When my father drank a little too much, he blew some spotty approximation of Taps on a dented old bugle kept on the shelf for such occasions. It didn’t happen often. One instance particularly stands out – New Years Eve - classic cocktail dresses, martini glasses, and cigarettes, lots of cigarettes. The bugle sound that reached my bedroom most resembled a laughing cow.
I didn’t really connect Taps with my dad’s experience in the war because he never talked about it. Yes, a few unconnected highlights are woven into my childhood narrative, the stuff of heroes: a narrow escape when his ship blew up just off the beach, a long winter slog through something called the Battle of the Bulge. But it was useless to ask for any details or emotions to go with these vignettes. My dad would only shrug his shoulders. “Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” he’d say, and change the subject.
He only broke his code of silence when, on a family trip, we passed through the Belgian village where he’d been cornered by a sniper. My father shared, for once, what it felt like to be scared. I was an impressionable sixteen, not that much younger than he'd been at the time. I had seen a few of the post-war movies, and Vietnam was then unfolding on TV. His brief but heartfelt confession was enough to draw an outline - a dotted one at least - of my father as the young and universal soldier.
Fast forward a few decades, and my teenage son got his grandfather talking to a video camera. Their three-day session filled in more of the logistical details, and included the long, quiet pauses my father required to get the story out. The hero images from my childhood began to take a more substantial and personal shape.
This year, the picture’s finally been completed and brought to life, my dad’s short journey from gawky kid to war-weary young man unsure of his next steps. My sister has assembled all the letters Dad sent home, a monumental task because, it turns out, he was quite the prolific writer. She combined his letters with day-by-day historic accounts of his battalion(s)’ march across the continent. And in this rendering we see the heart of it, the heart of him – a cockiness snuffed out by disappointment, boredom, hunger, loneliness, and fear; ardor dampened by the growing chasm between his experiences on the cold and muddy battlefields and those of my mother on the manicured lawns of her college campus. How, he wondered aloud, could they ever close the gap?
The picture that emerges now is clear enough to make the soldier discernably my dad, not any other soldier, not any other man. The intimacy of his letters – not intentionally left for us to read – takes me beyond understanding, finally, his experience of the war. It fills in the outline of who he became when the war was over, the man I knew growing up, the man who played the bugle when he got a little drunk.
This morning I heard Taps played on the radio. The tone was bright and clear, the moment poignant. But I turned the radio off. I wanted to hear that other version, the butchered one. I wanted to hear my father play his bugle one more time and tell me, "Oh, it wasn't so bad."