Leatherbee wet his lips before he raised his trumpet. That was the first indication that he was a genuine bugler. There is such a shortage of buglers now — ushered in by a confluence of death, including waves of World War II and Korea veterans, the first ranks of aging Vietnam veterans, and the nearly four thousand men and women killed in Iraq — that the military has been forced to employ bands of make-believe musicians for the graveside playing of taps. They are usually ordinary soldiers who carry an electronic bugle; with the press of a button, a rendition of taps is broadcast out across fields and through trees. Taps is played without valve work, so only the small red light that shines out of the bell gives them away.
Now Leatherbee, using his lungs and his lips to control the pitch, played the first of twenty-four notes: G, G, C, G, C, E... Taps is not fast or technically difficult, and even if it were, most true Army buglers, like Leatherbee, are trained at the university level, possessing what the military calls a "civilian-acquired skill." They have each spent an additional six months in Norfolk, Virginia, for advanced work in calls. But there are still subtle differences that survive the efforts at regimentation — in embouchure, volume, and vibrato, and in how they taper the notes — and there is always the risk of a cracked note, whether due to cold or heat or the tightness that every bugler feels in his chest.
"You always run into the question," Leatherbee said later, "do I close my eyes, so that emotion won't be involved, or do I leave them open, so that more emotion will be in the sound? In my opinion, you can't close your eyes. There's a person in a casket in front of you. You want to give them as much as you can."
After Leatherbee lowered the trumpet from his lips, the six men who carried the casket to the burial vault returned to fold the flag. For some soldiers, that can be the hardest part. "Because you're right there," said one of the riflemen, Sergeant Chris Bastille. "You're maybe two feet from the family. And the younger the soldier is, the younger the family is."
"He had a few kids," Huber said.
First, the soldiers folded the flag twice lengthwise, with a slight offset at the top to ensure that the red and white would disappear within the blue. "Their hands were shaking," Dawson would remember later. "I could see that they were feeling it."
Then they made the first of thirteen triangular folds. Before the second fold, Huber took the three gleaming shells out of his pocket and pushed them inside the flag. No one would ever see them again — a flag well folded takes effort to pull apart — but he took pride in having polished them.
by Chris Jones, Esquire (May, 2008) | Read more:
