Pinnacle

You know what I realized today?
Pinnacle rhymes with Cynical.
And that’s the way most of the Class of 2009 feels about it.
This is supposedly what ’08 did instead of recognition.
And ‘07s was supposedly even easier.
That was a piece of cake.
No,
Seriously,
That was a joke.

The whole thing started with the lowering of the flag on Friday.
Then we marched to dinner.
No sitting at Attention or anything,
Just chilling out.

After dinner,
We learned who our Class Exemplar is.
The Class Exemplar is someone in history that we want to represent our class.
For example,
2001 had General Billy Mitchell,
The guy how pushed for the formation of the Academy.
2005 had General Patton,
The first General to actively use Air Power in combination with his ground forces.
We nominated several officers from history and voted on them last semester.
I’ll write a separate post on our Class Exemplar.

We had four hours to clean for the SAMI,
That’s more than four times the amount we got during Recognition.

After cleaning went formed up for our midnight march.
We marched down to the base Cemetery.
They had a nice ceremony down there.
“Amazing Grace” was played on the Bagpipes.
After which there was a twenty-one gun salute.
Followed by our own “In The Stairwell” singing “High Flight” and the third verse of the Air Force Song.
Finished off by the playing of Taps by a bugler.
Then we marched back to the Hill.
Where we finished cleaning.

Got up for reveille formation which was at 0530.
Then marched to breakfast.
After which was the SAMI.
Yippie.

After the SAMI we had the line challenge.
We marched down to the athletic fields,
And lined up to start.
All of this was timed.
And we were carrying rifles.

We started by running some 200 yards to the first event where we did Ranger Pushups.
For those of you who don’t know,
You use four people to make a square.
Put your feet on someone’s back,
And someone puts their feet on your back,
And you do pushups.
We did 30.

Then we ran with the Charge (a large painted railroad tie with ropes) about 50 yards and ran back.
Then we ran to the next event,

Another 200 yards.
This was Fireman Carry,
Two people start alive and they have to carry the entire element of 9 across a line 50 feet away.
They carry a person over,
That person is alive and can help bring more people.
Than we ran 50 yards up hill to the next event.

Stretcher carry.
Similar concept,
But just three dead people and one stretcher.

Than another 200 yard run to the low crawl,
We had to get all 9 of us under an obstacle in 45 seconds to get a two minute bonus,
We did it in 20.
They said that was the fastest they’d ever seen.
Than we ran 300 yards to the starting point for the run.

We ran 2.5.
May not sound like much,
But after everything else,
4 hours of sleep,
Boots that weigh 5 pounds each,
Rifles,
And going uphill…
Yeah,
It was a little tiring.
But I still did better than the guys from ’08.

Than we had an In Ranks Inspection.
(For uniforms)
It was in Parade Dress.
Why?
That’s beyond me.
We’ve worn that thing twice so far.
Including the inspection.

Which brings up another point.
This uniform costs around $500 and has to be custom made.
Why did we pay $500 for a uniform that we’ll be wearing a grand total of 8 times in our lives?
They don’t where this in the real Air Force.
It does look cool though.
I’ll have to post a picture some time.

After the inspection,
We had a parade,
Now,
You’d think that since we where just in Parade Dress,
We’d do the PARADE in PARADE Dress.
Nope,
We did it in Service Dress.
Service Dress and boots no less.
The civilian equivalent to this is wearing hiking boots with a suit and tie.
Yeah…

After the parade we went to dinner.
That was fairly boring.
They announced the winners for pinnacle.
But everyone was to busy watching the cadet eat an entire Dove Ice Cream bar in one bite.

Like I said,
The whole thing was a piece of cake.
’08 and ’07 really had it easy.
And they know it too.
I kinda feel sorry for them.
They couldn’t help it.

The entire point of this post was to prove why Pinnacle rhymes with cynical.
Because that’s how it makes cadets feel.
As you may have gathered from my ranting.