The sound of honor: Tom Day and the bugles

Meet the boogie woogie bugle boy from Chicago with a mission more serious than reveille these days: Tom Day, veteran Marine, is the guy who wants every veteran to be honored with live Taps.

In 2000, Congress said that every veteran’s family could have military honors at their loved one’s funeral, including a bugler playing Taps.

The problem was there weren’t enough buglers to play Taps for hardly anyone. At the time, the military had just 500 buglers, a huge deficit considering that 1,800 veterans were dying every day.

The Defense Department was trying to make do with boom boxes behind gravestones or fake bugles that play a digital recording inside.
Now Day, who already played bugle for veteran funerals, knew it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t military and it wasn’t honorable. So, at age 70, he decided to change that and he founded Bugles Across America.

Day sent out a call for players of all horns, including trumpets, coronets or bugles, to volunteer to play the profound 24-notes of Taps for veterans.

That was 18 years ago and today there are nearly 8,000 volunteer Taps players. According to the Weekly Standard, even that isn’t nearly enough. Day’s buglers sound Taps at 35 percent of veteran funerals, leaving 16,000 digital bugles to do the rest.

Still, you have to admit his efforts amount to something. BAA doesn’t take a penny of government money. Donors fund a shoestring budget for the organization that operates out of Day’s basement in suburban Chicago. He has 50 state directors, all volunteers, who audition volunteer buglers over the phone. Families can search for and book a real bugler (if one is available) through the organization’s Web site.

When a bugler is requested, all volunteers in the area are notified and, when someone takes the job, they do everything at their own expense.
The players’ ages have ranged from 11 to 102 and the only requirement is that they blow clean Taps. It must be right because there aren’t any do-overs at a funeral.

Day likes to stretch out the 24 mournful notes so that they echo for just over one minute. It’s a 24-note prayer, he says. He prayed that tune 169 times in 2017. At age 78, he plans to repeat the same kind of schedule.