Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

We’ll get to what white trou are and what they have to do with our current circumstance as a wounded, limping, pathetic, shadow-of-its-former-self nation in a moment, but for right now, I want you to consider this elemental question: have you ever in your life been exposed to so much rank, unfettered absurdity?

Yes, we have seen criminality, and lots of it; we have been exposed to depths of ignorance and racism and all the other “ism’s” in every possible lexicon of terribleness; and we have experienced more disorienting chaos than anyone, even historians of the Great Depression and the Great Wars have thought possible.

But the sheer absurdity of the first three months of Donald Trump’s second term is what many have found truly remarkable. Take the performance of Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday. Just when everyone had breathed a sigh of relief after the Great Tariff Terrorist had suspended the bulk of the onerous tariffs on most of the world and cancelled his 145 percent tariffs on cell phones and other high tech electric gear imported from China, Lutnick announced that something called “semiconductor tariffs” will be reimposed in “a month or two,” because “we can’t be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us,” whatever the hell “things that operate for us” are.

Lutnick’s earth-quaking statements less than 24 hours before the markets open on Monday morning are not just chaotic but abjectly absurd.

Which brings me to this evening’s subject, white trou.

One of the great advantages of serving in the United States Army is the acquaintanceship, even expertise, one gains with that which is absurd. The classic phrase, “hurry up and wait,” is a seeming contradiction except to those with firsthand experience of military absurdity. Familiarity with the absurd is enhanced when one is awakened in the middle of the night along with the 300 fellow members of one’s battalion to be herded onto trucks and deposited, carrying a full load of combat gear, in the middle of a broad expanse of completely empty tarmac waiting to board a flight on a cargo aircraft due to depart at dawn, and hours later, with a blazing sun overhead and temperatures approaching triple digits and no cargo aircraft in sight on tarmac which continues to stretch for hundreds of empty yards in every direction, one is ordered to pick up the 80 pounds or so of combat equipment and move exactly 100 paces to the left and deposit the equipment on the tarmac and await instructions.

Being ordered to move from one empty expanse of hot tarmac to a similarly empty expanse of tarmac pales in comparison with white trou.

“Trou” is the military abbreviation for “trousers,” which is the lower half of any uniform more formal than what used to be called “fatigues,” the olive drab work uniform of the American soldier, the bottom half of which were called “fatigue pants.” At West Point in the late 1960’s when I was first becoming familiar with absurdity, the classic Dress Gray uniform came with trousers which had black stripes along the sides of the trouser legs, as did the formal Full Dress Gray uniform. Both were made of heavy wool. The Full Dress Gray unform was worn for parades, on Sunday mornings to attend chapel, which was mandatory in those days, and to formal dances called “hops” at West Point, and “cotillions” everywhere else.

During the summer months, when temperatures made woolen uniforms too warm (and odiferous) to wear, cadets were issued “whites,” a formal uniform made from a thick, canvas-like cotton. The tunic had the classic, stiff standing collar, and was fastened in front with a row of brass buttons specially made specifically for the summer white uniform. They came with a brass tail that you inserted in holes running down the right front flap and secured by slipping the tail so it was perpendicular to the button and prevented by a kink in the fastener from slipping the hole in which it had been inserted. The summer white tunic was thus a glorious thing to behold, especially atop the white trou with which it was worn.

This is how heavily the white trou were starched: They couldn’t be folded over the horizontal bar of a wire hanger, forcing the waist to be fastened with safety pins to the hanger, so the white trou hung vertically. When you unpinned them, the white trou were so stiff, you could lean them against the wall, or even against the back of a chair.

The sides of the trouser legs were so tightly starched together that it was necessary to “break starch” by using our chrome dress bayonets to slide down the trouser legs to open them, so our legs could be inserted. The white trou were so stiff, you had to sit down on the edge of a chair to stick your legs, one by one, through the open waist into the trouser legs and, wearing thin cotton socks, work your feet between the stiff sides of the trouser legs until they emerged from the bottom hems. Once both feet were through, you placed your feet on the floor and pushing off from the chair, stood up as you held onto the waistband and zipped up and buttoned the waist.

Until the tops of the trouser legs at hip level broke in, wearing the equally stiff tunic constraining the chest and waist and arms, walking was toy-soldier-like.

Absurdly impractical, of course, but you looked fantastic.

Which was the whole point. Cadets were the toy-soldier walking advertisements for West Point. Summer parades in Dress Whites against the dark green well-manicured grass of The Plain…jaw-droppingly impressive. On the arm of a young lady at a formal dance…something out of a picture book.

Every June, West Point sent its seniors on what was called the First Class Trip—a visit to the army posts around the country where the various combat branches were headquartered: Infantry at Fort Benning, GA; Artillery at Fort Sill, OK; Armor at Fort Knox, KY; Air Defense Artillery at Fort Bliss, TX; Engineers at Fort Belvoir, VA; Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, NJ. The First Class my year was about 800 strong. They flew us from one station to another on C-141 cargo jets, probably four of them.

With two extra C-141’s for our uniforms, which included starched khakis to wear around the posts off duty, and fatigues—also starched—to wear on field exercises we did for each branch: driving and shooting the main gun on battle tanks at Fort Knox, Infantry maneuvers at Fort Benning, and so forth. I looked through the cargo doors of one of the jets, and there were dozens of rolling racks strapped to the floors, some with khakis, some with fatigues, and protected by clear plastic covers, the racks of Dress Whites, with each set of white trou hanging with its white tunic looking like files of flattened cadets.

The uniform jets departed Stewart Air Force Base the same day we did. Two nights later, we forced ourselves into our white trou using triple-folded wire hangers in place of bayonets so we could attend the mandatory cotillion that would be held at each army post, where each cadet would be presented to a pre-chosen blind date from a master list. The blind dates, bless their beauteous hearts, were the daughters of officers and local civilian burghers like bankers and corporate officers and car dealers and the like.

Many, we would come to discover, were forced by their parents into the blind date thing with a cadet as if it was a civic duty. A few romances would blossom…I think several of my classmates even ended up marrying the girls they met on the First Class Trip.

Midnight would come and we would be bussed back to the barracks where we stayed at each post, whereupon we immediately stripped off our Dress Whites and attached paper name tags to them with safety pins, tunic and white trou alike, so they could be put in trucks and taken out to the air base and put on the C-141’s and flown to the next post, where they would be properly laundered and await our arrival on our C-141’s, so the whole thing could be recreated, complete with cotillion and jet-delivered white trou.

The outrageousness of the entire spectacle was lost upon us. We were blissfully unaware that it was part of our training, absurdly readying us, for the absurd war in Vietnam which beckoned, thousands of miles and a thousand absurd lies away, with its fake body counts and fake victories and fake medals and fake justifications and fake politics.

Looking back these many years later, it is all so heartbreaking, except for white trou, flying on their own C-141 around the country, the absurdity of which even we, in our youthful innocence could appreciate. White trou, starched so stiff you could barely get into and walk in them, made us into the toy soldiers we resembled to everyone but ourselves.