From A Korean War Stat Lingers Long After It Was Corrected:
A decade ago, the Department of Defense corrected an important point in U.S. military history: about 36,000 American soldiers died in the Korean War, not 54,000 as first thought. The revision was the result of new research, conducted at the request of veterans.Yet as the 55th anniversary of the war’s beginning approaches, the larger, incorrect figure can still be found in textbooks and newspapers, in recent speeches from lawmakers and on war memorials — demonstrating how bad statistics can linger after they’ve been corrected.
The 54,000 figure included all soldiers who died during the war, anywhere in the world, from any cause — including about 18,000 heart attacks, suicides, car accidents and other nonwar deaths during the war years. Some occurred thousands of miles from the theater of war. In the mid-1990s, the Department of Defense began to clarify the record, and that quiet change received widespread publicity in 2000, on the 50th anniversary of the war.