GREENFIELD — A misspelling on the new monument at Veterans Mall is expected to be corrected in the spring.
A memorial honoring those who have served in conflicts after the Vietnam War was unveiled as part of a Veterans Day ceremony on Tuesday, but the island nation of Grenada is incorrectly spelled as Granada.
Bill Phelps, who chairs the Trustees of the Soldiers Memorial, said the innocent mistake was made by the trustees and not Negus & Taylor Monuments, the Greenfield company that crafted the piece. Granada is a city in southern Spain, which is likely why no spell-checking software caught the error.
Chris Demars, director of the Upper Pioneer Valley Veterans’ Service District, which teamed up with the city to host the Veterans Day parade and ceremony, said he anticipates the fix could range from $200 to $2,000.
“It’s just a mistake,” he said.
Demars said the monument itself cost slightly less than $14,000. The project was funded primarily by money that was left following the installation of the adjacent Vietnam War monument years ago, as well as leftover state Chapter 115 money, which provides qualifying low-income veterans with financial assistance for food, shelter, clothing, housing supplies and medical care. Demars noted that some of the money in the trustees’ account came from change that had been tossed into a fountain that surrounded the sculpture of swords and hammers at Veterans Mall for years.
President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to invade Grenada in October 1983, citing a perceived threat that the Caribbean nation’s new regime posed to American citizens there following a Marxist coup that resulted in the arrest and execution of its prime minister. The conflict, which lasted eight days, led to the death of 19 American troops.
The new monument also honors those who served in conflicts in Lebanon, Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosova, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism.
The United States participated in NATO intervention in Kosovo (in Southeast Europe) in the late 1990s. It unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia in 2008 and is known internationally as Kosovo, though Kosova is the Albanian spelling. Albanians make up the vast majority of the landlocked country’s ethnicity.
The Republic of Kosova was a self-declared proto-state established as a shadow government in 1991 to exist in opposition to the Serbian-controlled government of the time.
Phelps and Demars said they were otherwise pleased with the Veterans Day parade and ceremony, and the monument itself.
“It was wonderful,” Phelps said. “We worked hard on [the memorial] — two years.”