Speaker 15

  Because they are not official group at the very beginning. So these are gears are not military issue.

• 39:16Avery Trufelman?

  To this day, a number of special operators have their own budget for clothes and gear. It depends on the group and their mission. But sometimes the clothes don't have to be very compliant. Sometimes it can be whatever they need to get the job done.

• 39:30Speaker 15

  There are so many US special forces in Vietnam War. For example, their tiger striped shirt, they are not made in US, use US material. No, they are made in Japan, use Japan materials.

• 39:41Avery Trufelman?

  Binh Dong is fascinated by the world of the United States Special Forces. He's as intrigued by the modern special ops gear as he is by the perfection of the standard issue M65 jacket.

• 39:53Speaker 15

  Vietnam gear is quite similar to nowadays. So I just like press the pause button for the Vietnam gears and switch into the modern gears.

• 40:02Avery Trufelman?

  Bing Dong has switched from collecting Vietnam gear to collecting modern special ops gear, really out of necessity.

• 40:09Speaker 15

  Vietnam gears, that price is gonna be super, super expensive. And as a student, no way.

• 40:15Avery Trufelman?

  The supply of Vietnam military surplus was limited. There was much less Vietnam surplus than World War II surplus. And there was less surplus generally after the draft ended, when the Quartermaster Corps stopped commissioning industrial quantities of clothes for millions of drafted Americans. The surplus supply was dwindling. But Bing Dong only realized this when he started trying to buy it up. And so did Patricia Ziegler.

• 40:44Speaker 12

  It wasn't gonna last at the level we were selling it.

• 40:47Avery Trufelman?

  Patricia and Mel had started Banana Republic in 1978, inspired by the look of European military surplus. And their timing was kind of terrible. Throughout the 1970s, Western Europe was shrinking their militaries. France, Italy, and Belgium reduced their conscription terms. The UK had already ended their draft in 1960. And in the 1970s, they shrunk their armed forces even more. Western European countries were reacting to the Cold War. They were slashing their defense budgets. They were demilitarizing. Patricia could see the writing on the wall. It was inevitable.

• 41:24Speaker 12

  I knew that surplus was gonna run out. It wasn't gonna last.

• 41:27Avery Trufelman?

  This fact kept Patricia up at night.

• 41:29Speaker 12

  We also knew that we had to start manufacturing, which is why we made the deal with The Gap.

• 41:35Avery Trufelman?

  A friend of theirs introduced them to the founder of The Gap, Don Fisher.

• 41:40Speaker 12

  So he brought Don Fisher by our store. And Don was fascinated.

• 41:45Avery Trufelman?

  How could he not be?

• 41:46Speaker 12

  It did not look like a surplus store. We turned the store into a little safari. The front of the building was zebra striped. We leopard printed the walls. I put astroturf on the floor and turned the poles that were holding the ceiling up into palm trees.

• 42:03Avery Trufelman?

  Banana Republic was irreverent, cheeky. It was fascinating. It was a project of these two artists.

• 42:08Speaker 12

  Every item would have a story. We made up stories. We had Italian camouflage jackets without hoods, but they had snaps. And Mel said, it's because the Italians have been on strike for 30 years or something. The stories would just come up and we'd write them in the catalog. I'd draw little illustrations.

• 42:27Avery Trufelman?

  Banana Republic was an adventure and the clothes were just the entry way in.

• 42:32Speaker 12

  When women would come into the store, they'd try on like a men's shirt and I'd double belt it with the gaucho belts and just style everything. And it was more about as irreverent kind of expedition travel wardrobe. We were just having fun while working our tails off. We were after people who just got the style of it and the humor of it and wanted well-made clothing.

• 42:59Avery Trufelman?

  So you were acquired by The Gap in 83?

• 43:04Speaker 12

  Yes, yes. The Gap came in and as soon as we finalized the deal, Don took us to The Gap's Beverly Hills store. And so Don takes us in there and says, what do you think? What could you guys do with this space?

• 43:18Avery Trufelman?

  This prime real estate that had belonged to The Gap would now be the Banana Republic flagship in Los Angeles. Mel and Patricia made their mark.

• 43:26Speaker 12

  We put a Quonset hut in and we built a big elephant coming out of the wall. I put in a real creek. I wanted to fly an airplane from the ceiling. We found an old bush plane and they roped off the street and we brought the bush plane down Santa Monica Boulevard.

• 43:42Avery Trufelman?

  And they were off to the races. The Gap wanted expansion.

• 43:46Speaker 12

  They wanted us just to open stores as fast as we could. And we were breaking records in shopping malls for sales per square foot.

• 43:54Avery Trufelman?

  And so with help from The Gap, they went from sourcing surplus to designing original clothes that looked like surplus, including their own versions of an M65 jacket.

• 44:06Speaker 12

  It became safari and expedition clothes rather than safari and surplus. I guess we did that with The Gap acquisition.

• 44:17Avery Trufelman?

  It wasn't the same. What happened? Why is Banana Republic not like this anymore?

• 44:22Speaker 12

  Ah, I don't know. At a certain point, it just got too big, too fast.

• 44:27Avery Trufelman?

  Patricia and Mel jumped ship in 1988.

