What soldiers carry in their pockets

Some questions are deceptively simple, masking quite a bit of complexity and some non-obvious answers.  I ran across this one on Quora, a web site where you can post a question, and if you’re lucky, random strangers will answer it:

What do soldiers keep in all those pockets they have?

As you can tell from the responses: (a) there’s no one answer, and (b) people really do devote a lot of thought to this.  Reading through them, you’ll notice some basic themes: (1) the necessities of life, like eating and pooping; (2) the necessities of staying alive, like first aid kits; and (3) the necessities of keeping your mind/spirit alive at the same time as the rest of yourself.  Focussed around those basic themes, you’ll see a lot of variety and creativity–the Turkish soldier who carries sanitary pads to staunch bleeding and catch sweat, as well as women’s nylon stockings (I’m surprised more people didn’t mention those–they’re popular in areas where there are heavy mosquitoes); writing materials; be sure to read the one about the Marine and his stuffed frog…

My own answer reflects those themes pretty closely: What I kept in those pockets

So, when you read my posts about the incredible number of needless gun deaths in the US and think about what a naive lefty liberal I must be: yes, I am a lefty liberal, and, yes, I can fire a weapon just fine, and, yes: I am a pretty good shot, actually.

• le treillis: [treji] fatigues, battledress, “cammies.”