Korean War gets a memorial in the Presidio at last

Just over 63 years after a cease-fire ended the bitter and bloody Korean War, veterans finally got a memorial in San Francisco on Monday to remember a conflict that many Americans call the forgotten war. The new memorial is a long, curving piece of granite in the Presidio with pictures and plaques to recall a war that lasted three years and cost more than 37,000 American dead and many thousands more Korean and Chinese lives. “It was a war that had to be fought, and I was proud to have fought in it,” said Paul “Pete” McCloskey, a former San Mateo and Santa Clara county congressman who was a Marine lieutenant in a rifle company. American, Korean and United Nations flags snapped in the breeze behind him as he spoke from a podium at the Presidio National Cemetery. McCloskey was wounded in the war and was awarded the Navy Cross and two Purple Heart medals. The war was unpopular in the United States and ended in a stalemate, with Korea still divided between a democratic south and North Korea ruled by a communist dictatorship. “I remember a fight in October 1952,” said Marvin Pheffer, who was a private in a Marine rifle platoon. Kim Jung-Boon, South Korea’s vice minister of veterans affairs, said the war devastated South Korea. John Stevens, who was one of the main organizers of the Korean War Memorial project, served with the Marine Provisional Brigade at a time when the American and South Korean forces were pushed back into a small area around the port of Pusan. The Korean War Memorial Foundation, a veterans group, raised about $4 million to plan and build the monument, including $400,000 for long-term maintenance. About $2 million came from Korean War vets, $1 million from the South Korean government, and the rest from Korean and Korean American donors, said Gerard Parker, the foundation’s executive director.