BDUs (Battle Dress Uniforms) consist of a shirt and pants. I will review the winter-weight pants now and add more as I make more visits to the army surplus store.
Pants: Tech Specs
BDU pants come in two varieties: a
summer weight version made of
cotton ripstop and a
winter weight version made of a poly-cotton
twill. They come in
olive drab,
black,
khaki, and several different varieties of
camoflauge. There are reinforcement
patch on the
knees and
crotch to make them harder to tear. The
cuffs contain ties that make them more secure and to make it easier to form a proper
boot blouse. The pants are six pocket
cargo pants that use
buttons to fasten everything. You can adjust the
waist with two cotton pull-tabs.
Pants: The Subjective Experience
The pants are roomy and fairly comfortable. They do not restrict your motion, which makes sense when you consider that most people who wear them face getting
blown up on a fairly regular basis. You don't want to have anything restricting your movements while you are diving into a
foxhole. The pants are a little
scratchy at first, but after a few washings they aren't bad at all. The pants have two main drawbacks. The first is the use of square corners in the pockets and reinforcement patches. Anyone who has ever studied
portholes knows that a square edge is weak; the pants prove this. The corners tend to get caught on things and tear the pants. The second is that the buttons on the fly break easily and if you go
commando this is a very
bad thing.
They are fairly inexpensive pants and this offsets the problems with the buttons and corners. Overall, I'd rate them as a strong buy.