Members of the US Army’s 5th Special Forces Group threw it back to the group’s Vietnam War days with an unusual and outrageously cool choice of uniform during a training exercise in Kentucky, back in mid-August.
Instead of donning the customary OCP-patterned uniforms, popular with US Special Operations Command, the Legion’s Green Berets were photographed wearing the Vietnam-era tiger stripe pattern — somewhat unused and mostly forgotten by the US military for decades.
Tiger stripe’s roots are mildly ambiguous, but the US military’s unofficial adoption of the pattern came about during the Vietnam War, where South Vietnamese forces were already wearing uniforms emblazoned with the unique camouflage. Before long, American special operations units that were deployed in-country to advise friendly forces began wearing the pattern alongside their South Vietnamese counterparts in order to blend in more effectively with their foreign partners.
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