Quote Originally Posted by Tacitus View Post
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.
Pre-BDUs we had "permanent press" (better know as permanent wrinkle) fatigues that I remember being told to get starched. And, of course, before those bad boys, we had the real starched cotton fatigues that you could stand up in the corner if you had a good QM laundry or a mama san laundry lady who knew what heavy starch meant.

For a real golden oldie, who, besides Ken, remembers, the Louisville cap (AKA the Fidel Castro Cap)? Some hot shot put a cardboard circle in a standard issue fatigue baseball cap and created it. As far as I can recall, it was never an Army clothing bag item, but it was required for wear.