House and Senate lawmakers are demanding answers on how hundreds of service members’ names were misspelled or mixed-up on stone markers at the Korean War Veterans Memorial despite warnings from advocates about the potential for mistakes years ago.
“Errors of this magnitude should not have made it past the initial blueprints, much less carved into stone, and certainly not erected and unveiled to the public,” a bipartisan group of key congressional leaders wrote in a March 3 letter to Defense Department leaders.
“We find these errors deeply concerning and write to seek accountability on how the Remembrance Wall’s glaring flaws went unnoticed until post-construction,” the lawmakers wrote.
In spring 2021, ahead of plans to unveil a new remembrance wall at the memorial featuring the names of more than 36,000 Americans who died in support of the war, members of the Korean War Project warned of numerous discrepancies in the National Archives and Records Administration list officials planned to use to complete the project.
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In particular, the advocacy group warned that numerous Native American, Asian-American, Hawaiian, and Latino troops had their names misspelled, transposed or otherwise listed incorrectly.
But memorial officials went ahead with the $22 million project despite the concerns. The stone wall addition to the existing memorial was unveiled in July 2022. Earlier this year, the Korean War Project reported at least 1,015 spelling mistakes among the stone etchings, and the names of 245 individuals who were not killed in the conflict but had their names included anyway.
Congress is now launching a formal investigation into how and why the mistakes happened, and what it might cost to fix them.
Signers of last week’s letter include House Committee on Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala.; Senate Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.; and the top two lawmakers on the House Natural Resources Committee, Chairman Bruce Westerman,…
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