Wear of the Uniform/Appearance Off-Installation

[Tacitus]

I hated the rationale that your DUTY/FIELD uniform does not look professional unless it is starched, and your boots are not presentable if you cannot use them to signal an aircraft. Where did that come from?

I vividly remember standing in formation to hear a battalion commander rail about how he didn't want to see any starched BDUs, that that was in fact, against regulations, and he was going to make life hell for anybody he saw with them on. Then having NCOs make life difficult for us soldiers if our BDUs didn't look like they were starched. What to do?

It was then, at that moment, that I realized that Catch-22 wasn't merely a good novel and work of fiction, but something accurate that I would just have to learn to live with in the military.

That BC had to have seen soldiers walking around all the time with starched BDUs afterwards, but I never heard of anybody getting in trouble for it. The feeling in the ranks was that if (the mysterious "They") had it in for you, this was a sort of selective enforcement of regulations they would get you for, if they wanted to.