"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. Beyond that, there are about 500 names that should be listed but are not, according to the Barkers. They say that the official roster used for the wall was so slapdash that they cannot find much rhyme or reason to who was included and who was left out."
"A man named Frederick Bald Eagle Bear, an Army corporal who was killed as he rallied his infantry squad to fend off an enemy attack... [is listed] as Eagle B F Bald. There are hundreds more mistakes like those."
What to do about it? From the comments over there: "Leave the memorial as is. Place a plaque there saying 'This memorial contains numerous errors and omissions.' Let it stand as an example of the horror and confusion of war, when a tiny error can lead to the loss of many lives."
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37 comments:
It may be worth a look into how the contract was awarded while asking did the anti-memorial trend of the last 10years have an effect on that small industry?
What a Perfect Memorial, for the Korean War!
No one knew about it at the time.. Even LESS know!
Let Those vets, KNOW that we REALLY don't care about them (oh, WAIT! they Already Know THAT)
Speaking as the son, of Korean War vet. He was PRETTY SURE, that no one cared about it.
Government work.
People didn't notice a lot of spelling mistakes in the Vietnam War Memorial. I guess standards have fallen. That also goes for including the Marine who long outlived the war, but the rest is a little shaky.
If you died of fever at Vicksburg or Chickamauga, your name would have been put up on the town or college monument. You wouldn't have been where you were or living in the conditions you were living in without the war. There was no anti-freeze in those days, but plenty of accidents with horses.
I say we rename and rededicate it the "Education Memorial" commemorating the demise of basic education in our country. It would become known as the 'Tomb of the Unknown Scholar'. Or maybe just simply the 'Teachers Union Wall'.
Of all the money raised for this, how much was kept by the fundraisers?
No one screws things up like charitable groups.
"It also incorrectly includes 245 names of service members who died in circumstances totally unrelated to the war."
Kinda like the narrative about the 5 police killed at the Capitol during the J6 gathering. A narrative repeated all last week by too many Democratic politician and media tools. False, but they want it to be true, so to them...it's true!
"Eagle BF Bald"? They used citation styling software and never bothered to check the results. In the back of a scientific or academic paper, it's no big deal, but even there, it should be manually reviewed for obvious errors. It's astonishing that they weren't more careful with a literally carved in stone war memorial.
No use complainin', don't you worry, don't you whine
'Cause if you get it wrong you'll get it right next time
Next time
This has the whiff of faux concern for which the NYT is famous. It distracts wonderfully from the purpose of the memorial, which is about the price of war, paid by so many otherwise nameless people. War is a meat grinder that destroys individuals. It's almost poetically correct, therefore, to note that our best effort to make peace with that war contains some of its chaos and injustice, its grinding-up and forgetting of others just like...us.
When will the NYT run a name check on the Vietnam Memorial? Must be plenty of errors there --almost like a New York City voter roll!
I'm guessing this is what happens when someone copies-and-pastes the wrong word processor document into an email, and then the stonecutters on the other end must work with what they were given. Government memorials took the naming turn with the list of names at Pearl Harbor over the sunken Arizona, and went mainstream with the DC Vietnam War memorial.
So now they must list everyone, everywhere? But mistakes are present on all such memorials.
It's sad but not surprising that Korean War veteran names are mangled, as the entire war was overshadowed by WW2 and then Vietnam.
My mother was in San Diego while my Marine father was in Korea. She was asked, "Where's your husband?" " he's in Korea. " "He's where?"
In San Diego, a Navy town.
Wouldn't it have been more honest to honor the Korean veterans' (both killed and surviving) actual experience with a Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers.
Yes, the Korean war vets have gotten a raw deal. Sandwiched inbetween WW II and Vietnam. Unfortunately, Truman got us in a no-win war, and had no idea how to get us out. It lead to Ike being POTUS, one of the few good things about it.
But how typical of Americans that they'll send $100,000 million to Ukraine to kill people, but won't spend an extra $2-3 Million to correct errors on a memorial to Americans who died for their country.
Of course that's typical of our power elite. Joe Biden just said we have an obligation to the world to let in millions of immigrants whatever the impact on those now living here. That sure is generous of Joe.
So, above average quality from the government.
Tear it down and start over, that will be an excellent use of taxpayer dollars. Just like digging holes in the morning and filling them in all afternoon.
Perfect metaphor for progressive governance. Perfect.
I'm a bit confused. We already have a Korean war memorial. for 30 years.
why screw with it now?
"Good enough for government work."
Mark: "No one screws things up like charitable groups."
One scarcely knows where to begin with such an astonishingly and fundamentally flawed "hot take" such as that.
Do people not see the instructions above the comment window? They include "You must use a name or pseudonym. The non-name 'unknown' is not accepted."
I delete everything that is submitted as "unknown." In case you are wondering. If you are actively harassing me, you're an idiot.
ah ... there was no fact-checking for names in 'meme of the fallen'?
Why would we expect anything else in 2022?
Lorem Ipsum isn't Latin for "Korean War"?
Let Althouse's delete button be the Tomb Of the Unknown Trolls forevermore.
And since we're talking about feckless wars, what ever happened to Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns"? Was that ISIS? Or Putin?
Paywall.
It's a private charity fuckup! No, it's a gummint fuckup!
But wait, it's both!
The Korean Police Action was probably the high point of the new United Nations working more-or-less as designed in a major military crisis.
My mother used to say that the Air Force called my father, the ex-bomber pilot, to ask if he might want to go back in. With one kid already, another (moi) on the way, and a promising future, he declined. I'm sure they wanted him at a desk to crunch numbers (he had become an accountant) and his eyesight was already declining.
No one screws things up like charitable groups.
Let your undying love of government thugs and bureaucrats shine through for all to see.
I don't know, a certain amount of errors out of 36,000+ names is inevitable, especially since the sources for the names were probably error-laden to begin with. The error rate here sounds a bit high, but not yet another item in the long list of things we're supposed to be outraged about.
I've never been fond of the Wall of Names monuments, except in local circumstances, for many of these reasons, but mostly out penchant lately for personalizing everything. A large granite obelisk set amidst a quiet, pleasant, contemplative setting seems to me more appropriate for commemorating the dead when the numbers reach into the hundreds or thousands or more.
Noone younger than a boomer will even know or care what the memorial is for.
Eventually it will just be a hangout for homeless drug addicts.
My first thought was that this is similar to the railing about covid deaths that "weren't really," used as evidence that covid really wasn't dangerous. But like the Korean War, it did actually occur, and a few screwups in the charting doesn't change that there was a lot of death.
Just getting to the end of Dominus, the third and presumably last book in Steven Saylor's epic history novel of a family lasting well over a millennium in ancient Rome from its beginnings (I love his much longer Gordianus the Finder series, "detective" stories set in the late Roman republic). It's a propos here, because I just started reading about the construction of the Arch of Constantine in the Roman forum, a degenerate, bastardized ripoff of earlier monuments such as the Arch of Titus (replete with references to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem) and even the Arch of Septimius Severus. Have we reached the same degenerate level?
--gpm
The UN police action in Korea was against a cruel and determined foe. But we could not win I because it was not called a war. This was the first hot war in a Cold War where winning was not as important as avoiding a nuclear exchange with the USSR. But no one wanted another death machine like Korea until LBJ was blackmailed by the CIA into invading Viet Nam.
The UN police action in Korea was against a cruel and determined foe. But we could not win I because it was not called a war. This was the first hot war in a Cold War where winning was not as important as avoiding a nuclear exchange with the USSR. But no one wanted another death machine like Korea until LBJ was blackmailed by the CIA into invading Viet Nam.
And yet, single-payer healthcare will work better than what we now have somehow...
What I am hearing now is that the National Parks Service didn't want such a monument because there were problems with the Vietnam War Memorial Wall. The Pentagon records from the midcentury period were on such antiquated technology that mistakes were inevitable. Bald Eagle Bear couldn't be recorded as a last name on the older software, hence the mistake. But Congress insisted on putting names on the Korean War Memorial.
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