Korean War Wall Is Littered With Goofs

Two historians count more than 1K spelling errors, plus about 500 missing names
By Mike L. Ford,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 10, 2023 4:29 PM CST
Korean War Wall Is Littered With Goofs
A bouquet rests on a section of the Korean War Veterans Memorial's newly unveiled Wall of Remembrance, Wednesday, July 27, 2022, in Washington.   (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

"It’s just a damn mess." That’s how historian Hal Barker describes the Korean War Wall of Remembrance, a new $22 million installment at the existing Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Hal and his brother Edward "Ted" Barker certainly didn’t create the mess; on the contrary, according to the New York Times, they worked for years trying to prevent it, and now they’re determined to help fix it. Similar to the Vietnam Memorial, the wall memorializes the names of US military personnel killed during the Korean War. Unveiled last summer, it’s a collaborative effort by the nonprofit Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation, the National Park Service, and the Defense Department, and it’s mostly funded by the government of South Korea.

Of the 36,634 names on the wall, 1,015 are misspelled. Furthermore, according to the Barkers, 245 of the names shouldn’t be there at all, and about 500 names were mistakenly omitted. The spelling errors have been carried forward since the 1950s, when personnel records were kept on IBM punch cards that couldn’t accommodate surnames with hyphens and such. The rest of the errors are due to the simple fact that nobody really vetted the list before it was inscribed in stone. Editorial responsibility was supposed to fall on the Defense Department, which was appointed by Congress as sole supplier of the official list.

As the project developed, the Barker brothers warned anyone who would listen that there were likely to be errors in the official records, but they didn’t get much response. Initially inspired by a quest to learn more about their own dad—described as "a good Marine, but a bad father"—the Barkers have been researching and compiling their own meticulous records for decades. They’re confident they can help fix the mess, but as Ted told NBC Dallas, "If they had just worked with us, we could have saved taxpayers probably $10 to $15 million, because that’s what it’s going to take to redo this." Per MSN, the South Korean veterans’ ministry said it would review and "rectify" the problems itself. (More Korean War stories.)

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