By Ray Wert

A Jeep pickup will restore America's manhood

The Jeep pickup truck is every red-blooded American male's ultimate automotive wet dream. The mother-truckers over at PickupTrucks.com just got a chance to drive one. If America is ever to get its manhood back, Jeep must once again build a pickup truck.

The history of the Jeep pickup truck goes back almost as far as the civilian Jeep itself. In 1947, just a few years after the CJ-2A — the first "Civilian Jeep" — was introduced, Willys-Overland Motors began selling the "Willys Jeep Truck." Later came more full-size pickups like the Jeep Gladiator of the 1960s and its successor, the J-10 and "Honcho" variant.

Then came the Jeep pickup truck heyday of the 1980s where we saw the CJ-8 "Scrambler" pickup, the CJ-10 and the Comanche — three compact-sized pickup trucks built off of Jeeps. But that all ended in 1992 when a now Chrysler-owned Jeep killed the Comanche — the "last" Jeep pickup.

But some — like American Expeditionary Vehicles and its Brute conversion kit — kept the dream of the Jeep pickup alive. The "Brute" kit allows you to take a "TJ" (the 1997-2006 generation) Wrangler and weld an extender to the back allowing you to turn your Jeep into a pickup truck.

There's other options available too — like the ability to slip a Hemi between the rails of a TJ Wrangler to create the ultimate off-road-ready sportscar-UV. The result is simply epic. We drove the flat-black Brute over yonder on 35s with a two-inch lift a couple of years ago and immediately fell in love with it.

But now there's Jeep's new JK-8 Independence project truck conversion kit — the same one driven by PickupTrucks.com — that will let you add the same utility to your current "JK" generation Jeep — only without all of the slicing n' dicing required by the AEV conversion.

Either way — whether you're converting a JK with a Jeep kit or a TJ with AEV's kit — the result is the greatest vehicle ever created by man — a Jeep pickup truck.

But wait, how could a Jeep pickup truck, in a world where supercars reign supreme, be the greatest vehicle man has ever known?

Because whether you're a JDM tuner, horsepower-obsessed muscle head, or a car-hating greenie, if you have even an ounce of manhood in you, when you see a Jeep with a pickup truck bed you will think the exact same thing as me — "Whoa!"

That's because a pickup-packing Jeep stimulates the cro-Magnon center of every man's brain — that area we learned to keep dormant and hidden after childhood. It's the animalistic part of our brain that drove us to collect G.I. Joes and set them on fire in our backyards and that made us love watching construction vehicles drop giant loads of dirt.

A Jeep pickup takes both of those thoughts, wraps 'em up in one neat, little bow and slaps it under the Christmas tree for us to tear off in a heated adrenaline-fueled frenzy.

Jeeps still carry a connotation of war and utility and off-road prowess and pickup trucks are all about utility. Put those together in one vehicle and we'll giggle with glee.

But yeah, here's the other thing — I don't have time anymore to convert a Jeep. What I want is a production Jeep pickup truck. And I don't want it being hinted at — I want it to actually happen and happen soon.

Plus, how can American men explain a project vehicle's purpose to our girlfriends, wives, significant others, mothers being that we want to drive over rocks and get dirty and burn G.I. Joes with our homemade match-fueled flamethrowers? They probably wouldn't understand.

How could they? It's a guy thing.

But maybe, just maybe, we can justify that purchase if it were a production vehicle.

I keep hearing America has lost its manhood. Well, isn't it about time Jeep helped the American male regain it by making this wet dream a reality?