The Army's war on gorilla shoes

Past the railroad tracks, the sidewalk bends around a corner. I heard him first, which is saying something because the Frightened Rabbit in my headphones was trying to distract me from the four miles ahead.

Slap!Slap!Slap! - the sound of rubber soles on concrete. I looked up to see a guy, shorter than I am but younger and far fitter, hair shaved, sweat pouring. As he passed, his face was contorted in obvious agony mixed with equally obvious determination.

If you live around here, and you run early in the morning, you've seen him or his brothers. He was almost certainly Navy, perhaps a SEAL, and his morning PT involved running faster than I have ever run in my life.

But we did share something other than the sidewalk. On his feet and mine were silly-looking shoes that made us look like gorillas below the ankles.

For some reason, they're called FiveFingers, even though they're gloves for your toes. Introduced a few years ago by the Italian company Vibram, they've created a revolution in the running world, allowing people to run almost barefoot even where glass and other hazards mean that's a really bad idea.

I bought a pair in 2009. That was about 2,000 miles ago.

Barefoot running isn't about getting back to nature in all its grooviness. For serious runners, it's an age-old practice designed to refine form. For old slowpokes like me, the idea is that injuries can be avoided by letting feet do what they were made to do.

There is now a significant barefoot running subculture. Several companies, including some household names, have begun making shoes with extraordinarily thin soles in an attempt to mimic unshod running.

But most of them still look like running shoes, with all the high-tech flash and colors that don't exist in nature. Only FiveFingers make you look like you're about to grab something cold with your feet. They're so weird-looking that I've seen children actually point and laugh.

But the ridiculous design has a purpose: It allows your toes to grip the ground, which alters how you travel over it in ways I don't understand. What I do understand is that in a very specific manner, these shoes are the ultimate expression of function over form. They look like this to do that thing.

Which makes an order from the Army last month so odd (I'll spare you the all-caps): "Effective immediately, only those shoes that accommodate all five toes in one compartment are authorized for wear. Those shoes that feature five separate, individual compartments for the toes, detract from a professional military image and are prohibited for wear with the [improved physical fitness uniform] or when conducting physical training in military formation."

In other words, the Army has banned gorilla shoes. The other branches of the military, and their commands, have various degrees of ambivalence about the things. For example, I have it on pretty good authority that these shoes are popular with Special Forces. Navy commanders do their own thing, as Navy commanders do. Marines don't seem to care, which is about right. The Air Force - at least in some places - requires airmen to wear white socks with these shoes, which is so laughably geeky that it's also entirely appropriate.

Across the military branches, the Department of Defense has traditionally had a sartorial style that can charitably be described as nonexistent. Aside from a few fillips here and there, the form of military stuff - from wristwatches to transport to office chairs - follows well behind its function.

If you had to eliminate every bit of military kit because it was functional first, or because it was homely, soldiers and sailors would be mostly naked as they walked around empty bases.

Service members need their stuff to do stuff. Except on a few occasions, it doesn't need to be pretty. So here you have a shoe that hews precisely to such ideals, that is ugly precisely because it has a job to do.

And the Army bans it because it's funny-looking. Just a word, General: That's the point.

Donald Luzzatto is The Pilot's editorial page editor. Email: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.