Another Army "innovation." And a poor one at that. The Beret is worthless
as a piece of headgear in the field, can't be used as anything other than a
beret pretty much, and requires much more maintenance than the field cap.
It has a distinctive silhouette which is easy for an eye to pick out as a
target. It is not a piece of traditional headgear for the US Army. The
Army missed it's chance to bring back the shako, or pickelhaube, or kepi, or
czapka, all of which it used in one form or another in its' history. The
story I heard was that Shinseki went to a funeral for a Special Operations
Classmate, and he felt out of place with all the beret's standing around.
Poor reason for inspiration.
If they want something original and noteworthy for soldiers, they should
tatoo their asses with a unique computer generated bar code. This would be
the soldier's email address so he could receive counseling statements in a
distance education environment from highly skilled Sergeant Major's trained
in this technology. Very useful for multiple purposes. The most crucial
purpose is to mount a bar code scanner in a satellite, so at a pre-arranged
time, all soldiers can drop trou and show their "distinctive markings" to
the satellite so the pentagon can count.... "noses" as it were. See, an
innovative salute for a traditional method of showing respect to one's
superior's.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 05 2001 - 07:13:48 PST