It may seem like a normal Tuesday, but as a student walks through Academic Plaza, they notice the flag at half-mast. Cards with a student’s name, class and major lie at the base of the flag and atop the Silver Taps Memorial. Throughout the day, letters are written to the families of the students who’ve died in the last month. The bell tower chimes a familiar song of “Amazing Grace” while lights are dimmed throughout campus, and moonlight sets in over Aggieland. Students gather in Academic Plaza to stand together for the fallen with a hushed silence.
The clock strikes 10:30 p.m., and all is quiet until the footsteps of the Ross Volunteer Company can be heard across the plaza. Students stand at attention as family members of Aggies who died in the last month are led into the plaza. The Ross Volunteer Company marches to the center of the plaza in a slow cadence and fires off three volleys of seven shots to honor the current graduate or undergraduate students who’ve died.
Buglers play a special rendition of “Taps” called “Silver Taps” from the top of the Academic Building with no sheet music — the song has been passed down over the years by the buglers and is played from memory. They play once to the north, once to the south and once to the west, but never to the east because it is said the sun will never rise on these Aggies again.
As the family members are led out of the plaza,
the students make their way back home in silence, as the lives of the fallen Aggies are remembered.
The first Tuesday of every month is a special time in Aggieland as Silver Taps is held to honor students who died in the previous month. The tradition began in 1898 to honor Lawrence Sullivan Ross, former governor of Texas and president of A&M. Traditions Council, an organization within the Department of Student Activities, was placed in charge of the ceremony in the 1970s.
“I think [Silver Taps is] a very present reminder of what the Aggie family is,” said 2016-2017 Traditions Council Chair Julia Graham. “There is no other university that I’m aware of to honor students that they’ve lost.”
Before the night of Silver Taps, family members of the deceased are invited to campus for a reception and the ceremony. The Battalion, A&M’s student-run newspaper, publishes memorial articles about the students lives on the day of the ceremony. For a first-time Aggie, this experience can be an emotional time.
“We were honoring two members of my outfit [at my first Silver Taps] who I’d never met but they were going to be my sophomores,” said Brian Hessler, Silver Taps chair and Class of 2014. “It was a deep personal connection to honor them even though I didn’t know them, but I would stand there for them and all the Aggies that have fallen.”
Students have also been able send letters to the family members ever since Traditions Council took
over the ceremony as a way to get more students involved and connected to those being honored.
“The families in their own time can read the letters, so they know their student was loved, and even people that didn’t know them, they were still a part of the community,” Graham said. “[Families] wanted to hear from students that they could relate more to their daughter or son that they lost. We’ve kept it alive for that reason.”
Chemical engineering sophomore Billy Stuart has attended every Silver Taps, and said even when protests were happening on campus the day of the ceremony, the Aggie family was still able to come together.
“I had heard that somebody had said ‘What if there is a protest during Silver Taps or what if something happens during Silver Taps?’” Stuart said. “It was kind of nice to know that wasn’t going to happen, and then actually going and seeing that it was still a solemn, still a respectful program put on despite what was happening.”
Texas A&M students are told day in and day out about the Aggie family and Spirit of Aggieland, but most do not realize it until attending such a time honored tradition as Silver Taps.
“You don’t go to Silver Taps as individual people,” Hessler said. “You go there as the Aggie family to honor somebody that we lost. It’s a way of our Aggie family grieving as one.”