The Armed Services Committee demanded answers to how this all happened on March 2, 2023, with an answer no later than March 23, 2023.It is now a year later and no answer. The investigation is now dead.Call the Armed Services Committee at 202-224-3871, and ask why.
Thousands of Errors and Omissions Exist on the Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall of Remembrance dedicated on July 27, 2022, at the Washington Mall.
Millions of taxpayer dollars will be needed to fix errors and omissions. Millions will be needed to conduct the research that the Department of Defense claims to have already conducted.
This was not a mistake.
The White House in two administrations, Secretary of Defense, House Oversight Committee, National Capital Planning Commission, Department of the Interior, the Department of Defense Inspector General, and the nonprofit entity building the Wall, the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation, were all warned in writing. They all failed to act.
The Tragic Case of Major Genevieve Smith, Army Nurse Corps
On July 27, 1950,Major Genevieve Smith, Senior Army Nurse Eighth Army, was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur to command nursing operations in the Republic of Korea. An aircraft carrying Smith with other passengers enroute to Pusan crashed at sea south of Tokyo, Japan. Only one survived the crash. It is the position of the Department of Defense that there isno proof (page 24) Smith was on orders to Korea, or any proof that the flight was related in any way to the Korean War. Her name is not on the Wall, and she is not considered Missing. She is just gone along with MacArthur staff officers and journalists and the others lost and forgotten on this flight.
Her hometown of Epworth, Iowa, filed a petition on behalf of Major Smith, but Smith is still considered formally forgotten by the Department of Defense.
The Tragic Case of Captain Vera Brown, Air Force Nurse Corps
On September 26, 1950, Captain Vera Maude Brown, from Wedowee, Alabama, a nurse with the 801st Medical Evacuation Squadron, was killed shortly after takeoff from Ashiya Air Base, Japan. Twenty-three personnel died in this incident. During this time period, nurses often flew three or more evacuation flights from Seoul to Ashiya and return per day, with often 70 hour weeks. She posthumously received the Distinguished Flying Cross for this flight. Officially, she and all the other passengers on this flight are forbidden from appearing on the Wall of Remembrance, although similar flights from the same base enroute to Korea are on the Wall based on various exceptions to the criteria.The fact is DoD formally approved losses on ship fires and explosions on ships at dock in Sasebo and Yokosuka, Japan, and losses in Europe and Africa, but not nurses enroute to Korea.The Tragic Case of Lt. Col. James Henry Moyer, Jr., Commanding Officer, 90th Bomb Squadron, Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea.On August 30, 1951, Lt. Col. Moyer, from Columbus, Ohio, was the pilot of a B-26C. Shortly after takeoff from Kunsan, the aircraft crashed and Moyer was badly burned and evacuated to Japan where he died on October 9, 1951. His co-pilot, Captain Richard Anthony Grablin, was killed and is on the Wall of Remembrance. Moyer is not on the Wall apparently because he died in Japan and is not considered an official death related to the Korean War.
News Stories
"Thousands of name errors possible in new Korean War Remembrance Wall, advocates fear" was the headline in a story by Davis Winkie of Military Times on April 6, 2021.
"The Korean War Memorial’s New Wall of Remembrance Appears to Forget Hundreds of U.S. Casualties" by Michael Hall in the August 2022 edition of Texas Monthly was a detailed analysis of the problem.
"A Korean War Wall of Remembrance Set Hundreds of Errors in Stone" by David Philipps in the January 9, 2023, story in the New York Times finally rang a bell.
As a result of the New York Times story, the Senate Armed Services Committee and other interested Committees filed a demand to the Secretary of Defense on March 2, 2023, and requested a response by March 23, 2023. Five months later, no response has been made public. Three women, two sisters and a family member from Tennessee were responsible for a hand-carried petition to Armed Services.White House and Department of Defense Answer To The Problem.