• 44:30Speaker 12

  We did it for 10 years. It was really good. We saw the world and our son was born. And it just seemed like a good time to leave. It was a good time to leave.

• 44:40Avery Trufelman?

  And of course, the Gap got rid of the zebra stripes and the Quonset huts and the made up stories and the hand drawn illustrations. There's more money to be made in more serious stuff.

• 44:50Speaker 12

  And they tried to make it into different things over the years. But in the past couple of years, they've gone back and they've returned to a lot of the heritage.

• 44:59Avery Trufelman?

  As I record this, last month, Banana Republic launched Banana Republic Archive, where they're telling the story of Patricia and Mel and selling some Banana Republic pieces from the 80s and 90s. They're coming around to embrace this history and to embrace this look. The look of loose jackets in khaki and brown that look like they've been fished out of a pile. New clothing that looks like it was surplus. Because how fitting, there was no more surplus of surplus. Although, okay, there is some military surplus out there still.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  It definitely does exist. Not as big as it was.

• 45:42Avery Trufelman?

  There are a few military surplus companies, like Americana Pipe Dream Apparel, based out of Appleton, Wisconsin, founded by Logan McGrath.

• 45:49Speaker 06

  It's still comparatively to like a new garment, sometimes a very good deal.

• 45:54Avery Trufelman?

  Sometimes.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  A modern, like new made Patagonia fleece, like there are surplus equivalents you can still get from 1999 that aren't even worn.

• 46:04Avery Trufelman?

  If you can find something like that.

• 46:05Speaker 06

  Like there's this annual trade show in Vegas where all the surplus companies meet up. That used to be like hundreds of booths, hundreds, 20 years ago. Nowadays, they're lucky to get like 20 to 30 booths.

• 46:17Avery Trufelman?

  Really?

• 46:18Speaker 06

  So it's, it's, it's shrunk a lot because. Cold War stockpiles are running out. People aren't making as much stuff. And these days, it is getting a little bit more difficult to source. So yeah, it's not getting any cheaper on our end or on the consumer side.

• 46:32Avery Trufelman?

  And now, a lot of European countries are starting to hold on to their military surplus.

• 46:37Speaker 06

  Now, it's like, ooh, we might need it. We might need it. You'll see a lot of surplus kevlar helmets and body armor and stuff in use with the Ukrainians. Because, you know, it's better to have something that's old than not have anything at all.

• 46:50Avery Trufelman?

  So it's a hard time for surplus sellers.

• 46:53Speaker 06

  You're not always guaranteed to find that next batch of stuff that you can sell.

• 46:57Avery Trufelman?

  So what is a surplus store supposed to do?

• 47:00Speaker 15

  No, not. Oh, so this is not good. This is not good. Oh. Yeah.

• 47:05Avery Trufelman?

  Sometimes you come across a surplus store, and it's small and dark and dingy, and it has piles of field jackets and camo fatigues. But Bing Dong Duan doesn't fall for it.

• 47:15Speaker 15

  Once you notice a surplus store have your things, especially like this kind of hat. A hat that says army is not a good hat. No, not good.

• 47:24Avery Trufelman?

  This surplus store on my block did not pass Bing Dong's sniff test.

• 47:28Speaker 15

  So these are, these are the M655? No, just a, I would say M655 style. Okay. Because usually the material is a different made. Oh. And the pocket size is different. Column is smaller.

• 47:40Avery Trufelman?

  None of these clothes in this store were made for the military. None of this was actually surplus. They were all entirely new, cheap clothes made to imitate the style of 20th century military surplus. The surplus store had to essentially become a knockoff surplus store. That's what this store was.

• 48:01Speaker 15

  Yeah, that's true. But that's the most surplus store looks like nowadays. Just like this, full of the cheap surplus things. And people buy it just maybe for cheap.

• 48:12Avery Trufelman?

  Even Logan McGrath of Americana Pipe Dream, who's still fully devoted to authentic military surplus, he's making his own line of made in USA clothes.

• 48:20Speaker 06

  So I have seen a lot of people pivot to making their own stuff like we do. Because it's been 30 years since the Cold War.

• 48:26Avery Trufelman?

  Surplus comes from big, massive militaries with lots of cheap excess sloshing around. The end of the draft led to a smaller, tighter army that can be accounted for. There doesn't end up being that much left over. It's not like a company supplying to the military is going to be like, oops, we made a couple extra 100,000 jackets.

• 48:46Avery Trufelman?

  Clothing for the 21st century army is made to order by private companies, who stand to make a lot of money. And this brings us to the story of camouflage. Articles of Interest is by Avery Trufelman, but my drafts are listened to and the scripts are edited and the story is shaped by Alison Behringer. Costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane was an MVP on this one. His master's thesis helped me a lot and many resources here have been pulled from it. Fact checking was by Yasmeen Alsayad. Music by Lelitone, Ray Royal and Sasami. Mixing and mastering by Jocelyn Gonzalez and her team at PRX. And couldn't you just listen to Ray Christian talk forever?

• 49:31Avery Trufelman?

  I rarely say this, but thank heavens that guy has a podcast. What's Ray Saying is like a gift. Ray is one of the blessed few people in the world who I just want to hear cook. Find What's Ray Saying wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Drew Haupt and thanks to you, dear listener. For images, links and more information, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com.