The young man in the reflective vest stopped with his clipboard halfway raised, and the whole crowd at the memorial park went quiet as he read the brass plaque on the wall. “The first name on the honor roll of buglers,” he read slowly. “Josephine Lyle. First woman to sound Taps for the United States Army at Fort Bragg. Nineteen sixty eight.” His eyes moved from the plaque to the old woman in the folding chair with the dented horn across her lap. I am Josephine Lyle, eighty one years old, of Fayetteville, and I had come to the Memorial Day service in my navy blazer with the silver pin of my mother.
In 1968 I was a twenty four year old specialist from Spring Lake with a lip like iron. The band sergeant said a woman could not hold the long notes. I held them. For three years I sounded Taps at the services of soldiers who fell in Vietnam, sometimes six in a single week, standing alone at the edge of the field with the families watching from folding chairs. When I left the Army I taught school music for thirty years, and I never once told my students what that horn had asked of me.
The coordinator of the ceremony, Tyler Brandt, twenty seven years old, had told me an hour earlier that the bugler seats were reserved for the active band and that I should find a place in the back with the visitors. Now he came toward me through the crowd, his face red to the ears. A line of old soldiers in their garrison caps had risen from their chairs behind me, one at a time, until the whole front rows were standing. A man in a wheelchair saluted. “Madam,” said Tyler, his voice cracking, “I did not know.”
A brass plaque on a memorial wall gave one retired bugler the length of a Memorial Day morning to bring a young coordinator back to the truth in Fayetteville.
I gave my terms from the folding chair, with the horn upright on my knee. “Young man, I am not angry about a seat. You were doing a job. But I will ask you for three things. You will tell this crowd who stands on that wall, because most people walk past it. You will find the names of the women who sounded Taps after me, and put them on the plaque. And you will stand beside me while I play this horn one more time, because I am eighty one and I would like to be heard properly before I put it away.”
Tyler lowered his clipboard, and his voice came out thin. “Mrs. Lyle, I took this job because my father served and I wanted to be near it,” he said. “But the director told me to keep the ceremony small and tidy, and I started cutting corners. I took the names of the old buglers off the program to save space. I sent the volunteers to the back. And I took forty dollars here and there from the wreath fund to cover my rent.” He swallowed. “I have been treating this place like an event, and not like a promise.”
But shame makes a young man foolish. Tyler suddenly snatched the green cash box of the wreath fund off the folding table beside him and ran across the lawn toward the parking lot, the box clutched to his vest. He ran twenty paces. Master Sergeant Hollis Greer, ninety one years old, rolled his wheelchair squarely across the path. The color guard turned as one, with their flags lowered across the walkway. And Boy Scout Troop 214, who had been handing out programs, formed a line across the gravel in their olive shirts with their arms linked.
Tyler stopped on the grass with the cash box shaking in his arms and the flags hanging in front of him, and the bells of the Methodist church across the road began to toll the hour. The old sergeant looked up at him from the wheelchair and spoke in a gravelly voice. “Son, a man who runs from the wreath is no soldier. A man who carries it back is.” Tyler stood a long moment. Then he turned, walked the twenty paces back, and set the green box in my lap, and went down on one knee in the wet grass.
The consequences were orderly and warm. Tyler repaid the wreath fund, six hundred twelve dollars, by the end of the week, and he confessed to the director, who kept him on probation for a season. He restored the honor roll of buglers to the program in large type. He went to the Army archives with me and found the names of eleven women who followed me. The plaque was redone with all of them, and the Fayetteville newspaper ran a picture of me with my horn raised and Tyler standing behind me at attention.
In the name of my husband Earl, who passed in 2019, I started the Earl Lyle Fund. It pays for band instruments and lessons for students whose families cannot afford them, and for honor guard uniforms for volunteer veterans, in Cumberland, Hoke and Harnett counties. In the first year we placed sixty one instruments in the hands of children and outfitted fourteen volunteer buglers. One was a thirteen year old girl from Spring Lake with a secondhand trumpet and a split lip, who played her first clean note in a school hallway and burst into tears.
On the next Memorial Day, I stood at the edge of the green lawn at dawn, with the mist rising off the grass and the long rows of white markers pale in the morning light. Tyler stood beside me in a pressed uniform shirt. I raised the old horn, drew my breath, and sounded the twenty four notes, steady and clear, across the field. When the last note faded, he said very low, “Thank you, Madam.” I lowered the horn and smiled. “Next year,” I said, “you hold the horn, and I will hold the chair.”
