Next month, the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall will have a new focal point \u2014 a remembrance wall featuring the names of approximately 36,574 Americans who died supporting the war and more than 7,200 Koreans who died while augmenting the Army. Their names will be organized by rank and respective branch of service, demonstrating how the war\u2019s burden fell unevenly across the military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the National Park Service<\/a>, work began in early March on the addition and additional renovations, which will cost approximately $22 million. The groundbreaking marks the completion of a years-long fundraising process that began when Congress passed the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall of Remembrance Act<\/a> in 2016. The non-profit Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation<\/a> successfully raised the money through private donations from American and South Korean citizens and corporations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Korean War Veterans Memorial is one of the most visited monuments on the National Mall, with over four million visitors annually.\u201d said KWVMF executive director James Fischer in an email to Military Times. \u201cCompleting the Wall of Remembrance will help educate these visitors about the costs of war and honor those who paid the ultimate price for freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Getting the money was step one. Now getting the names right is the task at hand. And advocates are questioning the accuracy of the Defense Casualty Analysis System database that the Defense Department used to provide the initial list of names to KWVMF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The wall, which will include the names of those killed or reported missing between June 1950 and March 1954, will provide a sobering reminder of the war\u2019s ferocity. More than five times as many Americans died in support of the Korean War than the approximately 7,056<\/a> who have died in support of the Global War on Terror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DoD won\u2019t release the current DCAS list it provided to KWVMF, so the best glimpse into the data comes from an archived, publicly available version of the list available through the National Archives and Records Administration website<\/a>. Korean War veterans advocates are alarmed at the inaccuracies they are finding there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From their home near Dallas, Hal and Ted Barker run the Korean War Project<\/a>, a free-to-use online archive and database documenting those lost in Korea. The site represents more than four decades of research and effort to tell the stories of Korean War veterans such as their father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Barkers and KWP volunteer researchers estimate there are some 2,000 name discrepancies in the DCAS list publicly available through NARA, they told Military Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some shouldn\u2019t be there. Some should be there but aren\u2019t. Others are grievously misspelled or misformatted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of particular issue, they explained, are Native American, Asian-American, Hawaiian, and Latino names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And soon these errors could be cut into stone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One glaring example is that of a Navy officer who died in\u20262013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Included in error<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cKilled in action\u2026remains recovered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s what the NARA public version of the DCAS database has to say<\/a> about Navy Lt. j.g. Edwin Nixon Jr., a carrier-based fighter pilot shot down during the Korean War. Nixon\u2019s F9F Panther fighter went down in flames in March 1953, crash-landing in North Korea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contrary to what his fellow pilots reported, what the newspapers reported, and what the NARA DCAS archive says, Nixon survived the crash and became a prisoner of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He survived his ordeal and returned to his family in Seattle, eventually having three children and self-publishing a memoir<\/a>, Killed In Action: Dead\u2026Wrong!,<\/i> about his experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nixon is not the only person included on the list in error, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another erroneous entry is that of Wilson Fielder Jr., Time <\/i>magazine\u2019s Hong Kong bureau chief who was killed while reporting<\/a> near Taejon in July 1950.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NARA DCAS lists Fielder<\/a> as \u201ckilled in action.\u201d The Time<\/i> correspondent had served as a Marine Corps officer during World War II, and was an inactive member of the Marine Corps Reserve at the time of his death, but was not serving at the time. As a result, DoD recorded his death as a battle casualty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other servicemembers in the NARA DCAS list \u201cdied from [various] accidents\u201d outside the theater of operations, said Hal Barker, including some who were not supporting operations in Korea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One such example is Navy Lt. j. g. Lawrence Frederick Emigholz Jr., who died in a 1952 accident while trying to land his fighter on the USS Wasp in the Mediterranean Sea, according to contemporaneous newspaper accounts. His remains were never recovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The NARA DCAS database states that Navy pilot \u201cLawerence Freder Emigholz Jr.\u201d died in an accident aboard the USS James C. Owens, a Sumner-class destroyer that had no planes. His misspelled name appears in a mockup<\/a> of the Wall of Remembrance presented to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts by the National Park Service on September 17, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But for each name erroneously included in the database, there are others not included.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those left out<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n Air Force and Navy personnel who died in accidents are included \u2014 or not \u2014 haphazardly, explained Barker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some troops lost in air crashes outside of Korea are included in the NARA DCAS list, such as Air Force 1st Lt. Frank M. Lopes<\/a>. He was a fighter pilot assigned to the 16th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron who boarded<\/a> a C-47 transport flight on October 15, 1950 in an effort to get back to his unit in Japan after surviving an emergency landing of his damaged jet in Korea during a combat mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The transport became lost over the ocean amid adverse weather after takeoff. Four hours later, the pilots radioed that fuel was running out, and the crew and its lone passenger, Lopes, would bail out. The aircraft wasn\u2019t heard from again, and search teams failed to locate its wreckage, much less its crew and passengers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lopes remains listed as missing in action, and his name will appear on the Wall of Remembrance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n