Specialist Jenkins, who couldn’t play the bugle or trumpet or any instrument at all, had just been ordered to play “Taps” at a funeral.

            A dumb mix-up? Or perhaps the energy drink he downed before morning PT was causing a hallucination. Perhaps the man hovering over him, telling him to do things he could not do, Sergeant Major Gates, was really just a statue or a tall bush.

            Jenkins stared up from the cold ground, where he had been dutifully knocking out sit-ups, and told Sergeant Major he didn’t follow.

            “On your feet, killer.”

            Jenkins stood. He brushed wet grass from his shirt, then met his superior’s gloomy, sunken eyes.

            Sergeant Major asked, “Can you push a button?”

            Of course. And Jenkins would have told him so if, at that very moment, a company formation hadn’t come jogging across the PT field, interrupting their business.

            The passing troops’ heads, all thirty of them, steamed in the drizzly November morning and bobbed in time as their throaty cadence echoed off the surrounding barracks:

​

Jesse James said before he died

there’s five things that he wanted to ride

bicycle, tricycle, automobile

an Abrams Tank and a Ferris Wheel.

​

            Observing this, things clicked. Jenkins pictured himself operating a boom box (what else could it be?) from behind a mausoleum or a thick spruce. No one would see him. No way to mess up. No problem, too easy.

            But if he had learned anything during his three years in the army, it’s that just when things start making sense, just when you think, “okay, this ain’t so bad,” that’s when the IED goes off.

            So he wasn’t totally surprised when, after the company passed, Sergeant Major said, “You’ll be issued a special bugle.” He made a fist to represent the instrument and pressed on it with his index finger, raised it to his mouth as if giving schoolyard sex instruction. “It has a little speaker inside,” he said. “You push a button and ‘Taps’ plays.” Sergeant Major pursed his lips and leaned in, as if to kiss Jenkins. He pointed to his puckered cheek and said, “You do this. It’s proper form.”​

 

***

 

An hour later, Jenkins reported to the parade field, for funeral practice.

            Exiting his car, he smelled a fecal odor: lawn fertilizer. Out in the middle of the well-fed grass, Sergeant Paulson sat atop a plywood prop casket, vulture-like, thumbing through a training manual. Behind Paulson rose the grandstand: dull aluminum under the overcast sky. Jenkins crossed the field imagining a crowd waving flags, cheering, stuffing themselves with hot dogs and buckets of soda.

            “Ladies and gentleman, it’s the best damn bugler in the US Army,” Paulson said, opening his wiry arms in salutation as Jenkins approached.

            Paulson had a knack for reading Jenkins’ mind. The two had spent long hours together in Iraq, back when they were crude privates doing crude jobs—like burning human excrement for the army’s waste disposal program. You can learn a lot about a person talking love and life over a barrel of boiling shit. Jenkins learned that Paulson wanted to make the army a career. Paulson learned that Jenkins’ parents were outspokenly opposed to the Iraq War and had tried talking him out of enlisting (a position, incidentally, that Jenkins came to agree with while deployed). Paulson, who had re-enlisted after they returned to the States, now outranked Jenkins. But the two friends still spoke as coequals, at least when no other soldiers were around.

            “Smells like Camp Victory out here,” Jenkins said, referring to their former base in Baghdad. He looked at the grass, the neon green fertilizer pellets smearing the tips of his boots. “Why practice here?”

            “Sergeant Major thought it might mimic the terrain of a cemetery.”

            “That guy’s been in the army too long,” Jenkins said. “Who’s the funeral for?”

            “A World War Two veteran,” Paulson said. “Man, I’m nervous. I’m team leader, so I’ll be presenting the flag to the veteran’s widow and offering the President’s condolences. Typical that command gives us one whole day to prepare.”

            “The army can’t find a real bugler for a World War Two vet?”

            Paulson said he overheard in the orderly room that regular Joes were getting assigned to funeral teams out of necessity. The recent spike in KIA’s in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with more veterans of previous wars dying, had spread thin all properly trained honor guards. Addressing the bugler shortage, the army hired a contractor to develop a stopgap. Hence the electronic substitute.

            Paulson pointed toward an instrument case, lying nearby on the grass like suspicious luggage.

            Jenkins went to it, popped the clasps, and raised the lid. The bugle lay snug in the blue plush. He lifted it, surprised by its heft. In fact, it was a real bugle—a quality specimen. His pale face, black beret, and bushy red eyebrows stretched like putty in its polished reflection. But the speaker, wedged into a separate compartment, resembled dollar store electronics. He figured out that the battery-powered, gray plastic cone slid into the bugle’s bell. Inserting it, the rubber rings used to hold it in place tightened against the brass, squeaking like Styrofoam.

