Present arms.
Present, as in the verb. To present or display.
Arms, such as weapons, rifles, firearms even.
Sounds bold and dignified, don’t you think? Like aren’t you imagining some knight in shiny armor brandishing a sword? If you close your eyes for a moment and concentrate, you can see a broad-shouldered Anglo-Saxon man holding Excalibur high over his head.
“PREEESENT…..ARMS!”
The command echoed across the field.
This was not an epic scene from a Hollywood production of King Arthur, or even a Showtime mini-series. Furthermore, there were no arms displayed, unless you counted literal arms raised in salutes. Some lucky arms got to hold their unit colors; little flags emblazoned with unit crests and sometimes framed by ribbons. Even luckier still, were the select few Soldiers chosen to hold brigade colors. Brigade colors were obnoxious symbols of dominance, so heavily weighed down with tassels, ribbons, and obscene amounts of high quality fibers imported from China, that their bearers had to augment their carrying capacity with special vests and anchoring apparatuses.
“Order ARMS”
And with that command, everyone’s hands and colors went down in one great motion.
Thud!
And Reggie.
Reggie went down too.
If there is one thing that the armed forces loved more than defending their homeland, it was standing in place in neat rows of ten on giant swaths of mowed grass under the blazing sun. This was what they called a parade, and it was way cooler than anything Macy’s could put on. The narrator during the parade said something during the program about how this was the traditional way to show deference to the incoming and outgoing division commanders, but that’s not the reason everyone stood there so rigidly and attentively. They stood there like that because all of the leadership had promised their subordinates unforgiving torment if they fucked up the division change of command ceremony.
There would be no shiny watches poking out from underneath camouflage sleeves.
There would be no shitty haircuts fanning out from beneath berets.
There would certainly be no poorly formed, chef-shaped berets.
And most importantly, there would be absolutely no fall outs.
If anyone collapsed during the ceremony, everyone had strict instructions to leave the fallen bodies to lie where they collapsed.
This was a set of instructions that all of the West Point and Citadel commissioned officers excelled at far above their peers. They had spent the better part of their young adult lives learning how to step over the corpses of less resilient officers rather than help them up; it came second nature.
But returning back to Reggie, he was no small man. Slender maybe, but at 6’1”, he was markedly not small. Furthermore, being so tall meant he was at the front of his unit’s box formation on the field. The front left corner to be exact. The first command following the last presentation of arms, was a massive pinwheel turn toward the review stands. To ensure that the movement was fluid, the ranks behind Reggie didn’t need to just march around him as if nothing had happened. They would have to march over him.
The first few rows weren’t so bad. The Soldiers immediately following Reggie were similar in height and possessed legs long enough to step over him without missing a beat. The last few ranks though, that was where the horror lay. Pair after pair of stubby, Napolean-complex feet stomped over Reggie’s dehydrated and crumpled body. Were it only his own company that he had to worry about, he may have escaped that fateful day with only a few bruises to his face and dignity, but he was in the first battalion, of the first brigade combat team of the division.
Somewhere between the 215th Brigade Support Battalion and their supported battalion of very heavy tankers, Reggie came to. He locked eyes with a portly, bull-faced battalion Sergeant Major and knew instantly that if he didn’t move quickly, he was done for. A tiny chaplain’s assistant from the 215th hopped over Reggie as he rolled onto his belly and began to desperately low-crawl through the division command sergeant major’s grass. The parade field was mercilessly hot and infested with all manner of disease carrying arthropods. Reggie cursed under his breath as he dragged himself forward.
This was no time to be dehydrated.
With each beat of the marching band drum, the tankers stomped closer. The gap between units wasn’t very large, and Reggie had ungodly long and heavy legs to drag behind him. If only he had in fact skipped leg day, perhaps he would already be off the field. Fifty meters lay between him and the safety of parking lot asphalt.
Fifty meters.
Fifty, goddamed meters.
Somehow, he made it past the farthest-most corner of the tank battalion’s formation with not a moment to spare. Their columns of marching men and women concealed Reggie’s broken, yet still camouflaged form as it finished crawling across the parade field to the safety of the parking lot.
Once there, he finally stood up. Standing in parking lots decidedly did not ruin the magic of Division Changes of Command. This was safe ground.
Reggie would go on to receive a company grade article 15 for falling out of the parade’ however he served his extra duty hours proudly, because he knew that despite his faux pas, he had dug deep and given his all to not only save himself, but also save the ceremony. Reggie put in all of the effort where it truly mattered.
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