More than 43,000 names have been added to the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C., in a rededication ceremony that happened this week. But if you ask Dallas brothers Hal and Ted Barker, they’ll tell you that the memorial does a disservice to a great deal of them. The new piece leaves out hundreds who died in the war but are prevented by bureaucracy from being memorialized.
The August issue of Texas Monthly looks at the brothers Hal and Ted Barker’s work and their labor of love to catalog and preserve the stories of Korean War soldiers, starting with their own father. They also describe their frustrating efforts to convince the Department of Defense to correct misspelled names and make sure that the agency addressed omissions. In the end, the Barkers told the magazine, the newly unveiled wall had “868 misspelling and formatting errors—eight times the number of mistakes on the Vietnam wall, in a war with almost 22,000 fewer deaths.”
Retired lieutenant colonel James Fisher, the executive director of the foundation overseeing the memorial, told Texas Monthly that their research wasn’t enough. The Barkers “have to follow the law,” which means adhering to the official DOD list. “They’re going to have to prove their case,” he said. “‘This guy should be on the wall.’ Okay, where’s your proof? If you have someone shot down in the sea, a family member has to petition it, not the Barker brothers.”
The Korean War began in 1950 and lasted three years. Often called “The Forgotten War,” at least 36,000 Americans died in that three-year period (for comparison, 58,000 died in the decade-long Vietnam War). Thousands are still missing in action to this day.
The most nascent effort to commemorate those who fought in the Korean War began in Dallas in 1984, when Hal Barker donated $10 to the American Battle Monuments Commission to seed the work that would become a Korean War memorial trust fund. Eventually, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill to create the memorial, which was paid for with private donations sent to the trust fund that Hal had started with that sawbuck.
The foundation said it tried to check every name and has left space at the bottom of the memorial to add new names. But to Hal, who has spent a great deal of his life on this work, “this wall is going to be a colossal embarrassment.”
The Barkers ultimately published a list of names on their own, with underwriting from Los Angeles philanthropist Mary Urquhart. The 4-pound, 525-page book had an initial printing of 500 copies and is a no-frills listing of “everyone known to have died in the war, along with birthdays, hometowns, units in which they served, places and dates of death, and official status.”
The new Memorial Wall of Remembrance is part of the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall. It lists 36,000 American soldiers and another 7,100 members of the Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army. The original memorial was dedicated 27 years ago. Construction on the $22 million project that included the new wall began in March 2021 and was paid for mostly by donations.
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