The posts that state that 5 branches are represented are correct. From what I have seen, at any one time there are 4 enlisted soldiers at each corner each with a rifle. There is one officer at the head of the casket wearing a sword. The branch of the officer seems to change which affects the make up of the rest of the group. I haven’t seen enough to notice a pattern but I’m sure they have it all planned out.
Sorry, no. They are *honor guards * first and foremost. There is plenty of other security there to react to any problems. The honor guard is not concentrating on the crowd and would be poor security. They would not be able to react quickly enough to matter. I’m sure they would help out if they could but their primary function is to honor a former Commander in Chief.
The rifles they carry are ceremonial. I guarantee there are plenty of people with real guns off camera. One thing that struck me when I was in London: the guards at Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London looked like ceremonial guards in their fancy uniforms but they were carrying very modern lethal looking automatic weapons. I hear they will neither confirm nor deny if they are loaded. I assume loaded.
BTW the rarest award in the US Army is not the Medal of Honor, its is the Tomb Badge which is awarded to those who become qualified to guard the Tomb of the Unknowns. There have been more MoH winners than Tomb qualified soldiers.
NITPICK: While the Tomb Guard Badge is more rare than the Medal of Honor (by like 3,000), it is not the rarest. The rarest badge awarded in the Army would be the Master Army Astronaut Device.
Time has a lot to do with this too. The Medal of Honor has almost a hundred year head start on the Tomb Guard Badge. And the rarest, the Master AAD, has only been around for like twenty years.
Ready for a FOAF story? Good. Actually, it was my friend who claimed to have witnessed the event, and I’m your friend or so I hope, gentle reader, so to you it’s a friend of a friend.
Anyway, my friend’s story (and he’s a pretty standup guy, for what it’s worth, military aviator type): he saw a guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier challenge a guy who was goofing off and jumping past the barrier when he thought the guard didn’t see. The guard shouted a scripted warning, very loundly. The person did it again, the guard challenged and shouted again. The guy did it a third time and the guard turned, chambered a round in the rifle, and leveled it at him. He then shouted that he had warned him three times, that this would be his final warning, and something to the effect of quoting the text that legally authorized the guard to shoot him.
So if he is to be believed, an honor guard would be honored to shoot you.
He remember that some years ago, during some ceremony, a british guard collapsed due to heat, and nobody moved to help him. I can’t remember what was the outcome for this individual, perhaps he died, but I can’t remember it anymore. I’m wondering to if the regulations were changed following this incident. Perhaps a british poster will remember it (it was quite widely reported, since there was a footage of the incident) better than I do.
The sailor spends about 5 minutes of his time with one hand behind his back. It’s always the sailor and only the sailor so far as I can tell. Why does he/she do this?
They all do it: the detail commander puts both hands behind his back to signal the detail they may do so. They also pull their feet about a foot apart. It’s called “Parade Rest” and it indeed is how they take a break from being 30 straight minutes at rigid attention.
BTW, the detail commander is not necessarily a commissioned officer: I see from the broadcast it can also be an NCO, apparently grade E6 or above (in the times I watched I’ve seen an Army and a Marines Staff Sgt, a USCG Lieutenant, an AF Master Sgt, and a Navy and a USCG PO1). Besides him and the four others at each corner, there is a sixth guard who stands by the US Flag, aparently always a member of the commander’s same service.
… And as mentioned, there’s probably off-camera more than a few Capitol Police and Federal Protective Service people who, if you tried anything funny, would likely be on you in a fifth of a second making you feel unloved and uncomfortable.
Quite a few years back, sometime in the ear;y 80’s, there was an elaborate ceremony in DC/Virginia to entomb the unidentified remains of a Vietnam War soldier in yje Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers. IIRC, the remains were in the Capitol dome, and then moved by horse drawn carriage to (I think) Arlington. The carriage route was lined ny an honor guard along both sides of the road, and as it was a couple of miles a least, it must have involved hundreds of soldiers. It was one of thise horribly hot, humid Washington summer days. I went out to take photos that day and covered a good deal of the route myself.
At one point I saw a guard simply wobble and collapse without a word. The guards near him did not break ranks to help him, or react in any way that I could see. But all of the sudden I saw a couple of more soldiers, not in dress uniform, come trotting up with a stretcher, and they loaded him on and broaght him to an ambulance.
