I suppose the brass prefers to see one hole in the lineup more than two or three. It’s a matter of discipline, and though I was never in the military, I was 18 once and can imagine if two people were allowed to leave the line to aid the sick one, faintings would become so common as to leave the parade grounds empty.
I see we have a range of people here covering more than forty years of military service. Are there more of these ceremonies now than before, or fewer?
In my experience, Passing in Reviews were just a pain in the ass. It was a couple of hours of your life you’d never get back again. And there were always better ways to make use of that time. And when everyone assembles 15 minutes early and the Reviewing Officer appears 30 minutes late on a hot, sunny day, it borders on an exercise in “YOU DO IT BECAUSE I TOLD YOU SO!”
The only interesting thing was trying to spot the Warrant or Commissioned Officer who sliced his ear with his dress sword.
Not military, but most of my family are/were.
Apparently the consensus there is that the first ceremony was enjoyable but after that they got annoying.
I wonder if their is a difference in view here between officer and enlisted. For the former its probably a lot more of a tension causer than for enlisted.
I was a naval officer for 30 years. I didn’t mind in the early days when I was one of a formation of cadets marching mindlessly while daydreaming about other stuff, but I had to do two different stints as a parade commander and I hate doing that. My cognition is such that I couldn’t memorize details if my life depended on it. As a parade commander there is no shortage of details and no shortage of spectators if you get it wrong. And from the “one of a formation of cadets” episodes I do have some fond memories (almost spectator-like).
The Army generally does not do ceremonies in dress uniform. At least for the 28 years I’ve been in. I’ve been in one ceremony in dress uniform and that was Basic Training graduation.
I’ve been in many ceremonies in BDUs or ACUs. They are a necessary evil to maintain some traditions. Certainly some long winded commanders can turn them into complete hell. I had one commanding general who limited all speeches to 2 minutes or less. Great guy who knew troops shouldn’t be baking in the sun for longer than necessary. Change of Command took 15 minutes.
My husband is active duty, and if the bitching I have to hear about parade is half of what he actually feels, he fucking despises them.
For one base commander COC, our battalion CO wanted make us look good, so he replaced all of the company guide-on bearers (who are normally junior enlisted) with E-6 personnel. You know, all that fruit salad on our chests. None of us (or at least I) had ever carried the flag before, and had to learn how to smartly snap it to present arms. For the uninitiated, this means bringing the flag pole from the ‘carry’ position, which is vertical, to the horizontal position (present arms). This is supposed to be done in one smooth motion.
We practiced this for a week, marching up with the officers in two rows, then doing a facing moving toward the review stand and marching forward in two lines. My company commander, an Ensign, had a bad habit of drifting to his right, which meant near misses with a heavy piece of wood coming downward at the same time that his arm was coming up to salute with his sword. I kept telling him, quietly, “Move left, MOVE LEFT!”
As luck would have it, on the day of the ceremony he did the same thing, but couldn’t hear me over the band playing. I was able to control the pole to the extent that it didn’t hit him in the head, but it thwacked his arm hard enough to make him sag. Later, the XO told me jokingly that nobody had told me to “lower the ensign”.
It was the only time I almost enjoyed a ceremony.
What was your rank at the end?
A little. A lot depends on who the person that was being honored or those in a change of command ceremony.
My worse one: Super hot summer day without shade in New Mexico. A brigadier general and a technical sergeant are retiring. We had to wear full blues and it was hot. The ceremony was taking too long with boring speeches. People started dropping like flies especially those who normally worked in air-conditioned offices. Even I, who worked outside on the flight-line, was feeling queasy and sweat was pouring off of me. About a fourth off all the participants had to fall out of formation and even people in the reviewing stand were leaving. This for a a lousy one-star and a TSgt!
After yesterday it was sort of in the back of my mind trying to think of dress uniform involvement in ceremonies. My commissioning was in dress uniform. I was the only commissionee that day so it was light on ceremony and pain. My officer basic course ceremony was in Class As. Aside from that, I can think of three, all funerals. I had no issues with the requirements of ceremony for those. I even wished I could have rehearsed more for the first time I had to hand over the flag. I didn’t like the need to hold those ceremonies but wouldn’t have missed any of them.
I had one Brigade commander who tried for 3 minutes. He was usually pretty good at hitting his mark. At one COR he was easily on pace but then diverted to a personal anecdote about prior service with the new CSM. Missed his mark by seconds. He’d wagered something like 1000 pushups, too. 
Several of us in the “cheap seats” had timed and caught it.
…but your pain for that ceremony was the gift that kept on giving every time you shared the story. It’s still giving.
One ceremony stands in my memory. Just about anybody connected to the military can be buried at sea by the navy. As ship’s admin division, we could be spared to be the attendants, since we had the least important work to do. The cremains were in plastic bags held in paisley boxes that looked like the came from the die-cutter as McDonald Happy Meals. We stood at attention in the hangar deck while the chaplain opened the bags and dumped the ashes from the elevator platform into the Pacific. The wind blew them right into our faces and all over our dress blues, until the chaplain heard our groans and dumped the rest of them still in their bags.
US Army, Military Intelligence. If you don’t know, most folks there are some combination of crazy, bored with life, super smart, and very creative. At one station we had a standing deal with our platoon sergeant–when he’d call us to attention in the morning formation we would sound out in unison with some flip remark. If we could make him lose his composure he’d do pushups. Otherwise he’d drop us for 20 four count pushups with varying degrees of mercy in his cadence depending on how amused he’d been.
‘Marching up & down the square’ practice could be entertaining as well because once the basics were knocked out we’d get stuff like, “Right step left step, double to the rear…MARCH!” There’s a primitive part of your brain that gets happy when 40 people execute something like that without screwing up.
But standing for a change of command ceremony…depends. If the outgoing officer was reasonably cool it was an honor to send them off in military style. Plus those were typically the ones who did not get off on making their command stand in the sun while they droned on through a speech nobody’d give a shit about.
I enjoy them as a spectator, when I can sit down, but I’m not crazy about having to stand in formation. I’ve also been an emcee at a few, and I enjoyed those because you are doing something, you can move your legs around behind the lectern, and the business makes the ceremony go faster.
But I don’t really hate them; in the aviation side of the house we average about one all hands in dress uniforms per year, and they are in the hangar, out of the sun, so it’s no biggie. My back and knees don’t enjoy it, but I’ll take a motrin before hand to help with that.
As an aside: I was deployed during one of the change of commands at a unit where I was stationed; an O-5 female, (who was friend of mine), passed out and fell straight forward onto her face breaking her jaw and one of her cheek bones. She was 6’1", so she had a long way to go, before she hit that concrete hangar deck.
Never lock those knees.
Canadian Navy - Lieutenant (Navy) for life 