In March 2021 I wrote President Biden about the problems. A year later, I received a response from the White House along with an answer from the Department of Defense. It read:
"The Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation identified problematic names after a series of reviews of the official listing of all Korean War casualty names, which they received from the DoD as a result of their Freedom of Information Act request in 2018. As a result, the DoD conducted a thorough review of all the names on the list, requiring extensive research of these Service members' military records. This extensive review corrected thousands of names on the Korean War casualty list. In November of 2021, the Defense Human Resources Activity released the final official list to the Department of the Interior pursuant to Public Law 114-230." Click Here for Full White House and DoD Answer.
Background To Disaster On The Mall
My name is Hal Barker. I am 76 years old. My brother Ted, age 78, and I operate the Korean War Project online in Dallas, Texas. Our father was a highly decorated Marine helicopter pilot in Korea but he would not talk about the war. Long story, but in 1982, I found that no memorial existed for the Korean War. I established the Korean War Veterans Memorial Trust Fund in 1984, and lobbied Congress for a Memorial. Clint Eastwood voluteered to help get the legislation out of a stalled Senate Committee in 1986. The legislation was signed by President Reagan after Eastwood personally interceeded. I went back to my day job in construction but worked every spare moment in Korean War history.In November 1988, General Richard G. Stilwell, USA Retired, praised my work on the Memorial by saying: "As Chairman of the Korean War Veterans Memorial Advisory Board, I salute your efforts at laying the cornerstone of this magnificent project."In 1989, at the invitation of the Minister of Defense of the Republic of Korea, I spent two weeks in Korea at my own cost. I was able to visit Hill 931, Heartbreak Ridge, inside the current DMZ where my father was awarded the Silver Star for an attempted helicopter rescue of a downed pilot.
Using my savings from a stint as a set carpenter for "Walker, Texas Ranger," I went back to Korea in 1994 as a guest of General Abrams, and toured all along the DMZ and down to the area of the Pusan Perimeter with a group of Second Indianhead Division veterans.
When the Internet opened up in Dallas in February 1995, I created the first Korean War related website on the entire Internet. It went viral within days.
By July 1995, the Department of Defense asked my brother and I to help create the Korean War section at the Defense Prisoner of War Missing Persons Office (DPMO - Now DPAA). Later the DPMO asked us to help find families of Missing from the Korean War, so we voluteered to create "Finding The Families: The Search For Korean War MIA/POW Family DNA." All work was free to the government. Not one dime of taxpayer money.
In 1997, with the help of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, we became a registered IRS nonprofit under the name "Korean War Project." Generous donors and members over the years kept us afloat. A key part of our work over the last decades has been our Korean War Casualty Database, know as our "Remembrance" pages. Through the efforts of thousands of family members, friends, veterans, and veterans group, we were able to correct massive errors and omissions in the official data relating to losses. We had hundreds of thousands of emails and hundreds of phone calls often ringing off the hook.
In May 2014, Colonel William Weber, USA Retired, of the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation asked us to donate our Remembrance database to the Foundation for a Wall of Remembrance. I told them that our database would take many more years of work to complete. "I am fully aware that your list is superior to and more accurate than those of ABMC, DOD, VA, etc. lt has always been my intention to rely on yours. And yes, compensation for use is certainly appropriate." But the Foundation was broke.And we had nothing to sell. As of today, November 3, 2023, we have nothing to sell. We add or change data every single day.
In 2015, Weber wrote again on May 9, 2015, asking for our database. "I am aware that preparation of what I’m requesting is significant work effort. KWVMFnd is prepared to provide an agreed upon donation to your 501(c)(3), organization in return for the data as requested." Again, I repeated that we had years of work to complete our database. The Foundation was still broke. We heard nothing more.And we still had nothing to sell. As of today, we have nothing to sell. We add or change data every single day. It is a work in progress that can never be finished. The Department of Defense and the Foundation know this as fact.Last Ditch Plea To General Tililli
In 2021, in a last ditch effort to save the Wall, I emailed General John H. Tilelli, Jr., USA Retired, Chairman, Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation. There is no law that required Foundation leadership to read the Public Law as written, or follow the Public Law as written. And this is what happened. Nobody read the law as written."Thank you for your email dated 7 May 2021. As you are aware, the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation (KWVMF) is required by Public Law to use the list of those killed in Korea during the war provided by the Department of Defense. The list, which is vetted by the Services, will be provided to KWVMF and placed on the Wall of Remembrance. I am confident that the Department of Defense will provide an accurate list based on the significance and importance of this Memorial. John H. Tililli, Jr."