            “Don’t keep us in suspense,” Paulson said. “Let’s hear it.”

            Jenkins pushed the button. Predictably, coming from such a small speaker, this version of “Taps” sounded nasally and tinny. He stopped it after a few bars.

            Paulson said, “I don’t think it’s so bad.”

            “I do,” Jenkins said. “But it’s not my funeral.”

            Seven privates, the firing party, soon arrived with rifles and blank ammunition. They gathered around Paulson, seated Indian-style atop the casket, and regarded him as if he were a load of bricks to cart across a desert.

            “Suck it up,” he said, responding to the privates’ complaints about the smell. “We’ve got a lot to learn before tomorrow.”

            Practice dragged over the next hour.

            What should have been the simplest task, casket-carrying took five tries to get right. The box, which contained one hundred and fifty pounds of sandbags, wobbled and dipped as the privates marched it to and fro.

            Rifle volleys didn’t go any better. The privates couldn’t synchronize their shots. “You sound like popcorn!” Paulson yelled.

            After the privates finally fired a successful volley, Paulson turned to Jenkins. “Bugler’s up.”

            Jenkins brought his feet to attention, pushed the button, and raised the bugle. He felt ridiculous pursing his lips behind the canned music. A song that usually gave him chills now had all the effect of a musical greeting card.

            In the middle of “Taps,” Jenkins noticed Paulson answer his cell phone. Bad news?

            Before Jenkins could even finish the song, Paulson announced: “Sergeant Major says we can’t practice here anymore. He just found out the field has been fertilized and manicured for the general’s upcoming pass and review. We have to move.”

            The team stared at Paulson, awaiting further instruction. For a long moment, he just stood there, lanky arms folded, looking down at the grass. “I’ve got a lot of lines to memorize for tomorrow,” he eventually said, “and I need to go study. Specialist Jenkins, you can take it from here. I’m confident you can finish training these guys.”

            “Seriously?” Jenkins said, startled by this delegation of responsibility to him, a short-timer (with only three months, thirteen days, and a wake up left on his enlistment contract).

            “Yeah. Something wrong?”

            “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

            Paulson gave him a stern look.

            “All right,” Jenkins said. “No problem, sergeant.”

            Like an overzealous coach, Paulson said, “We’re professionals. We got this.” Then he added a “hoo-ah!”—the army’s unofficial battle cry, which could mean anything at any time, but often meant nothing at all.​

 

***

​

The next morning, the situation really unraveled.

            It was still dark when Jenkins answered his barracks room door to Paulson wearing class-A’s, his eyes red and heavy from poor sleep. He held the funeral manual at his side like a priest with a Bible.

            Jenkins sensed distress behind Paulson’s blank stare.

            “Sun’s not up,” Jenkins said, squinting under his room’s fluorescent glow.

            “The battalion orderly is FUBAR,” Paulson said. “He jacked up our schedule.”

            Jenkins groaned. This wasn’t good.

            “The funeral’s earlier than we thought. We’re late. Be at the HQ in fifteen.”

            Barely conscious, Jenkins shaved, got into his uniform, checked the alignment of his ribbons in the mirror, pocketed a banana, then rushed out the door.

            He hustled down the sidewalk, the heels of his Oxfords clacking on the concrete, class-A’s already chafing his neck. Approaching the HQ, he slowed. There in the parking lot, next to the battalion van, stood Sergeant Major Gates—the last person he wanted to see. Fuck. Jenkins considered going the back way into the HQ, even hiding in the rhododendrons. But had he been spotted? Too risky to dodge his superior now.

            “Where’s the rest of the honor guard?” Sergeant Major offered as greeting when Jenkins approached.

            Jenkins scanned the vacant lot, turned and looked down the long, empty sidewalk. No sign of Paulson and the privates.

            “We’ll wait for them,” Sergeant Major said, “together.”

            Small talk between superiors and subordinates usually came with a uniform and hygiene inspection. Jenkins figured Sergeant Major would call out his two-week old haircut, but instead he said his sideburns (which could hardly be called sideburns at all) were too long, as were his shirt sleeves.

            But then—mother of all fuckers—he asked, “Did you re-enlist yet, Specialist Jenkins?”

            Dammit, where the hell were Paulson and the privates? 

            “Negative, Sergeant Major,” Jenkins said, going on to explain he was college-bound.

