An Old Guard Monument Milepost Crossed

The effort to create a monument honoring the Old Guard, the U.S. Army’s most prestigious and historic regiment, passed anther milepost on the road to completion last week, as three creative forces met together for the first time in Arlington, Virginia. Gathering at Fort Myer, headquarters of the Old Guard and the site where a bronze sculpture is to be placed, sculptress Barbara Mungenast traveled from her studio in St. Louis to join Washington, DC landscape designer Alex Zaras and Alexandria, VA masonry contractor Michael Bratti, to coordinate plans for the monument’s casting and installation within a proposed plaza.

Mungenast’s creative vision produced a larger than life-sized sculpture, embodying the three mandates of the Old Guard’s mission; that of providing military honors at Presidential ceremonies and for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, to accurately portray the drill, music and uniforms of the U.S. Army at the time of its colonial beginnings and to maintain itself as a combat ready organization, poised to deploy to trouble spots when ordered to do so. A model of the sculpture has been approved by Ft. Myer and the Secretary of the Army.

Zaras’ design for a plaza surrounding the Mungenast work envisions a mini-park, with welcoming gateways and graceful pathways leading visitors to the sculpture. Benches invite restful enjoyment of the monument space with its tasteful landscaping of shrubbery, ornamental trees and blossoming flowers. The designer displayed a scale model of the proposed site for the group, which included members of the Old Guard Monument Foundation.    

Michael Bratti, CEO of a stone contracting firm spanning four generations, provided samples of granite, bricks and other masonry suggested for a pedestal supporting the sculpture and the other structures planned for the site. His engineering plans are drawn to guarantee the long term stability of the monument, located within the proud old fort, itself a museum to Army history. The Bratti firm is respectful of this honored parcel overlooking the Nation’s Capital, home to both the fort and national cemetery. His firm undertook the 1998 exhumation of newly identified remains from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, a location constantly guarded by a special detail of The Old Guard. 

The meeting, which took place at the monument site adjacent to the fort’s parade ground, was animated by the sights and sounds of Old Guard men and women drilling and barking commands, further inspiring the visitors to move the project to a speedy completion. Returning to the Bratti works in nearby Alexandria, the discussion turned to modalities to coordinate future work, including the casting of the sculpture and construction of the plaza.

As Ms. Mungenast boarded her plane to return to Missouri, all agreed that the creative groundwork had been solidly established to move to completion of an inspiring monument to the men and women of the Army’s Old Guard,  a dream that began on September 11, 2001 when soldiers of the Old Guard were dispatched to a smoldering Pentagon Building, there to help maintain security and remove the dead and injured from the site of one of the terrorist attacks of that fateful day

Pictures of the sculpture and additional information about the Old Guard Monument Foundation may be found at www.theoldguardmonument.org.