Back when I first enlisted in the US Army (1979), I had been at my first assigned unit for only a few weeks when I found out a few of us were scheduled to make a trip to Panama for Jungle School. We weren’t authorized jungle boots as an issue item, and couldn’t wear them in that unit. But those rules didn’t apply when we went to schools like that. I’d never been to a tropical place, but I knew what it was like to have feet roasting in hot boots, so I went out and invested in jungle boots. They weren’t exactly the Army issue kind, but close enough to serve the purpose. My feet did rather well in Panama, but just about everything else went wrong.
About a decade later, I was stationed in the Netherlands. I found out we were authorized to wear jungle boots and I bought a pair from the Army uniform store. They were okay for regular duty wear, but I decided to try them on a volksmarch. Having tested jogging shoes, hiking boots, and a few other kinds of footwear, I found jungle boots were the single best choice for hilly hikes cross-country. While fairly stiff and hard on the soles, they were extremely durable and light, and my feet recovered rather well the next day. Even better was when I replaced the issue-style insoles with carbon-foam cushioned insoles. Those boots lasted several years of hard use.
As our economy grinds to a halt, and the US Treasury prepares to devalue the dollar, it occured to me it might be a while before I could afford to get good footwear if I didn’t get them soon. I had hoped I might hit a military surplus store and get another pair of jungle boots. I would be okay with regular decent hiking boots, but those are less versatile. Still, in the midst of other shopping for necessities, we stopped at Academy. After poking around for a half-hour, I stumbled across a pair of regular styled jungle boots. Not exactly the issue kind, but better. These have a real welt, instead of a hard rubber sole injected around a leather upper. Otherwise, the same ultra-light unpadded design. Amazingly, they were only about $20.
I’m not crazy enough to think there is no way we can avoid some descent into chaos in the US. It could happen, and I feel certain there will be some rioting and unrest in certain locations, mostly urban, as things get tighter. The price of fuel may not rise to such great heights again as in the recent past, but it won’t matter if you simply have no income at all, or not enough. I suspect a great many people will become unemployed, and it will snowball as businesses in every sector will close because people won’t have money to spend, and those folks join the ranks of the unemployed, and more business close, etc. There might be a lot of people walking wherever it is they have to go, and I’ll probably be one of them at least part of the time. I wonder how many folks will wear out their flip-flops and cheap athletic shoes in the first few months of 2009.
