University Trumpeters Offer Taps for Veterans’ Funerals

LONGVIEW (AP) – Ten trumpet students at a Louisiana university are offering to play Taps at veterans’ funerals, rather than leave the haunting farewell bugle call to a mechanical device. “A lot of people get a recording, and play it over a speaker. It means something because it’s the song. But when you have an actual person with the horn … and you hear the horn ring over the fields, it takes the breath out of your chest,” Kody Jernigan, a music education major at the University of Louisiana in Monroe, said in a telephone interview. The senior from Longview is a member of Talons for Taps, named because the university’s mascot is the Warhawk — a nod to the World War II-era Curtiss P-40 Warhawk airplane. All are members of the ULM Trumpet Studio: seven trumpet majors and three other students taught by Assistant Professor Eric Siereveld.

Siereveld said “all of them jumped in head-first” when he suggested the volunteer program and explained why he felt it was important. Service members deserve the honor, he said. “They’ve sacrificed too much for us to not have what in the long run is a relatively small acknowledgement of the sacrifice they’ve given.”

The Pentagon has estimated that 10 to 15 percent of military and veterans’ families ask for a funeral with military honors: at minimum, a two-person uniformed honor guard, folding and presentation of the U.S. flag, and a rendition of Taps.

Talons for Taps members have already played at four funerals or memorial services and three Veterans Day ceremonies.