Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Last week I was watching The McLaughlin Group on PBS, a political show that for some reason I've always liked -- especially the Saturday Night Live parodies of it, in which McLaughlin (played by Dana Carvey) would let his commentators get halfway through a sentence and then bark, "WRONG!" before moving on to the next thing.

But there was a fascinating segment, toward the end of the show, on a problem facing the military. Veterans of World War II and Korea are dying at a pretty brisk clip these days, pushing up the number of funerals with full military honors -- but the military only has something like five hundred buglers worldwide, which makes the playing of "Taps" at each funeral a difficult or impossible proposition. The military's solution is to use an electronic doohickey to sound "Taps" while a member of the military holds up a bugle and, well, fake it. I'm thinking, in the event of a funeral where there can be no actual bugler, why not just have a civilian trumpeter play "Taps"?

I played the trumpet in high school and college -- pretty well, too; I actually majored in it my first two years of college before I switched to philosophy -- and I had the high honor of playing "Taps" for several military funerals while I was in high school. They weren't official military funerals, actually; they were done under the auspices of the American Legion, which I'm sure is a different matter requiring a different protocol. But the men being buried on those occasions were veterans or former servicemen, and I was immensely proud to be able to play "Taps" for their funerals -- a small way for me, as a civilian, to pay tribute to the service they had done for their country. If there aren't enough official buglers around, then I suggest that civilian trumpeters are the way to go. I doubt there is a community anywhere in the country where one trumpet player can't be found, and believe me, playing "Taps" for a funeral is a surprisingly moving experience.

I don't know the first thing about the military regulations for such things, but surely they could be changed so that a civilian could sound the call for a departed veteran. At the very least, it seems to me that having a non-military person actually playing "Taps" is preferable to having a military person who can't play the instrument "acting the part" while the call is sounded electronically.