In fact, one list was created by DoD, but third parties provided additional names for the Wall outside of the Public Law specifications set in the legislation.This answer would seal the fate of the Wall of Remembrance, guarantee heartbreak to countless families and veterans, and cost the taxpayers millions."Shakedown" ( Video excerpt here. )In 2019, I found that the South Korean government had agreed to fund the Wall of Remembrance. A hearing was set at the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) for approval of the design, so I wrote a one page letter to the Commission noting that there were errors and omissions in the current Department of Defense database.
In testimony at the Hearing on October 3, 2019, Colonel Richard Dean, USA Retired, a member of the Board of Directors of the Foundation, came out with a direct attack on our integrity and suggested we were demanding that the Korean War project be compensated for decades of work. Commissioner Mina Wright suggested we were engaged in a criminal "shakedown." Dean said, "Could be."
Dean's boss at the Foundation made the funding promise in writing. At the time, Dean's day job was reportedly as Director of Engineering at the National Defense University and a highly regarded military veteran. By 2021, the Foundation reported assets of $31,935,002 with office expenses and salaries at $474,021.Kill The Messenger - Literally
It was clear that it was extremely important to Dean that the Foundation must aggressively discredit my brother and I officially, and Commissioner Wright was the hatchet woman. It worked very well.It was almost enough to kill me. Literally.It was essential to the enterprise that foreign donors not realize the Wall of Remembrance would be built on a foundation of quicksand. The money was the overwhelming need. Fact was a four letter word.
By this time the Foundation staff was taking data from our website while aggressively attacking us in public for having that data. In testimony at the NCPC Hearing, Dean showed knowledge of a range of data residing on our website, and this could only come from many hours of going over our data. Yet he and Commissioner Wright cast us as federal criminals.
We started to look at our web server log files and noted that automated data scrapers had been going through our site. We put a block on data volume and immediately two data contractors asked for a release on the block and others with fake emails from the DC area asked for access. We identified DoD related VPN's involved in the data scraping.
Ramification of the "Shakedown" Attack
Originally the Foundation promised to make a donation to the Korean War Project in return for all our casualty data. We found later that the Foundation made an agreement with the Department of Defense sometime in 2018-2019 to use technology to "scrape" data from the Korean War Project without permission and later provide that data to the Department of Defense. A DoD employee would admit that DoD had a contractor or contractors pulling our data. While all this was going on, we published a hardback book and gave two copies to the retired Generals running the Foundation free of charge to show our good will.
Unfortunately, the Foundation and the Department of Defense did not have the knowledge, technical ability, or staff to analyse our data, so the result was thousands of errors and omissions even thought they had our data in their possession and claimed to have line item examined all the records for 36,000+ names from their own records.
We don't know if the Foundation told the Koreans that there was a major problem with the names. From the reaction in Korean media after the New York Times article, the Koreans were apparently left in the dark.
I had a glimmer of hope when an official from the Manpower section of the Department of Defense called me on October 21, 2022, and asked for our help. At that time I gave him voluminous documents and information relating to the problems. I asked for a formal memorandum to credit our participation and certain documents that we needed to determine why the Department of Defense had failed. I was told to file a Freedom of Information Request for the documents I needed immediately and I subsequently learned it would take one to two years for production. No formal memorandum of participation has been received after 10 months.
Hal BarkerFounder - Korean War Veterans Memorial
