State Funeral for War Veterans
Our mission:
"To convince Congress to pass legislation to grant a State Funeral for the last Medal of Honor recipients from the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as a final to salute to all the men and women who served."
COLONEL (RET.) RALPH PUCKETT JR.
Medal of Honor action: November 25-26, 1950, Hill 205, vicinity of Unsan, Korea.
3.5 million Americans fought in the Korean War. As of 2023 only one medal of honor recipient is still living. Col Ralph Puckett of Georgia. We are working hard everyday to convince congress to pass legislation to give this hero a state funeral in Washington D.C. A final salute to all who fought and served in the "forgotten" war. On May 21, 2021 President Joe Biden presented Col. Puckett with his medal of honor.
The Korean war began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s behalf. In July 1953, the Korean War came to an end.
After more than two years of negotiations, the adversaries signed an armistice on July 27, 1953. The agreement allowed the POWs to stay where they liked; drew a new boundary near the 38th parallel that gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square miles of territory; and created a 2-mile-wide “demilitarized zone” that still exists today.
Today, Korean War Veterans are remembered at the Korean War Veterans Memorial near the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a series of 19 steel statues of servicemen, and the Korean War memorial in Fullerton, California, the first on the West Coast to include the names of the more than 30,000 Americans who died in the war.
June 5, 2000, CBSNews.com - In the 1994 version of its annual publication, Service and Casualties in Major Wars and Conflicts, the Pentagon put Korean War battle deaths at 33,652 and "other deaths" meaning deaths in the war zone from illness, accidents and other non-battle causes at 3,262. That yields a total of 36,914. More than 100,000 were wounded.
Why, then, has the old figure of 54,000 deaths been used by the Department of Defense 50th Anniversary of the Korean War Commemorative Committee in a newsletter meant to highlight the war's history? Maj. Bob White, the committee's historian, said Monday he had been using the old 54,000 figure until he recently discovered that the Pentagon's casualty statistics had been revised several years ago.
The higher figure also is engraved on the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington apparently because the memorial's organizers wanted to honor all military members who died during the period of the war, not just those lost in Korea.