Not everyone in the military deals with customs and courtesies. I was on submarines. We barely knew how to wear uniforms correctly. We would go months without shaving or cutting our hair. We would share crucial daily operational tasks like periscope depth operations extremely closely with officers. Most of the time the the entire evolution was done with courses suggested by the enlisted control party, and confirmed by the officer.

I don’t know shit about uniforms or any of the big military stuff that honor guards do. I wore a dress uniform once every 2 years or so. I couldn’t tell you anything about ceremonies. We rarely had them.

I was tasked with memorizing acoustic signatures of hundreds of enemy ships, submarines and aircraft. With memorizing the dozen plus formulas that can be used with bearing and relative motion to generate range and speed for a target. How to do time/frequency analysis of single hz low frequency tonals to remove own ship contribution to the frequency and figure out enemy speed and bearing solely off a single hertz dark line on a water falling display. It’s Doppler. If they are running a pump with 100 hz tonal, and they turn toward you, that frequency is going to shift up .3 or or something. Over a long enough timeline, you can math out those shifts to get target track and speed.

You know how hard that is?

I’m glad this guy knows all this big military stuff. Not all of us ever exposed to it. But it’s not a failing on our part. We just didn’t have to know it. Big military is a different universe than the submarine community. We operate in our own isolated bases and our own bubble. And I loved it that way.