Posted on 02/27/2004 3:42:22 PM PST by SwinneySwitch
For 35 years, the slow, melancholy notes have poured from George Menefee's bugle, sounding taps.
On green cemetery lawns, standing a respectful distance from mourners, Menefee has lulled old soldiers — airmen, actually — to a final rest.
Now, the 59-year-old Menefee is facing a different kind of rest — the possible loss of his job as Randolph AFB's honor guard bugler. And like many American workers, the source of his unemployment is new technology.
"I never thought a couple of AA batteries would knock me out of a job," he said.
The "digital" bugle, a cone-shaped, battery-powered device that slips into a horn and plays a recorded version of taps, has been in the offing for years. The Pentagon revealed in 2002 it was studying the bugles but insisted they wouldn't displace live musicians.
The idea, the Defense Department said, was to cope with the large number of military funerals held across the country each year.
While the military has fewer than 500 buglers, 1,800 veterans die each day. A "dignified" alternative to boomboxes, and not a desire to cut costs, drove the decision, they added.
About 2,000 digital bugles have been produced since a six-month testing period ended this past May, a Defense Department official said.
Some $200,000 was spent to develop the bugle at a cost of $500 each (plus a $25 shipping and handling fee). The bugles are produced by S&D Consulting International Ltd. in New York.
Not everyone in San Antonio has gone to the digital bugle. Sgt. Rene Duclos, a member of Fort Sam Houston's honor guard, said the Army has not purchased the devices. But he said the post, with four active-duty trumpeters, must call on a civilian at times because of a shortage of musicians.
Randolph offers military honors across a 4,700-square-mile area east to Louisiana and south to the Texas coast. It switched to the digital bugle to improve service for veterans' families, said Master Sgt. Leon Roberts, a spokesman with the base's 12th Flying Training Wing.
Menefee's future as the wing's sole honor guard bugler isn't clear.
He said a Randolph official told him last week that his services would not be needed after Friday. That official could not be reached, and his office said base policy precluded him from commenting.
Roberts said he was unaware of the conversation, but insisted that Menefee had not been terminated.
Whatever the case, Roberts said Menefee still could be called to sound taps if families prefer a live musician to the digital bugle. But with 708 funerals here in 2003, the digital bugle will get a workout simply because there's no way Menefee, who earned $18,000 last year, could appear at every service, he said.
Retired Army Sgt. Maj. Benito Guerrero, a Vietnam veteran who heads a group of former and active-duty airborne soldiers, bristles at the idea of a digital bugle. Still, he feels it's better than a silent graveside service.
"Without it, you just have two soldiers folding a flag," Guerrero said.
Guerrero thinks the digital bugle sounds like a live bugler. But Menefee said the recording, made at a 1999 Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, is "cheesy" and "cheap."
"Put a jukebox out there and dress him in a uniform," he said.
The trend toward canned music doesn't go down well with other veterans.
Bob Dukes, a retired Army first sergeant who sounds taps at funerals, said most live buglers switched years ago to a trumpet, which has three button-controlled valves to regulate musical tone.
But giving families a make-believe performance of taps at funerals is "a deception to the public," he said.
"It's like somebody going on stage and pretending to sing a song, and they're lip-synching," Dukes said. "I don't know if the public's going to accept this."
The tradition of taps goes back to the summer of 1862, when Brig. Gen. Daniel Butterfield whistled a new tune to his brigade bugler, Pvt. Oliver Wilcox Norton, to replace the "extinguish lights" call, which Butterfield considered too colorless, according to an Arlington National Cemetery history.
----sigc@express-news.net
You gopt that right, a combination of lass, sadness and pride all rolled into one. It's a loss to us as a society that we're losing the live playing of Taps.
I wouldn't think it difficult. Twenty-four notes using four pitches (the 3rd through 6th overtones).
He looked at his watch and as the second hand touched the top stepped up and raised the bugle to the megaphone, and the nervousness dropped from him like a discarded blouse, and he was suddenly alone, gone away from the rest of them.
The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held just a fraction longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. Held long like thirty years. The second note was short, almost too abrupt. Cut short and soon gone, like the minutes with a whore. Short like a ten minute break is short. And then the last note of the first phrase rose triumphantly from the slightly broken rhythm, triumphantly high on an untouchable level of pride above the humiliations, the degradations.
He played it all that way, with a paused then hurried rhythm that no metronome could follow. There was no placid regimented tempo to Taps. The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a woman had once told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all the grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see us, dont close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of the ruck, not of battle heroes; the song of the Stockade prisoners itchily stinking sweating under coats of grey rock dust; the song of the mucky KPs, of the men without women who collect the bloody menstrual rags of the officers' wives, who come to scour the Officer's Club--after the parties are over. This is the song of the scum, the Aqua-Velva drinkers, the shamelessness who greedily drain the half filled glasses, some of them lipstick smeared, that the partyers can afford to leave unfinished.
This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember? This is the song you close your ears to every night, so you can sleep. This is the song you drink five martinis every evening not to hear. This is the song of the Great Loneliness, that creeps in the desert wind and dehydrates the soul. This is the song you'll listen to on the day you die. When you lay there in bed and sweat it out, you know that all the doctors and nurses and weeping friends don't mean a thing and cant help you any, cant save you one small bitter taste of it, because you are the one thats dying and not them; when you wait for it to come and know the sleep will not evade it and martinis will not put it off and conversation will not circumvent it and hobbies will not help you to escape it; then you will hear this song and remembering, recognize it. This song is Reality. Remember? Surely you remember?
"Day is done... Gone the sun... From-the-lake From-the-hill From-the-sky Rest in peace Sol jer brave God is nigh..."
And as the last note quivered to prideful silence, and the bugler swung the megaphone for the traditional repeat, figures appeared in the lighted sallyport from inside of Choy's. "I told you it was Prewitt," a voice carried faintly across the quadrangle in the tone of a man who has won a bet. And then the repeat rose to join her quivering tearful sister. The clear proud notes reverberating back and forth across the silent quad. Men had come from the Dayrooms to the porches to listen in the darkness, feeling the sudden choking kinship bred of fear that supersedes all personal tastes. They stood in the darkness of the porches, listening, feeling suddenly very near the man beside them, who also was a soldier, who also must die.
If that's all that powers this thing, it must be pretty puny. I would have expected 8 D-cells.
The bugles are produced by S&D Consulting International Ltd. in New York.Yeah, but where are they MADE? Surely not in China.
Taps is the hardest "easy" song there is to play. I played the trumpet for about 15 years - haven't played in about 10. On a trumpet, the mechanics of the song are simple - no valves used at all (of course, a bugle doesn't have the same kind of valves as a trumpet). As someone stated before, it's all in the lip. And somehow, its simplicity is what makes it so difficult to play without cracking or missing a note. It's also rather emotional, which further complicates things. However, any brass player should be able to blow taps with just a little practice.
I appreciate that playing it flawlessly is probably non-trivial, but I'd rather have it played imperfectly by a human than perfectly by a machine (or, worse yet, badly by a machine).
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