Honor Guard: A very somber drill weekend
This past weekend with the National Guard did not involve firing ranges, roaring engines, or anything even remotely resembling a tank. No camouflage-face-paint, no action-movie moments, no “tell me about your drill weekend” stories that would impress anyone at a bar.
Instead, I voluntarily spent a full eight hours learning how to stand still.
I signed up for Honor Guard training, which, if you don’t know, is the unit responsible for military funerals. The ones who show up when everything is quiet. When the family is tired. When the story is over, but the respect is not.
I’ll admit, when I showed up, I assumed I already knew a good chunk of it. Parade rest is parade rest, attention is attention; how different could it be? Turns out, very. Honor Guard doesn’t just stand; it holds space. Every movement has weight. Every pause has purpose. Even the bugle, which I naively believed required someone who actually knew how to play it, turns out to be a carefully timed illusion. There’s a speaker inside. Your job is to make it look real, timing your breathing, your movements, your stillness, so no one ever notices.
That theme followed us all day: making something look effortless when it is anything but.
We learned proper drill and ceremony, memorized the words spoken when handing off the flag, and practiced again and again until muscle memory took over. The training was long. My feet hurt. My shoulders ached. And by the end of the day, my fingers were sore in a way I didn’t know fingers could be sore.
But my favorite part, unexpectedly, was folding the flag.
Over and over, we folded. Tight. Clean. Precise. Triangle after triangle. There’s something grounding about it. Something almost meditative. By the end, my triangles were near perfect, and I felt an odd sense of pride in that. Not because I’d “won” anything, but because I’d learned how to do something correctly that would matter deeply to someone else on the worst day of their life.
That’s really what this weekend was about.
The veterans we honor already did the loud part. They served. They sacrificed. They lived whole lives full of stories I’ll never fully know. Standing in silence, folding a flag, saying the right words at the right time, it feels small in comparison. But it’s not nothing.
It’s the last formation. The final salute. The closing chapter.
It feels strange to say I’m looking forward to my first funeral detail. Excited isn’t the right word. Prepared might be closer. Grateful, definitely. Grateful that I get to be there not for myself, but for someone else’s story, for their service to be seen, acknowledged, and honored properly.
They served us while they were alive.
The least I can do is show up, one last time, for them.