The most important military invention of my career? War socks.
Do I sound like I’m joking? Not having them is what brought the first push into Moraneth to a grungy stalemate. Those jungles highlighted the eternal problem of keeping your feet happy on campaign, and they did it with blisters and stench and more varieties of fungal rot than we could count. I had three centuries with me on the march to Chenasét and more than half of them were out with one foot-related condition or another.
After that debacle, the chaps at OMRD put their heads together and came up with something useful for a change. Behold the U-ILE47/2 Combat Utility Sock. It comes with a gel layer that shapes itself to your foot and keeps it comfortable inside your armor. It repels, eats, and expels sweat, excess skin oils, and intruding water, keeping your feet dry come desert, jungle, swamp, or river crossing. And its antibiologic lining is very effective at killing any nasty fungi, bacteria, parasites, or others of nature’s little joys.
War socks kept us going through the next Moraneth campaign, and through southern Ochale, and the Dominions, and even the Sweetshallow. None of the flashy toys you’re probably thinking of matter a damn if someone can’t get them where they’re needed and stand up to use them.
– Brig. Sigmal Oricalcios-ith-Oricalcios (Retd.), IBC interview
General Patton was (in)famous for requiring that clean socks be delivered with hot meals to front-line forces. His opinion on the subject was simple-soldiers down with trench foot or unable to march cannot fight. If soldiers cannot fight, they are essentially casualties. And, Patton had the poor luck to be continually assigned the shit-end of the stick in the US Army during the Second World War-and had to solve problems with less-than-optimal solutions.
I hope they did the same with underwear because holy heck a clean cool groin is fresh endorphins directly into the hypothalamus.
Or local blue-life equivalent