Week 2 – Pennant Test, PFB, and Academics (Part 1 of 3)

The pennant test is graded by the MTIs.  Your flight will select someone in your flight to march you around the drill pad and at the end you will either pass or fail.  The results will be released during the pennant award ceremony which immediately followed the tests.  If you pass, your flight will march itself to wherever it needs to go for the remainder of the course.  If you fail, your MTI will schedule a time to re-accomplish the pennant test to give you another opportunity.  The staff wants you to pass your pennant test because they will no longer have to babysit you, so they have a vested interest in ensuring you know what you need to know to pass.

The test has a time limit and physical boundaries on the drill pad.  The MTIs set up a few cones to mark the boundary but I think we would all have preferred a lot more cones.  The person in charge of marching your flight around is called the Flight Leader (FL).  The FL is given a card with different commands which they must accomplish within the time limit of the test.  The FL may have to add different commands between commands on the card to ensure they are all covered and you don’t bust the boundary.  For example, if the card lists a column right then a column left the FL may need to do two column rights before the column left so they don’t march through the boundary.

The MTIs graded both the FL and the individuals in the Flight.  The individuals in the flight were supposed to carry out the commands correctly which involved executing on the correct foot, keeping hands cupped, etc.  There were also individual drill commands on the card such as left face, about face, etc.  Everything was graded so if an individual didn’t do something correctly points were lost.  The FL was graded by their ability to maintain control of the flight.  A big part of this was catching and calling out individuals if they didn’t do something correctly.  If the FL called a right face command and everyone executed but someone then adjusted to correct their feet, the FL would have lost a point for losing control of the flight and the individual would have lost a point for adjusting.  If the FL called an about face and two people don’t pin their hands but the FL doesn’t catch it, two FL would have lost points and the two people would also have lost points.  I can’t remember exactly how the grading worked but I think every three mistakes by the flight counted as one point and every one mistake by the FL counted as one point.  This weighted scoring helped because early in training a lot of people still made a lot of drill mistakes.  So basically as long as the FL generally knew what to do and didn’t march the flight through the boundary they were good to go.

For the award ceremony all flights were told to line up on a line on the pad.  The MTIs called out the flight numbers for the flights who passed their pennant test and the Flight Commander attached the pennant.  My flight passed our pennant test and this was one of my proudest moments of OTS.  I wasn’t even the FL but when they called our flight number I was overwhelmed with a sense of pride.  Looking back most of the emotion was probably due to the stress of TFIT and knowing we finally accomplished something good instead of getting yelled at all day long.  But regardless, the thoughts going through my mind were that we were faced with an obstacle and we came together and overcame the challenge.  Out of 16 flights I think four or five failed their pennant test.  Most failed for marching across the boundary but I am not sure about the others.  Most of the flights who failed re-tested within a few days and passed.  A few flights had their pennant taken away for messing up drill badly, but they earned it back a few days later.  The bottom line is you want a pennant and you don’t want to have it taken away because it is embarrassing.