The Salute: A brief history

No one knows the precise origin of today’s hand salute. From earliest times and in many distant armies throughout history, the right hand (or “weapon hand”) has been raised as a greeting of friendship. The idea may have been to show that you weren’t ready to use a rock or other weapon. Courtesy required that the inferior make the gesture first. Certainly there is some connection between this old gesture and our present salute. One romantic legend has it that today’s military salute descended from the medieval knight’s gesture of raising his visor to reveal his identity as a courtesy on the approach of a superior. The military salute has in fact had many different forms over the centuries. The following explanation of the origin, however, is perhaps closest to the truth: It was a long-established military custom for juniors to remove their headgear in the presence of superiors. In the British Army as late as the American Revolution a soldier saluted by removing his hat. But with the advent of more cumbersome headgear in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the act of removing one’s hat was gradually converted into the simpler gesture of grasping the visor, and issuing a courteous salutation.  From there it finally became conventionalized into something resembling our modern hand salute. Whatever the actual origin of today’s hand salute, clearly in the tradition of the US Army it has always been used to indicate a sign of respect, further recognition that in the profession of arms military, courtesy is both a right and a responsibility of every soldier.