            “Last I heard,” Sergeant Major said, “college kids don’t get to throw hand grenades.”

            Jenkins ceded him the point.

            Not one to mince words, Sergeant Major laid it on him: “Our battalion is deploying again. We could use an experienced soldier like you, over there in the sandbox.”

            Time for an evasion tactic, the response all low-ranking soldiers used in tense moments such as this. He said, simply, “I’ll consider it, Sergeant Major, and I’ll get back to you at a later time.”

            “Don’t think too long,” Sergeant Major said. “We need you over there.”

            Sergeant Major eventually grew impatient and went inside the HQ. Soon after, Jenkins’ teammates emerged from the shadows at the edge of the parking lot.

            Before Jenkins could scold them for not providing reinforcements, Paulson went into a story about how he had just climbed through Private Dixon’s window to wake him. Dixon had patronized a strip club last night, got drunk, and now the private owed him a one-thousand-word essay on the Army Values.

            Jenkins interrupted, “Sergeant Major just tried to get me to re-enlist.”

            “Really?” Paulson said. “You going to?”

 

***

 

Paulson made good time speeding in the van—until a tanker truck, drifting on and off the rumble strip, clogged the passing lane. Its star-spangled bumper sticker read TROOPS THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE!!!

            “This dude is on something,” Paulson said, flicking his lights at the stubborn truck. When it finally let them pass, he shouted at the driver through the passenger window, blasting Jenkins with morning breath.

            (Three months, twelve days, and a wake up.)

            After they found the cemetery, got the van unloaded, and determined where to march and stand, there wasn’t time for a full rehearsal. So they practiced flag-folding.

            The result wasn’t terrible, but certainly not display-case-ready.

            “You guys didn’t go over this yesterday, did you?” Paulson said.

            The privates looked at Jenkins.

            “I needed to go buy batteries for the bugle. Dixon volunteered to cover flag-folding.”

            Dixon didn’t need to respond. His puffy, bloodshot eyes said it all.

            Jenkins was, of course, partly to blame for this negligence. He felt some responsibility—but it was ultimately Paulson’s fault for entrusting a short-timer. Friends or not, he knew better.

            “Well then,” Paulson said, “if this ceremony goes awry, it’s on you, Specialist Jenkins.”

            Jenkins expected a punchline, but there wasn’t one. Instead, Paulson said, “And you ought to address me as sergeant.”

            Paulson, that double-crossing blue falcon …

            Jenkins needed to get away from his friend—his superior—before saying something he’d regret. He grabbed the bugle case, muttered a weak defense, and walked off.

            He went behind a large monument, near the open grave. The perfect emplacement. It would provide cover from the rows of folding chairs facing the podium, give Jenkins space to collect himself. He sat on a headstone and polished the instrument. The morning dew was burning off into wisps of fog, giving the surrounding evergreens a dreamlike quality. That helped calm him. Birds chirped. That was nice too. He thought about how he did not want to go back to the war—would never go back. He thought about how, honestly, he didn’t want to go to college either. Aside from leaving the army, he didn’t know what he wanted.

            The hearse and auto procession soon arrived, four-ways blinking. Paulson yelled from across the cemetery: “Stand at attention, they’re here!”

            Jenkins stood up and listened from behind his granite barricade. He heard car doors shut and gravel crunch underfoot. Then he heard voices, people approaching.

            A group of garrison-capped Legionnaires appeared. They stiffened their spines and saluted him. Others passed by, including the elderly widow, navigating through the headstones with a walker. Two young twin boys, each holding a rose, accompanied her. When they noticed Jenkins, both stopped and regarded him as if he were a living statue performer. They stared, until the widow called them back to her side.

            After everyone took a seat, the preacher tested the podium’s microphone. The audience nodded in response: yes, we can hear you. Then he waved to Paulson and the privates, standing in formation behind the hearse.

            That was the signal. The ceremony had begun.

            Jenkins had an unobstructed view of the hearse. He watched the privates open the rear door, then hesitate. They hadn’t practiced this part. One grabbed a casket handle and yanked. It didn’t budge. Another private reached far inside, then climbed in on all fours. They tugged and tugged again. Finally, it released. The conveyor squeaked as the flag-draped casket rolled into view.

            Jenkins watched the privates carry it to the gravesite, Paulson (that bastard) marching alongside them. The casket looked heavy, judging by the privates’ stiff necks and chesty postures. Their movements, however, were clean. No wobbles, no dips. All in step. Pretty good.

