AncienTrails

Lughnasa                                                            College Moon

Third Monday of the month. It’s been the Woolly meeting night for years, over 25. Bill Schmidt suggested we visit a memorial related to war, a memorial in a neighborhood park in northeast Minneapolis, right on the Mississippi behind the old Grain Belt Brewery and its wonderful castles of yellow brick. The memorial is in an odd, very out of the way location, almost as if its hidden. And it is a monument to the effect one man can have on history.

That one man is Woolly Mark Odegard, a Vietnam War Veteran, who became part of this project and as part of it shaped its content in important ways. When the group gathered to consider it began, all the veterans wanted to honor the war and their service. This is after all the public script about how to notice veterans. We honor the historical event, the war, and their participation in the war. But Mark knew there was more beneath the public script.

When probed, the veterans admitted that war was ugly, painful and often confusing. Mark said the monument should show that side of war, too. He got this element added by interviewing veterans from various wars and putting their quotes on marble stelae along with historical facts about the war. Commenting on the Spanish-American War one man said, when the fighting against the Filipino’s began he realized the war “was about greed.” Unusual and telling language at a war memorial.

Each stelae is a slab of black granite with text acid etched into it and a face above it bronzed from living subjects, when possible veterans from the wars memorialized. Mark suggested that the monument start with the Dakota war in 1862 since that was the first war with Minnesotans serving. To particularize it further Mark suggested that the stelae have the number of Americans who died and the number of Minnesotans.

(Mark next to the Vietnam War stelae topped by his face in bronze.)

This monument will be in place for a long, long time and Mark’s effort to personalize war through the words of veterans will bring an element of realism to a too often romanticized human endeavor.