Local honor guard sweeps competition

The Las Cruces detachment of the Marine Corps League swept the state honor guard competition.

The Military Honors Fall Training Conference and Competition took place in Albuquerque and judged different teams on how well they could provide honors at a veteran’s burial. Teams were judged on how well they could play taps, fire three rifle volleys, fold a flag and other metrics like uniformity.

Member of the Las Cruces detachment of the Marine Corps League Andrés Rivera said that the competition was broken up into small, medium and large teams and Las Cruces won all three categories for the first time in the 16-year history of the competition.

“Everything’s precise. All of the movements have got to be precise. The weapons have to be precise,” Rivera said.

Rivera said that perhaps one of the hardest parts of the competition is the firing of the rifles.

“The big one that always catches you is when you actually do the volleys of the fire. If you sound like seven rifles making the sound of one shot, then everybody is doing the same thing. If you shoot and it sounds like fireworks then you just blew that part of the competition,” Rivera said.

But Rivera and other members of the detachment do more than just competing at these events. The education and training that they go through helps them provide better services for veteran funerals.

“The guys that are still with it that joined when I joined, we have at least 1,300 funerals under our belt,” Rivera said.

Rivera also said that providing these honors for funerals is “bittersweet.”

“We send them off to their final duty station with full military honors and the best part of this is when family members come up and thank us. That means a lot,” Rivera said.

The next Military Honors Training Conference and Competition will take place in Las Cruces in April.