Then there was Base Dress for those with light and dark blue dress uniforms, and Garrison Dress for those with green ones. That meant that, for several years, the Army guys wore plain olive green combat clothing in the field, and a cheap polyester camouflage jacket on base, with the old dark green work dress trousers. The camouflage colours were selected to blend/co-ordinate with the trousers rather than any particular environment.
The trial version appeared in Germany during my time there. My first encounter occurred at the Mess at Happy Hour one Friday night, when a bunch of Vandoo Officers strutted in. That jacket had a different camouflage pattern (lighter and more natural colours than the final version) and olive green trousers (not adopted due to cost; there were tons of work dress trousers in the supply system). One of the teachers that we were plying with cheap booze asked who they were. "Canadians. Vandoos", said I. "Those are the new Garrison Dress uniforms". I only new that because I'd heard about them, and recognized the Vandoo flashes on their shoulders. "Oh", said one of the teachers. "That looks like something that Colonel Qadaffy would wear".
Another memorable uniform occasion: I was attached to the SSF (now 2 CMBG) staff in the early nineties, shortly after the new uniforms had been inflicted upon us. While strolling in to work one morning, I noticed that the two female Corporal pass-checkers at the entrance to the HQ building were dressed almost, but not quite, identically. Both were wearing dark green trousers, dark green "combat" sweaters, and dress green shirts, but with different rank insignia. One had the metal pin-on type on her shirt collar with plain green (no rank insignia) dress-type slip-ons on her sweater, and the other one had the dark-gold work dress rank slip-ons but no shirt collar insignia. Not knowing which one was wrong, I tracked down the Force Sergeant-Major and enquired about it. He said that it depended upon what trousers each was wearing. Rank insignia was determined strictly by the lower half of the uniform, which was the same colour in both cases but a different fabric and slightly different style, and completely independent of the upper half, which consisted of exactly the same shirts and sweaters. I expressed the illogic of this, and he just smiled and shook his head, and then told me about the previous week's Commander's O Group. He had paraded seventy-five soldiers through that, all in different orders of dress, to make that same point. He said that he could have shown almost twice as many variations, but ran out of available soldiers before he ran out of uniform variations.
