Korean War dead memorialized on the Web
The message was simple: Write a letter to someone lost in the Korean War. Within a day, responses started pouring in for the latest effort by brothers Hal and Ted Barker to remember the war their father didn’t like to discuss. In the three weeks since their plea went out, more than 500 letters and e-mails have arrived — from daughters who lost their fathers to veterans who lost friends to schoolchildren thanking those who died for their freedom.

I was going to add this article as a one-line entry in the DPRK News roundup later today, but on visiting the site I came across this notice:

Korean War Project Closing!!
October 25, 2006
Financial support for the Korean War Project has virtually stopped…

More, and an update, after the jump…

With Veterans Day just past us and the Thanksgiving season coming soon, I think it’s worth asking our readers to take a few minutes to visit the Korean War Project. Read the letters there thanking the men who died to preserve freedom in South Korea and allowed it to become the vibrant nation it is today - in stark contrast to the daily reminder of “what might have been” that lies on the dark side of the DMZ. Judge for yourselves whether it is worth a few dollars to keep this memorial alive and online.

UPDATE
I contacted Ted Barker about the future of their project. His response:

If you did a Google, Dogpile or Yahoo search, the results over the past couple days are staggering. Guess the wire story came out in the twixt of any other news. Got hundreds of radio, TV and media websites since the 10th.

Our predicament is nothing new, been a week to week struggle for the nonprofit since inception. But, the work is compelling. We just have never had the clout to get the “White Knight” needed. Our original seed grant came from the Chicago Tribune Foundation, spearheaded by Charles Brumback, the CEO at the time.

Charley was an FO with the 37th Field Artillery Bn in Korea, interesting back story on how we got together.

Bottom line for us, never had a budget to operate from so we had to learn all the programming skills and between the two of us do everything. At least we don’t have dishes to wash.

We run 6 machines across a local server farm on Server 2003, using Cold Fusion for our GUI and NetObjects. That makes life much easier than hiring top dollar programmers.

The good news is that a book is looming from the Letters to the Lost. They keep coming in from USPS and email attachment. Many from complete strangers and many from long time pen pals.

Time will tell.

Ted