Qualla: Korean War Veterans Memorial

Korean War Veterans Memorial: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rdsmith4, CC BY-SA 2.5. Walk past the Lincoln Memorial on a damp morning and you can come upon them by surprise. Nineteen stainless steel figures, slightly larger than life, fanning out across a triangular field of granite and juniper. They are dressed in ponchos against weather you cannot see. They are moving forward, but warily - heads turned slightly, weapons at the ready, eyes scanning ground that does not exist. Sculptor Frank Gaylord posed them as a platoon on patrol through the kind of Korean terrain that the survivors would never quite stop walking through. To their right rises a wall of polished black granite, and there a strange thing happens: the wall mirrors the soldiers, and the mirror produces nineteen more. There are now thirty-eight figures in the field. The number is not an accident. The 38th parallel was the line that divided Korea. The war lasted thirty-eight months.

Image: Rdsmith4 | CC BY-SA 2.5

Korean War Veterans Memorial: The Forgotten War Remembered

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Goodtiming8871, CC BY-SA 4.0. Congress authorized the memorial through Public Law 99-572 on April 20, 1986 - more than three decades after the armistice that ended fighting on July 27, 1953. The design process was its own war. A team from Pennsylvania State University won the original competition, then withdr...

Image: Goodtiming8871 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Korean War Veterans Memorial: The Column

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gryffindor, Public domain. Frank Gaylord's nineteen steel figures, collectively titled The Column, weigh nearly a thousand pounds apiece and stand between seven feet tall. Fourteen are U.S. Army. Three are Marines. One is a Navy hospital corpsman. One is an Air Force forward air observer. They are dressed ...

Image: Gryffindor | Public domain

Korean War Veterans Memorial: The Mural Wall and the Reflection

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS Photo, Public domain. To one side of the field rises a wall 164 feet long and 8 inches thick - more than 100 tons of highly polished Academy Black granite quarried in California. Artist Louis Nelson sandblasted more than 2,500 archival photographs onto its surface: faces, equipment, ships, planes, sup...

Image: NPS Photo | Public domain

Korean War Veterans Memorial: Pool of Remembrance

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS Photo, Public domain. Beyond the field of soldiers, a 30-foot circular pool, lined in black granite, sits ringed by linden trees pruned into a barrel shape that lets sunlight reflect off the water. Three Rose of Sharon hibiscus bushes - the national flower of South Korea - bloom on the south side. Eng...

Image: NPS Photo | Public domain

Korean War Veterans Memorial: The Wall of Remembrance

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Kranewitter, CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades, the memorial had no names. The Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation lobbied Congress for years to change that - over the objections of the National Park Service, which worried about adding to the original design. In 2016, Congress passed the Korean War Veterans Me...

Image: Michael Kranewitter | CC BY-SA 3.0