Pentagon River Entrance Arrival

Joint Service – Separated

DrillMasterColor Guard/Color Team, Honor Guard, Instructional 2 Comments

I received a great question the other day. Why are the color guards at the Pentagon and sometimes at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier carrying the American and a foreign national flag with guards and what dictates the order of the manning for both teams? Joint Service A full joint service arrival ceremony for a foreign dignitary at the …

The Argument From AFPAM 34-1203

DrillMasterColor Guard/Color Team, Commentary, Instructional, Judge Training, Regulation Drill 2 Comments

What argument would this be? It’s about using the other two service manuals. It gets a bit complicated, but bear with me as we go through why the AFPAM has so little information and what to do about it. We need to understand that all three drill and ceremonies manuals are lacking in certain aspects and using ones best judgment …

The Firing Party Timing

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Forensic Experts Galore What you hear and what you see can be two different things. A firing party fires so quickly that it can be impossible to hear that a single shot fired by all seven team members is not at exactly the same split second. We hear perfection, but a photo or still from a video can show a …

A DrillMaster Study of Mark Time

DrillMasterColor Guard/Color Team, Drill Team Training, Drill Teams, Honor Guard Training, JROTC, Judge Training, Regulation Drill Leave a Comment

Marching in place, marking time. Many think they know how to do it. There are three different regulation drill techniques for the US military and two techniques for ceremonial drill.

The Why of the Military Color Guard – JROTC and State Colors

DrillMasterColor Guard, Color Guard/Color Team 2 Comments

For a JROTC color guard in competition the idea behind carrying the state flag in place of the departmental or even the JROTC organizational is to not break military flag protocol and that’s understandable. However, this idea has backfired so that just about every JROTC color guard believes that carrying the state flag as a substitute for the military flag is perfectly acceptable for every colors presentation.

Presenting the Colors at a Sporting Event

DrillMasterAsk DrillMaster, Color Guard/Color Team, Honor Guard, Honor Guard Training, Instructional 5 Comments

In 2017 I was talking with one of the JROTC instructors at one of the local high schools where I have taught in the afternoons and he was relaying the story of their color guard presenting the colors for a professional ball club and how the training I gave the team really helped since it provided the cadets and the …