            They marked time over the open grave, halted, and set the casket on the straps of the lowering device. Paulson marched them away with hushed commands.

            First part, done.

            The preacher talked about the deceased. He said that William, the veteran, had fought Nazis in France and Belgium, courageously charged an enemy artillery position, took prisoners, never bragged. The preacher’s delivery was compelling. He paused in all the right places, made animated hand gestures. He almost made Jenkins feel nostalgic for the combat zone.

            “And God bless our soldiers for our freedom,” the preacher said, looking toward Paulson and the privates. “Let us pray.”

            Amen was the cue to begin military honors.

            Paulson stepped before the privates. “Squad, attention.”

            The privates slid their feet together. Each held his rifle parallel to his right leg, butt resting on the grass.

            Paulson said, “Ready.”

            They executed a half-right face, tapped the butts on the ground, and raised their weapons to port-arms.

            “Aim.”

            They aimed to the sky.

            “Fire.”

            The first volley cracked. The shots were coordinated and crisp, much tighter than yesterday. They fired twice more. Not bad. Paulson called “order arms” and they lowered their rifles.

            Now it was Jenkins’ turn. He stepped out from behind the monument, took a breath, pushed the button, and raised the bugle to his pursed lips. Precisely as expected, “Taps” played. Tinny, nasally “Taps.” It sounded so lifeless. Jenkins felt sad and embarrassed for the family. He felt sad and embarrassed for himself. He wondered could a veteran request no military honors at his funeral? Was that possible? He might have that written into his will.

 

***

​

Afterward, the widow approached Jenkins. She leaned forward on her walker and, in a gentle voice, said, “You’re a very talented musician.”   

            Was she serious? She was. Jenkins could see it in those grandmotherly eyes. Her husband’s flag, passably folded, sat in a basket attached to her walker. It would be mean to tell her the truth. Her husband just died. She could be deaf. Let her believe.

            Jenkins gestured toward Paulson and the privates waiting by the van, said unfortunately they had to go. “Sorry for your loss,” he said, before turning away.

            Jenkins felt nauseous. He needed to leave this cemetery.

            Halfway to the van, Jenkins saw a stout, gray ponytailed man weaving his way through the headstones, approaching him. “Excuse me,” the man said, “I’d like to see your instrument.”

            Jenkins handed it over.

            “Ah ha,” the man said, pointing at the speaker. “Didn’t fool me.”

            “There’s a bugler shortage,” Jenkins said, relieved that someone had noticed the ruse. “I’m not a musician.”

            “Never too late to learn,” the man said. “My name’s Dave. Former US Army Band. Veteran of a little catastrophe called the Vietnam War.”

            Jenkins shook his hand and said, “I’m Jake.”

            “This is a fine instrument,” Dave said, looking into the mouthpiece as if the bugle were a telescope. “Mind if I try it out?”

            “Well ...” Jenkins said, glancing at an older couple having an intense conversation nearby. The woman, who held a wreath and a large yellow ribbon, kept shaking her head “no” at the man.

            “Bill loved horns,” Dave said, referring to the deceased. “He regretted never learning to play. He would approve, I’m sure.”

            Jenkins said, okay, go ahead. But quietly.

            Dave had trouble twisting the speaker out of the bell. “Who makes this junk?” he said, inspecting it like damaged merchandise. Tsk-tsking the device, he passed the speaker back to Jenkins.

            Dave raised the bugle, took a breath, and blew a series of sharp, sour notes.

            Jenkins winced. The couple shot them a disapproving look.

            “Jake, I won’t lie to you,” Dave said, wetting his lips, “it’s been a while.”

            His next attempt was better. He blew the first notes of a melody Jenkins recognized but couldn’t name.

            “ ‘Flight of the Valkyries’,” Dave said. “But I’m rusty.” He held out the bugle. “Give it a try.”

            “I don’t play.”

            “You won’t hurt anyone.”

            “I’m not interested in playing music for the army.”

            “Who says you have to play for the army?”

            Dave seemed like a reasonable and trustworthy guy. Jenkins took a breath, pursed his lips, raised the instrument and, following one failed attempt, surprised himself when a bright chirrup resonated from the bugle. The sound was crisp. The mouthpiece tickled his lips. The note couldn’t be called musical, but Jenkins found it satisfying nonetheless.

            “Good,” Dave said. “Give it another try—but really let it rip this time.” Then he motioned to the couple, now intrigued by this impromptu music lesson, to come see what the noise was about, to come learn the truth for themselves.