New Korean War memorial is riddled with errors.
Hal Barker, left and Edward Barker Jr., his brother, who started the Korean War Project, a repository of information about the conflict and the Americans who fought in it, at the apartment they share in Dallas, Dec. 2, 2022. (Nitashia Johnson/ The New York
The brothers estimate that the $22 million wall of remembrance — an addition to the 27-year-old Korean War Veterans Memorial — contains 1,015 spelling errors. It also incorrectly includes 245 names of service members who died in circumstances totally unrelated to the war, they say, including a man killed in a motorcycle accident in Hawaii and another who drank antifreeze thinking it was alcohol. And it includes one Marine who lived for 60 years after the war and had eight grandchildren.
The foundation declined to comment. The park service deflected blame to the Defense Department. The Defense Department declined to make decision-makers available for comment. In response to questions from The New York Times, it acknowledged that there were errors on the wall, saying in a statement that compiling an accurate list was “challenging.”
But as the Korean War wall of remembrance shows, efforts to be inclusive can instead call attention to who was left out. Should the wall include a nurse killed in a plane crash on her way to the war zone? What about a Marine who died by suicide a month after coming home? Even with the best proofreading, any attempt to recognize all who died in as complex an event as a war will inevitably involve hard decisions.
The brothers began what they readily admit has become an obsession more than 40 years ago, hoping to better understand their father, Lt. Col. Edward L. Barker, a Marine pilot whose portrait hangs in their hall. He was often brooding and quick to anger, Hal said: “A good Marine, but a bad father.” Much of the data has since been converted to modern digital files, but the errors introduced in the punch-card era endured. So the brothers started checking their list against personnel files, census rolls and gravestones — work that has taken years.
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