A somber monument for Korean War veterans has more than 36,000 names, but it's becoming infamous for something else it reveals — hundreds of mistakes.
Hal Barker, a historian, and his brother Edward "Ted" Barker Jr. oversee an online repository of data about the war through the Korean War Project. Hal told The New York Times the $22 million wall is a "damn mess — full of old bookkeeping errors and typos."
The Barkers told the Times the monument contains more than a thousand spelling errors and hundreds of mistakes. And they believe there are approximately 500 names that should be listed but are not.
For exapmle, only three of Lt. Walder McCord's crew of nine who died in a bomber crash are listed. Another example is a Navy plane colliding with an Air Force plane off Japan. Both pilots died, but only the Navy pilot was on the wall.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation put together the granite slabs to remember the more than 1 million people who died.
The money was provided mainly by the South Korean government. The Defense Department supplied the errored list and told the Times it was "challenging" to compile.
"We encourage all family members or concerned citizens to notify the Department of any names that were omitted, misspelled, or included in error," the DOD's statement read, noting that it would attempt to rectify the situation with the park service without providing any specifics on the granite slabs and how they could be fixed.
The DOD had erred on the conflict's data once before. Almost 50 years after the war, the official number of American deaths was published as 54,246. The Pentagon later acknowledged the death toll to be 36,516.
The brothers warned officials and even the White House about issues with the records, but "no one bothered to check it before they set it in stone," Ted told the Times.
This brought to light who should be counted among the fallen. Typically, these efforts lend themselves to inclusivity. The National Park Service has repeatedly opposed the Korean War memorial wall just for that reason, according to the Times.
"There is not always agreement on those names to be included," said Peggy O'Dell, the park service's deputy director for operations at the time, during a congressional hearing in 2016, according to the Times.
As for the brothers, it had become mission critical: their father, Lt. Col. Edward L. Barker, died in 2009 and had served in the Korean War. The two wanted to understand their father, who would constantly refuse to discuss the conflict, so they created the website in 1995.
"People ask us how we could spend so much effort doing this," Ted said to the Times. "I say, 'How could we not? We feel we owe it to these guys.'"
By 2010, a group of veterans running the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation started to lobby to add a memorial wall to the current monument. The foundation contacted the brothers, who warned them about the list's accuracy.
The problem seems to stem from the office of the Secretary of Defense issuing all the names at once and without any outside input. The brothers implored the DOD to make changes to the list, but the DOD was unresponsive.
The brothers were alerted to heavy traffic coming to their website and were suspicious that the DOD might have been using the brothers' research without their knowledge, according to the Times.
The Pentagon compiled its final list in 2021, according to the Times, and the Barkers sounded the alarm again.
"A wall should have never been done," Ted said to the Times. "But now that it has been done, we need to get it right."
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