This was sometimes my job in the Army, and I offer this for why I hold Memorial Day as more than just an opportunity for drinking, barbecuing, and discounts. Here is my story:

A lone bugler in dress blues stood atop this hill, on the left, beneath a tree, far from the ceremony below. Someone had decided that was the best place for a bugler to stand. Day after day, she watched a parade of identical flag-draped caskets, identical ceremonies, identical gun salutes taking place below, waiting for her cue. Only the faces of the grieving families changed, everything else remained the same. Each day, when the moment came, her bugle sounded a mournful salute to a life cut tragically and needlessly short, the echoes of her horn punctuated by the wracking sobs of a family wondering why. Her bugle gave them no answers, only acknowledgement of their loss. The folded flag was handed over, and the ceremony repeated again, 58,300 times.

Sometimes, the dead were the lucky ones. Those who lived carried heavy burdens; alone, because we abandoned them once they came home. The maimed. The haunted. The homeless. But we honor them with Memorial Day. And a white sale. We still cannot answer why, so we don't even ask anymore. And the ceremonies continue across the decades. Since we have no answers, we pretend the holiday has meaning.

But the bugler knows.

I like living in the US. Not everything, but most things. To get us here, some wars have been necessary. Not all, for sure, but a couple at least. The Revolutionary War could have been handled differently, but it defined us and gave us the right to stand on our own. The Civil War was necessary to really define what we believed. WWII was necessary to defeat insane evil. To some extent Afghan/Iraq was necessary, but it was handled badly by everyone who touched it, so the outcome was probably counterproductive. The others we probably could have done without. But still we honor those who served and died in conflicts mandated by our government, whether they were popular or unpopular.

Politicians sometimes send us into unnecessary wars. Memorial Day is not for them. Memorial Day is for the regular people who paid the ultimate price to secure our way of life. We don't celebrate war, although sometimes its necessary. It's neither possible or desirable for everyone here to agree, but we all benefit from the freedom others have fought and died for.

Just curious, Dana, were you the actual call or the echo? Generally as performed in all the ceremonies I have participated in, a bugler in plain sight plays the call, then another bugler who is hidden repeats the call (the echo). Most times the echo repeats after the call is finished, but sometimes it is done by phrase, or even with a short time displacement.

At the end of the US Civil War, Decoration Day (the original name of the holiday) was intended to honor war dead. It has changed so that now we use it to honor all veterans who have passed on; even those who survived the war and died in their beds. For the living we have Veteran's Day. Today we also remember those MIA (Missing in Action).