The bugle will raise its poignant message of
”
Taps
”
again on Monday at the 75th anniversary of the first Memorial
Day service held at the Veterans Memorial Building in 1928, when
the facility was about 6 months old.
The bugle will raise its poignant message of “Taps” again on Monday at the 75th anniversary of the first Memorial Day service held at the Veterans Memorial Building in 1928, when the facility was about 6 months old.
This Monday, May 26, Memorial Day, will be a special day with the veterans’ parade and the Remembrance Tiles for local veterans, and the renovated building that has been a focal point for much of the community’s activities during the past three-quarters of a century in use again.
“Taps “was also played in thousands of American communities and in many American military installations around the world to commemorate the service, whether in war or peace, of veterans who have since died.
There is no longer anyone remaining who fought in the Spanish-American War, and the veterans of World War I, which ended nearly 85 years ago, will all be gone over the next decade or so. Veterans of World War II die at the rate of 1,000 a day, and the youngest of those are in their 70s.
Many who will attend Monday’s services have heard “Taps” played before, but its long rise above the crowd and the flags when no other sound is audible still moves them as it did when they were young.
They remember other places, other times, other faces.
They remember young men going off to war with a sense of glory, with people cheering, and music playing and banners waving. And they also remember, all too well, those who returned to a world at peace, happy to be home but far older than they had been a few years previously – and they remember those who marched out and never returned.
Many in the crowd Monday will look at an engraved name on a memorial or tombstone, perhaps feel it with their fingers to somehow invoke the face of the youth who is now only a memory, and, in the inexorable passage of time, will pass altogether from the minds of the living.
We cannot bring back those who served and who have since died. We cannot turn back the passage of time. We can only honor their memories as long as any of us live.
They served their country and died in that service, or returned home to die years later. It is important for us to remember them or what was the reason for it all?
The “Taps” blend with earlier strains played at Cantigny and the Argonne Forest, at Bataan and Anzio, at Bastogne, Iwo Jima, Pusan and Baghdad. The music stirs us.
Its message is, “Remember us – remember.”
