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In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman's words "contribute a verse" each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a new series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”

On a triangle of lawn next to a busy highway and the Marshall County Courthouse sits a veterans memorial park. It has the engraved granite slabs often found at memorials, along with a statue of a soldier kneeling to honor a fallen comrade.

But what catches your eye is a statue of a man sitting on a bench in the shade, his hand resting on the head of a dog next to him. He has a prosthetic leg and is staring down at the dog.

“Everything here has a meaning to it, but I think the one that touches the heart and the healing process is probably the PTSD soldier and the service dog,” said Russ Steer, who chairs the Marshall County area Veterans Memorial Park committee.

He started this project to bring to light the pain of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition linked to the trauma of battle that for decades wasn’t taken seriously. That changed with the conflicts in Afghanistan and the Gulf War in the 2000s. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that nearly three in 10 U.S. service members from those conflicts 

will be diagnosed with PTSD at some point

. That’s significantly higher than the 10 percent estimate from the Vietnam era and 3 percent from World War II and the Korean War.

Steer said the idea for a memorial began with a young man whose father was part of a tank crew in World War II and a prisoner of war. He’d suggested putting a tank at the center.

Steer liked the idea of a memorial but got permission from the county to build one a bit more personal than a tank, including the quiet soldier and his dog. 

The PTSD sculpture was designed by Brodin Studios in Kimball and installed in March. 

Backers raised $400,000 in cash and in-kind donations from veterans groups, businesses and individuals.

Steer gives local veterans most of the credit for making it happen.

That includes Brett Brandon, a 17-year Army veteran who serves now as the veterans service officer for Marshall County. He suffers PTSD from a tour in Afghanistan and feels a kinship to the PTSD soldier depicted in the statue.

“I’ve seen that look before,” he said while standing next to the sculpture. “When I first walked up I was choked up. It was like ‘Oh my God, that’s so lifelike.’ It still gets me.”

Brandon was a military police investigator during his tour in Afghanistan and spent a lot of time investigating soldier suicides.

“There was the one weekend we had three in three days,” he recalled. “You don’t want no one to feel sorry for you, so you just kind of keep it all inside, and you just get used to it. You kind of get numb.”

He learned to manage his PTSD by working long hours. “If you can stay busy, you can keep that monster under the rug,” Brandon said.

As veterans age, retire and slow down, though, he said the PTSD often returns. “You can just tell when I bring it up that their eyes get heavy and they’re ready to cry, and they’re like, I’m not talking about it again.”

Like Brandon, Vietnam veteran Keith Bergeron worked long hours to try and keep the pain at bay. He said he drank, too, but “the more you drank, the worse the flashbacks were. It don’t happen very often, but every once in a while, it still comes back and bites you in the butt.”

 about their experiences. Sometimes after an interview, “my wife has to wake me up” when the conversation prompts a nighttime flashback. He’s talked to more than 150 veterans.

“When I came home, nobody wanted to hear about it,” he recalled. “They’d say, ‘How was it over there’? You’d say, ‘Well, I had some good times, some bad times, and just some times.’ That was my go-to answer. They just didn’t want to hear about it.”

Steer is not a veteran, but he has a deep emotional connection to this site.

“I had a brother that served in Vietnam. He was wounded in Vietnam,” Steer said. He farmed with his brother for 12 years before the brother died of complications from his wounds. His brother also had PTSD, but they never really talked about it.

“The question that I still have that kind of haunts me is would he have fared better from the PTSD that he suffered with if I had initiated conversation, and those are things you can’t answer,” Steer said.

At the memorial, though, “you can come out here and feel a little closer to those people that we lost or sit on the bench by the PTSD guy and realize you saw the signs of it,” added. “You saw the symptoms of it, but we didn’t talk about it.”

These men all have stories that circle back to the man on the park bench with his dog. They hope the statue will help make it OK to talk about an often unspoken mental health condition.

They sometimes see people stop to sit by the man on the bench. Brandon said the sculpture is sparking recognition and conversation.

“It’s really good to see that people are responding,” he said, “and we’re helping them get the care that they need for it so they don’t keep it swept under the rug anymore.”

Editor’s note: The Department of Veterans Affairs offers confidential help for veterans, service members, and their families at no cost 

. The National Association of Mental Illness Minnesota chapter 

maintains on online list of resources for veterans with PTSD or other needs

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Wander & Wonder

Dan Gunderson

Author

Veterans memorials are a common sight on Minnesota courthouse lawns. They often focus on military might. But in the small northwestern town of Warren, a sculpture is connecting veterans and the town in a quiet way.

In Warren, a different kind of veterans memorial draws people near

Dan Gunderson | MPR News

A locator map of Minnesota. Warren is in the northwest.

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In a small northwestern Minnesota town, a sculpture honoring veterans suffering from PTSD offers quiet comfort.  

In Warren, a different kind of veterans memorial draws people near

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