Shortly after our arrival as recruits on Parris Island, we learned how to execute the hand salute. As with all we were there taught, it was done by the numbers.
1. Raise your right hand smartly in the most direct manner until the tip of your forefinger touches the lower part of the headdress above and slightly to the right of your right eye.
2. Your thumb and fingers should be straight and touch each other.
3. You should be able to see your entire palm when looking straight ahead.
4. Your upper arm should be level with the deck and forearm at a 45-degree angle.
5. Your wrist and hand should be straight, a continuation of the line made by your forearm.
We subsequently learned the protocol for salutes, which any former Marine may still recite by rote. Proper saluting, like most Marine Corps rituals, is taken most seriously.
After boot camp, I was sent to supply school at Camp Lejeune. Young 2nd lieutenants direct from OCS were also attending classes there. During breaks, we'd head to the snack bar for the sole purpose of smartly saluting the exiting officers who'd often be juggling several cups of coffee. They, of course, were trained to immediately return the salute. Maybe twice a week we'd get a guy to dump his load. OK, we were kids.
The first time I saw a President return a salute (usually seen exiting Marine One on the White House lawn), I was confused and have quietly remained so ever since. He's not in uniform, but he is at the top of the Chain of Command (and as such, doesn't have one). Should he or shouldn't he salute?
Ronald Reagan did it with a confident Hollywood flair and, I thought, pulled it off well. Clinton was openly uncomfortable with it, and Bush II employed the sloppy hand to the forehead wave he'd learned in the Texas Air National Guard (Air Force types are notoriously bad saluters).
President Obama, from the start, has been a confident Marine-like saluter - always tight, crisp, and appropriate. Perhaps he was given early lessons from his National Security Advisor James Jones, a former Commandant of the Marine Corps. For example, compare Obama's salute with the Army officer next to him in the photo above.
It was, thereby, with great interest that I read the following piece by a former Marine in today's New York Times. I thought you'd enjoy it as well.
New York Times
A Final Verdict on the Presidential Salute
By CAREY WINFREY
FOR nearly three decades, I’ve felt conflicted about presidential salutes. After all, my United States Marine Corps instructors drilled into me the idea that “you never salute without a cover” which, in civilian, meant without a hat.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press
President Obama at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Oct. 29, 2009.
Then there were the salutes themselves, which ranged from halfhearted to jaunty. None of them fulfilled the characteristically succinct prescription that Capt. Jack O’Donnell of the Marine Corps delivered, in 1963, to my platoon of freshly minted second lieutenants at basic school in Quantico, Va.: “Your salute,” he pronounced, “must be impeccable,” by which we took him to mean like his: a straight line running from elbow to fingertips, the fingers and thumb forming a seamless whole, the arm brought swiftly to the brim of the cap, no palm showing, and then lowered smartly to the side.
Presidents have long been saluted, but they began returning salutes relatively recently. Ronald Reagan was thought to be the first, in 1981. He had sought advice on the matter from Gen. Robert Barrow, commandant of the Marine Corps. According to John Kline, then Mr. Reagan’s military aide and today a member of Congress from Minnesota, General Barrow told the president that as commander in chief he could salute anybody he wished. And so it began.
Mr. Reagan’s successors continued the practice, and I continued to be conflicted — believing that when it comes to salutes (and one or two other matters), presidents deserved to be cut some slack, but also feeling a little uneasy about the whole thing.
My ambivalence came to an end last week, when I saw a videotape of the president’s midnight trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where he had participated, very early that morning, in the “dignified transfer” of 15 Army soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents killed that week in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama stood ramrod straight and saluted as six soldiers carried the coffin bearing the body of Sgt. Dale Griffin of Indiana off a C-17 transport aircraft and into a waiting van. His salute, it struck me, was impeccable in every way.
Semper Fidelis.