This was an all day long thing. I was out there for 4-5 hours, and the guards weren’t relieved, and I didn’t even see a single guard break ranks to get a sip of water. But I did see two more guards collapse during the day with exactly the same outcome. There were ambulances and medical personnel stationed at intervals, apparently in anticipation of exactly that type of occurence.
I’ve never before or since seen discipline like that.
Well… the British have always had their guards carry whatever the standard infantry weapon is at the time, so today, it’s L85A1 assault rifles.
On the other hand, the US ceremonial soldier carry M1 Garand rifles, which aren’t exactly ceremonial. They’re the primary rifle carried during WWII and Korea.
There’s no reason that either group of soldiers (US & UK) couldn’t load them up, but I doubt they do, because of the possibility of accidents.
I would assume the same. I can’t speak for the British Royal Guards, but I’ve done the ceremonial guard bit at a royal palace in Denmark, and our rifles (H&K G3) - prettyfied as they were with a cute white strap instead of our standard leather one - were very much loaded. Not much good otherwise.
I don’t know but the one around the south side of Arlington National Cemetary is scalable.
I had business at Marine Corps Headquarters many years ago. The place I needed to get to was just south of the cemetary so I took a cab in downtown DC and told the cabbie my destination.
Well, we crossed the Memorial Bridge, turned south and ran into a maze of road construction with temporary “One Way,” “Dead End,” and so on. Somehow we wound up in the cemetary and were driving along the south edge inside the stone boundry wall there.
I looked up on a little hill and there sat the building I was looking for so I told the cabbie to stop. I got out, paid him, sat my briefcase on top of the wall, climbed over and legged it up to see the Marines.
Can anyone confirm what I thought I heard from the reporters while they were bringing Reagan into the rotunda? They mentioned that all of the pallbearers, and there were a lot of them, trained constantly just for the job of carrying dead folks up those steps.
Well those troops do a lot of funerals but very few people get to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda so they don’t practice going up those steps. However I do know they were practicing with a stunt casket before the real one showed up. BTW I was I flipped past CSPAN last night and noticed that the detail commander is a NCO at times. I was planning on mentioning it here this morning and then I noticed that someone beat me to it. Of course.
A story to go along with the previous hijack. Back several years ago we had a West Point Cadet join the unit for his summer tour. I forget what they call the program but cadets join active duty units over the summer to get experience. Anyhoo, There was a large ceremony, a change of command, and our Battalion was there. In the middle of the ceremony this cadet felt the heat and took a knee. The Battalion Command Sergeant Major was also to the rear of the formation and he whispered “sir what the f*** are you doing?” The cadet answered “At West Point we are taught to take a knee if we feel faint.” The CSM answered “Well this is the 1st Cav and we stand until we fing collapse so get the f on your feet!” Needless to say this cadet was not very popular and the other cadet who came to the unit with him were very embarrassed.
I still want to hear about the horses. Now suppose the horses pulling the caisson took a dump. Would the soldiers marching behind be obliged to step right in the poop? Or are the horses “street trained” and don’t dump while on duty?
When I was in Navy boot camp, I was assigned to a company that was called a “900 unit.”
900 units performed special services. Our company was a “State Flags” company, meaning that we practiced hard to march in parade formation while carrying the flags of all fifty states, plus a color guard.
We would even do special maneuvers with the flags, the most elaborate being the double-to-the-rear starburst. It was quite impressive.
This performance was given at graduation from boot camp. But first, we had to perform for the public. We were sent to five different parades in various towns within driving distance of the Great Lakes Naval Base in North Chicago, Illinois.
We marched in Crystal Lake, Kenosha and a few others. But the biggest parade we were invited to was the Great American Circus Parade in Milwaukee. We were fed at the Hotel Pfister, welcomed by Ernest Borgnine, who was the grand marshal (and a Navy vet), and placed into the staging area.
When we marched, it became obvious that we had been placed behind numerous mounted units, in addition to a whole bunch of elephants. There was nothing that could be done, though, except march through it all and perform for the crown according to our orders and our duties.
Luckily, uniform dry cleaning was free for recruits in boot camp. We had to clean and shine our own boots, though. :eek: