Bermuda Executive’s Memorial To War Dead

Bermuda insurance executive David Bell [pictured], co-founder of the charity Grateful Nation Montana which raises college scholarship funds for the children of that state’s servicemen killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now helped to create a larger-than-life bronze tribute to the fallen.

To be unveiled on November 4 on the University of Montana campus, the bronze memorial honours the 40 Montanans who have sacrificed their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.

Mr. Bell shepherded the memorial project from the moment it popped into his head as he and his wife strolled across the campus of their alma mater one day, spearheaded much of the fundraising for it and gave his word he would pick up any of the six-figure tab that donations didn’t cover.

“The memorial, by Montana artist Rick Rowley,will feature bronze sculptures of four people gazing at a Fallen Soldier Battle Cross — another bronze, this one of the familiar makeshift battlefield cross in which a dead soldier’s rifle is jammed into the ground, bayonet first, with his helmet balancing on top of the rifle, his dog tags hanging from it, and his boots next to it,” reports Montana’s “Missoulian” newspaper.

“The tallest of the four other bronzes, representing the dead soldier’s parents, are 10 feet tall and weight 1,300 pounds.

“In front of them are bronzes representing the dead soldier’s child, and the child’s teacher.”

Mr. Bell, chief operating officer of Bermuda’s Allied World Assurance, told the newspaper he is in awe of the sacrifice American servicemen and women make for their nation.

After graduating from the University of Montana with a finance degree, Mr. Bell was hired by Chubb Corp., which he describes as an insurance company “with a great moral compass.”

“If you owe it, you pay it,” Mr. Bell told the “Missoulian”.”That’s not the general reputation of the insurance industry.”

A decade ago, Chubb sent Mr. Bell to Bermuda to watch over its investment in Allied World, then a fledgling start-up company.

“It began with just four employees in a small office in the British overseas territory,” said the “Missoulian. “Allied World went public in 2006, and today Mr. Bell oversees more than 700 employees in offices in Bermuda, London, Dublin, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States, with revenues of more than $250 million.”

About the time Allied World had its initial public offering, Mr. Bell was working with New York lawyer John McCarrick, who had his own ties to Montana.

“John took a year off from law school to teach children on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation,” Mr. Bell explained to the Montana newspaper, adding that Mr. McCarrick had remained active there, raising money to build a community centre.

Mr. Bell described Mr. McCarrick as “someone who can take my wild ideas and frame them into executable plans.”

Five or so years ago, the two men happened to read an article about a young woman recently widowed by one of the ongoing wars.

“She had two children, both under the age of seven,” Mr. Bell said. “The article went through the death benefits this young mother got, and we were both shocked at how little financial consideration is given to the families of fallen soldiers.”

It got them both to thinking, Mr. Bell said.

“It is perversely ironic that these kids will have a harder time in life because their fathers were killed fighting for their country,” he said.

The facts are:

• A parent’s level of education is a good predictor of how far a child will take his or her education.
• A full 96 percent of U.S. infantrymen do not have college degrees.
• While some will go on to obtain degrees after their service, the ones who died, obviously, can’t.

“Their kids will be growing up, at least for a while, in a single-parent household,” Mr. Bell said. “It will be a scary experience, and to know that because of their fathers’ sacrifice they’ll be less able to compete at the college level is fundamentally wrong.”

It was, Mr. Bell said, “an injustice that cried out to me more than anything else.”

So he and Mr. McCarrick founded Grateful Nation Montana.

It aims to guarantee a college education to the child of any Montana serviceman or woman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan who wants one — and to be there to help them toward that goal long before that.

Grateful Nation Montana does not see its scholarships as options to be offered to the children when they turn 18.

The program also offers tutoring and mentoring services, alerts the children’s teachers early on that the child has the chance for a college education because of their situation, and follows their progress.

“I don’t apologise for one second if they receive a little more attention because they’re the child of a fallen soldier,” Mr. Bell said, and he and Mr. McCarrick want to offer the template they’ve developed for Montana to people in other states who would like to start similar programmes.

Media exposure on “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” and “Fox & Friends” has brought such inquiries from people in half a dozen states.

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