Death Miscount Etched Into History
President Clinton and veterans from across the nation will gather in somber remembrance this afternoon at the Korean War Veterans Memorial, where it is carved into stone that 54,246 Americans died in the war that began 50 years ago today.
For decades, the number has been enshrined in almanacs, histories, memories and monuments, cited as proof of the war's cost. But nearly one-third of those deaths--17,730--occurred elsewhere, often half a world away from Korea, in places ranging from the United States to Germany. The actual number of Americans killed in the Korean War theater of operations is 36,516, the Pentagon acknowledged this month.
"If you were walking down the street in Washington, D.C., and were hit by a car, you'd be considered a casualty of the Korean War," said Burt Hagelin, a Korean War veteran who helped uncover the mystery.
The error was blamed on an anonymous government clerk who in the 1950s mistakenly added all noncombat deaths worldwide to the total, and the correction was credited to revised reporting procedures, according to news accounts reporting the Pentagon's clarification. That is not the real story, according to veterans and others who have pushed for years to correct the number.
"Fifty years later, they're trying to drop it all on one clerk," said Richard Kolb, publisher of VFW Magazine, a Veterans of Foreign Wars publication that several times has urged the number be corrected. "They had the facts all along. Now they're acting like it's a new revelation."
Some Pentagon officials have for years considered the 54,000 figure inflated, and they believed before the memorial was dedicated in 1995 that engraving that number in black granite would be misleading, according to interviews. But at the insistence of the veterans committee that oversaw the memorial's construction, the figure was used.
