Read carefully and think about how much time and money got spent investigating The Case of of the Mexican B**l-Scratcher...
Why would anyone scratch their boots?
I had a young soldier under me, assigned as a van driver.
His daily uniform was Class "B"'s, which requires the wear of a brass belt buckle, which seems to be always in need of polishing.
The young soldier had parked in the local PX lot, waiting for a passenger.
He decided the wait time would be ideal for improving his personal appearance, took a can of Brasso and a cloth and commenced to polish his buckle, all while sitting upright in a van that had a slightly higher ground clearance than the surrounding vehicles.
Imagine, if you will, the motion involved in polishing a belt buckle while the buckle is on your person. Also, imagine the busy-body wife of a less-than-successful would-be career officer, with nothing better to do than whine about everything, who just happened to be walking past at that particular time.
Needless to say, the uproar was immediate.
Had it not been for the presence of a very senior NCO, a very senior NCO, who was later to able to relate that the young soldier alighted from the van with a polishing rag in his hand, his pants firmly secured and the buckle still with polish remnant on it, the young soldier would have gone down in flames.
The "witness" actually claimed to have looked down into the van (she was all of 4 foot 10 inches tall) and observed the soldier with his pants around his ankles and his genitals in his hand.
After much brouhaha, the commander of the soldier decided to give the young soldier a letter of reprimand for placing himself in the situation.
That took even more hell-raising on my part and the "very" senior NCO witness to squash. The senior NCO later related to me that he had done the same thing on numerous occasions when he was a young soldier. He just never realized the appearance it presented.
Sometimes the hysteria borders on insanity.
A couple of months later, the "witness" was apprehended in the PX while stealing bras, bras that she could obviously afford to purchase and that were not in her size anyway.
About six months later, the young soldier won the Soldier of the Quarter board.
I don't know if the amount of shine on his belt buckle was an issue for the board members.