Early in September 2024 we submitted our #8 Request to Donate a Monument to the VA and we are eagerly awaiting a positive response.  Once the approval comes, the monument will be completed and shipped in about three months.  In early 2025, on a pleasant day in San Diego at Miramar National Cemetery, we will have the dedication ceremony. Soon.

Hopefully.

During this last year we had a face-to-face meeting of the Design Team, when fine nuances and redesigns were determined.  The big thing with the VA has been our use of the Laser Company to create artwork on the monument…  to make it more than just a lump of granite with a few words scratched on it.  A piece of artwork in itself.  We have removed two pieces of artwork on the front panels at the VA’s request, and probably the artwork on the side (a collage of diving systems) will not be approved.  Our hopes go for the picture on the back side — a re-creation of a diving operation off an ARS, with divers descending into the dark ocean depths — will be approved.  The concern from the VA is that it will set a precedent for other future such monuments.  We think it tells the diving story and will help viewers to better remember their Diver family member who has passed on. 

We have had assistance from the daughter of one Design Team member and the neighbor of another who used their knowledge of computer graphics and art to redraw and make adjustments to the pictures that we have submitted.  This was a gracious volunteer action on both of their parts, and their names will be listed in another such announcement.   We found a new bronze-caster artist for the Diver Pins that will line the top panel of the monument.  He lives in the southern end of Wisconsin and is truly an artist.  Of course our monument company in Ohio and the Foundation and Placing company in Fallbrook are still with us.  We also met a new requirement of the VA, that being obtaining permission from the Trademark Department of the US Navy to use the Diver Seal and the Diver Pins, and from the Marines to use their Diver Pin.  At first we thought permission might come from the Navy Exchange!

There will be the Post-Ceremony Celebration gathering immediately after the ceremony, to which all will be invited (RSVPs will be appreciated for food-planning, of course), and the drawings for all the great prizes (including the Glock 19) will take place then.   Details will follow, once we receive approval of the monument.

We appreciate, so very much, all the donors who have given their money to help make this monument come to existence.  Every single dollar has gone to (or is still held for) the monument’s production – we have not even funded stamps from your donations — every dollar is going to the monument.

So… hopefully the next posting will be that the VA has approved design #8.   

Stand by, Red Diver!