O Captain! My Captain!

My congratulations to all of my fellow JAGs who went into the office yesterday as mere First Lieutenants and emerged as fearsome Captains. While we knew we were scheduled to be promoted on 10 July, it is common that JAG promotion dates are often held up due to bureaucratic lethargy. The JAGs that were in the Officer Training School class before me had to wait nearly six weeks beyond their projected promotion date before they pinned on their Captain's bars. It came as a wonderful surprise that we would pin exactly six months to the day from when I put on First Lieutenant.

As officers wear metal insignia on their uniforms to indicate rank, a promotion means physically changing all of one's insignia to reflect the new rank. One literally pins the new metal rank onto the uniform. Accordingly, the term "pinning on" is synonymous with being promoted.

Second Lieutenant

First Lieutenant

Captain

My office did an amazing job of feigning ignorance if our promotion notices actually came out on time. By about 10:00 AM I had resigned myself that my Captaincy (that's actually a word even though I'm using it improperly) was going to be weeks off, stymied by administrative plaque on the arteries of the Pentagon. I was pleasantly shocked when Bohdi (the roommate and fellow lover of things Xtreme), Devil Dog (another JAG that Bohdi and I went through OTS and JASOC with), and myself were called down during our office standup to take our Oath of Office.

The Boss administering our Oath of Office

From Left to Right:
Captains Devil Dog, Bodhi, and Johnny Utah, United States Air Force.