People will soon be able to walk up the stairs and face a veteran, eye to eye, when a new monument is erected by the L&A Veterans Council in Lewiston’s Veterans Memorial Park.

Bertrand Dutil, who is one of the organizers on this $40,000 project, said the memorial will honor what he calls “the whole melting pot of veterans.”

The proposed design includes five life-sized images of a Marine, a sailor, a soldier, an airwoman and a Coast Guardsman. Four men. One woman.

It is a fair representation of contributions that women have made to war efforts over the years, honoring the more than 8,400 women vets now living here.

The design of this monument is an enlightened departure from the more typical failure to recognize contributions of female veterans in this country.

The first major national memorial honoring women in the armed forces was erected at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery in 1997. The first reunion of female Vietnam vets was organized after this monument was dedicated. These acknowledgments of honorable service by women were long overdue.

In another half-century it will probably be much more natural to think of women in the armed forces because they are now involved in every aspect of military operations, with the exception of direct combat. But, according to Carol Toner, a history professor at the University of Maine, the definition of “direct combat” is getting very fuzzy. “It’s harder and harder for the military to define who is in combat because we don’t have a battlefront” in modern warfare. Women are in the fight as much as men and their contributions must be recognized.

For the past three years, Toner and Professor Mazie Hough in the UMaine Women’s Studies Program, have taught a course titled “Women and War.” The class was created after Donna Loring, who represents the Penobscot Nation in the Maine Legislature and is a Vietnam vet, met with faculty members to talk about raising awareness of the military contributions Maine women have made over the years.

The focus of the class is crafting an oral history project about women and their military service.

Toner and Hough’s classes have conducted 60 interviews with female veterans who served from World War II to the present. Many of them were nurses, but some were dog handlers and decoders. “Our goal,” Toner said, “is to really illuminate the history that has been overlooked to see the efforts that women have made in the military,” and also to look at how women negotiate their way through this male-dominated institution.

Studying women’s contributions is a worthy project, and honoring their participation in the armed forces is important.

Women represent about 5 percent of all Maine veterans and their presence on Lewiston’s veterans memorial is a righteous gesture of lasting respect to women who already have and who will serve this country.


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