Parade Bloopers

Reading T's comment on the parade about the ensign who nearly dropped his colours reminded of the fact that a certain mutual friend of ours was a colour ensign for the SAF day parade way back when we were in active NS. He related to us the incident of an officer who had to hand off the colours to the colour sargeant behind him before he fainted. Even as he was being carried from the rehearsal on a stretcher, a warrant officer was walking beside him, enumerating his various failings and faults while poking him with a pace stick for emphasis. Technically speaking, the colour ensign did the correct thing: if he had dropped the colours on the ground, the going rate for extras (as in "extra-duty", which is the standard administrative punishment for officers) was something like 21 if I recall correctly - that's enough to wipe out half a year's weekends.

What made it even funnier was when Channel News Asia had a brief clip in their behind-the-scenes feature on NDP showing a warrant officer dropping his pace stick during one of the rehearsals. Ouch.

I think the one we all remember though is from a few years back, when it was painfully obvious that one soldier misfired his "feu-de-joie". Can't even begin to imagine how many guard-duties that gets you ...