Yeah, my units did anyway.

Except at night, because the mud would screw up the IR properties of the material that the uniform’s made out of, some custom Para Aramid that doesn’t reflect much IR, since some of the more elite formations among the enemy were known to use civilian market IR NODs we didn’t want them to be able to see us any better.

I was a little too late for the 3-Color deserts or “Coffee stains”. In fact my BCT cycle was the very first to get issued the UCP patterned ACU. And it pissed off the Drills to no end as the Desert boots obviously don’t need to be shined, so it eliminated a lot of busy work that they make you do to kill time. Instead we cleaned our rifles. I went through maybe 15 boxes of Q-tips in that 9 weeks. AAFES made a killing off of us. I will say you could definitely tell the difference between BRM/ARM scores between my cycle and the previous one as a result though, so there’s that I guess.

I do know that what you’ve heard about the coffee stains being used in some units for as long as they could get away with it is accurate, I know the Navy EOD, Sea Bees and Corpsmen who weren’t attached to Marine (and thus in MARPAT) units all wore them for a very long time after they were phased out of the Army and the Army started cracking down by nailing units by using 670–1 as justification. A lot of units in Iraq at least used the 3-color deserts as long as they possibly could, not so much in Afghanistan though. In fact the really rare Close Combat Uniforms that like one Brigade in the Electric Strawberries (25th ID) got issued were preferred so much over the original ACU that Division HQ had to issue a policy forbidding their use on their second deployment. In the very few units that can actually choose, like Delta and the SEAL teams, they went with Multicam as soon as they could unless they had to blend in with conventional units.

The CCU is probably the rarest battle dress that the US Military has ever used, I mean the SOF tiger stripes (Martin Sheen’s character in Apocalypse Now wears them) from Vietnam that Special Forces, the LRRPs and MACV-SOG wore are even more common than CCU which is saying something, and as a result you won’t find too much on them. WiB should probably write an article about them because its up their alley. Anyway, it was basically the 3-Color Desert BDU pattern but on a uniform constructed like the ACU but without some of the stupidity that the original ACU had, like the Velcro mag pockets and (I’m pretty sure anyway) the Mandarin collar that nobody ever used. They should have just kept that as the ACU and not even bothered with the UCP pattern. Or used the old Rhodesian/current Zimbabwean pattern (its remarkably effective in just about every environment) but digitized and without the black like the Canadian CADPAT. Or coughed up the money for Multicam.