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century, Army camouflage prints began showing up in mainstream fashion. It began with clothing and took off from there. As I write this, you can get on the internet and order camouflage wedding bands, dog sweaters, onesies, condoms, flip-flops, hard hats, and football cleats. Camo print became so popular that eventually Navy personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. Unsure whether perhaps I was missing the point, I asked a Navy commander about the rationale. He looked down at his trousers and sighed. “That’s so no one can see you if you fall overboard.”
    No military fashion foolery can compete with the saga of the orange-red underwear. Around the turn of the last century there was, in the phrasing of a paper in the June 1897 issue of Medical Bulletin , “a very prevalent idea that red underwear possesses some occult medical value.” Baseless as it was, the notion made its way to the office of the US surgeon general. A Lieutenant Colonel William Wood reported that British Army officers in India had found some relief from the intense tropical sun by lining their hats with red cloth. A study was commissioned, using troops stationed in the Philippines as subjects. Though a small number of caps were prepared, the Americans seized on the idea of red underwear—perhaps as a sort of secret asset, a hidden psychological edge, like fabulous lingerie or lifts in one’s shoes. Five thousand pairs of orange-red drawers and undershirts were shipped from a War Department depot in Philadelphia, along with a like number of white drawers, as controls. Mental and bodily vigor to be monitored for one year. One thousand men conscripted as subjects.
    The garments arrived on the first of December 1908. Whereupon the setbacks began. Four-fifths of the underwear was too tight for all but the smallest men. Perhaps, having seen the destination of the shipment, the clothiers had misunderstood and fashioned the items for the slighter, trimmer bottoms of the Filipino male. Perhaps they were cutting corners. Who can say. Six hundred men were dropped from the study. Worse, the underpants had been sewn from heavy dungaree cotton, causing the men to perspire in places where no one wants to perspire, surely counteracting any mystical cooling properties that the color might have conferred. The sweating proved doubly vexing, as the dye ran badly. Much joshing and ridicule—“bantering by their companions”—ensued. Over a month of washings, the red underwear progressed to yellow and onward to a “dirty cream color.” The cap liners, though less frequently laundered, ran in the rain or when the men sweated, causing red blotches and rivulets running down their faces and yet more bantering.
    At the end of a year, the men were interviewed about their experience with the special underwear. Only 16 of 400 had anything positive to say. The red underwear was hotter and scratchier. It “outraged the sensibilities of the wearer.” In addition to prickly heat and rashes and a higher rate of heat exhaustion, it was blamed for headaches, dizziness, fever, blurred vision, boils, and colic. “An Experiment with Orange-Red Underwear” was read aloud at a biennial meeting of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine, no doubt jollifying the usual assortment of malaria and foot fungus reports.
    While we are on the topic of hot, uncomfortable military intimates, a word about Kevlar underwear. A version of which was successfully marketed to the British Army: Blast Boxers †† —protection against life-altering injuries.
    “There was some controversy over this,” Accetta says.
    LaFleur’s large, beautiful eyes widen. “She’s recording you.”
    “Which I started.”
    Fox News had called, asking why the Brits had bombproof underpants and our guys didn’t. “No such thing,” Accetta told the reporter. He said they were working on something else, and then he got off