Skip to main content

Camouflage Is the New Black

 

I have always loved shopping: in real life, online, even from a plane thirty-thousand feet above the earth, courtesy of SkyMall. I buy clothes, handbags, makeup, perfume, kitchen items—nothing that any other woman would find strange. But if you click the history tab on my computer, you’ll now see long lists of military tactical gear heading my way via UPS and Amazon Prime.

With the jaw-dropping exploits of the Special Operation Forces (Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, American Snipers, and Lone Survivors) brought to our attention by movies, books, and video games, a new breed of groupies has made its presence (and buying power) known. You no longer need to join the armed forces to look the part.

I have a friend named Mike Ritland who is a former Navy SEAL. Last month, during a visit to Texas, I tagged along as he made a call to ITS Tactical near Dallas. ITS stands for “Imminent Threat Solutions” and is a very successful online business. This might have been a classic “thanks, but I’ll wait in the car” moment for me. I assumed ITS was not up on designer hair-care products or sexy bras, little did I know I was walking into my newest obsession.

The ITS showroom is a Disneyland for gearheads. It is filled with a panoply of items you probably don’t think you need but will soon convince yourself you do, desperately.

I can think of no good reason why I should buy a digital desert-camo elastic MOLLE strapped combat backpack with a place to attach a Velcro patch embroidered with my blood type, but I did. Two.

Perusing the merchandise on the shelves at ITS sent red warning lights to my brain. My short visit to ITS turned out to be a gateway drug, and like the first firework snort of cocaine, I was instantly hooked on military tactical gear.

In fact, my view of the world shifted, and I no longer felt safe. I was not prepared for calamity and became dreadfully aware of how vulnerable I was. How could I have been so reckless as to not have a vacuum-sealed bag of QuikClot Combat Gauze with me at all times? If I’m gutshot in front of the Starbucks in Ridgefield, Connecticut, this stuff will stop the massive flow of blood until I reach the nearest MASH unit. I mean, local hospital.

When I returned home from Texas, I went online at two A.M. to peruse ITS’s seductive website. Soon I had filled my virtual cart with a pair of fire-resistant Escape shoelaces made of Kevlar, which, when removed from your shoes, you can use to friction saw through plastic wrist restraints. I also bought a small wallet-size lock-picking set and a jazzy Velcro-backed helmet patch that says, I RUN TOWARDS GUNFIRE. My helmet options are still undecided, but I favor the kind with netting that allows the insertion of small leafy tree branches.

After a cup of chamomile tea to settle my adrenaline-spiked shopping nerves, I retired for the evening thinking of George Orwell’s words: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Instead of sheep, I counted the hours until the next UPS delivery.

I soon learned that not every tactical-gear groupie shops for one item at a time, as I had been doing. You can sign up for a year’s worth of goodies by joining the Crate Club. Brandon Webb runs the Crate Club. Webb is a former Navy SEAL, celebrated combat sniper, and best-selling author of The Killing School and The Red Circle. Of all Webb’s prolific enterprises, I like the Crate Club best; it’s a sort of fruit-of-the-month club for badasses.

With a credit card and the push of a computer key, you can choose from various tiers of membership. The top-of-the-line crate is the Premier Crate that sells for around five hundred a year, and as with the less-deluxe Standard Crate or Pro Crate, you decide how often you would like it delivered. What you won’t know is what is in the box until you open it. That’s where the fun begins.

All the crates are filled with cool tech gear hand selected by Webb’s elite Special Forces buddies. To add gravitas to the merchandise, each warrior is pictured on the Crate Club website along with his Spec Ops credentials. So it matters little if you already own a pocketknife or a high-intensity flashlight. Now you have one with the residual glow of authenticity that comes from being curated by legendary military heroes.

Seeing a Crate Club unboxing feels like Santa Claus has morphed into Colonel Kurtz. This is the most butch shopping club in the world. If you want to see big tattooed men tremble like kids on Christmas morning, get them a subscription.

The Crate Club is not for battle-hardened guys in the military but for regular people wanting a taste of adventure that they will never see. After all, if the men who caught Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden favor this knife or that flashlight, how can you doubt that it will soon feel like a must-have as you sit in front of your TV set watching The Hurt Locker.

I’m not exactly sure what type of combat I’m preparing for. War with North Korea, the zombie apocalypse, the New World Order takeover … all are possible, but whatever happens, I now have a fully stocked medical “jump kit,” a three-day tactical backpack, and a “bug-out bag” filled with water-purification tablets, survival guides, and a collapsible camping tent to deal with it. And now for the perfect helmet.

 

Jane Stern is the author of more than forty books, including, most recently, Confessions of a Tarot Reader. With Michael Stern, she coauthored the popular Roadfood guidebook series. The Sterns recently donated forty years of archival materials to the Smithsonian museum, documenting the atmosphere, stories, and history of various restaurants, diners, and regional food events.



from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2vapnn8

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more