New $22 million Korean War memorial in Washington has 1,015 spelling errors and 245 service members who didn't die in the war, report says

• The Wall of Remembrance at the Korean War Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington last year.
• But the memorial contains over a thousand spelling mistakes and errors, The New York Times reported.
• Two historians told NBC it will cost US taxpayers millions of dollars to rectify the mistakes.

A new $22 million Korean War memorial in Washington, DC, contains around 1,015 spelling errors and 245 names of people who didn't even die in the war, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The Wall of Remembrance at the Korean War Veterans Memorial was first unveiled last summer and is meant to include all of the 36,634 names of American service members who died in battle in the Korean War.

But according to two historians who have compiled an online database of all of the names of service members who died in the conflict, the granite slab is riddled with mistakes.

Hal and Ted Barker, who founded the Korean War Project, told The Times that the memorial has at least 1,000 names that were misspelled, 500 names that are missing, and names that shouldn't even be there at all.

For example, the name of a man who was killed in a motorcycle accident in Hawaii and another who drank antifreeze have both made it on to the granite slab.

The name of Frederick Bald Eagle Bear, a member of the Lakota tribe, meanwhile, is so mangled that the polished granite lists him only as Eagle B F Bald.

"If you're killed or died in a war, people need to know what your full name was so they can find you and memorialize you properly," Ted Barker told NBC Dallas. "A name is everything we have."

In a statement to NBC Dallas, the Department of Defense said the errors are "very unfortunate mistakes" that they're working to correct.

But the Barker brothers told NBC Dallas and The Times that they informed government officials about these potential errors years ago, and sent their own records with the corrected names. But they never heard back.

"If they had just talked to us, and worked with us, we could have saved United States taxpayers probably $10 to $15 million because that's what it's going to take to re-do this," Hal Barker told NBC Dallas.

Insider was unable to independently verify that number and the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The government of South Korea largely provided the funds for the project. According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, the country's veterans ministry's said it would review the errors themselves, and "rectify" them.

"There must not be even a single error on the Wall," the ministry said in a statement to Yonhap.

The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953. More than 6 million American men and women served alongside South Korean forces during the conflict, according to US government data.