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By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Susan Burgess sometimes found herself in the attic with a family scrapbook and a child's curiosity. She wondered at the newspaper clippings about her Uncle Donald, an Air Force pilot who died in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Korea on a summer morning in 1951.
The family never learned the full story of Donald S. Sirman's death, never fully came to grips with the loss. The only remnant of him sent home was a small pocket Bible with Sirman's name on the front cover. ``He was the golden boy of the family,'' Ms. Burgess says, but she knew precious little about him.
Then last fall she discovered an Internet site called the Korean War Project.
``The Korean War Project put me in touch with people who helped me learn more about my Uncle Donald in a week than I knew in my entire lifetime,'' Ms. Burgess, 40, wrote in an e-mail response to an informal Associated Press survey of users of the Internet site, which gets about 1 million visitors a month. She described these revelations - including conversations with men who knew her uncle and remembered the Bible he had shared with fellow prisoners at great risk to himself - as ``one of the most remarkable events of my life.'' She also learned of the merciless marches to POW camps her uncle and other captives endured and details of his murder by a prison guard.
Ms. Burgess and a growing number of war veterans and their relatives are turning to the Internet as a way of rediscovering - and in some cases realizing for the first time - the meaning of the sacrifices made in combat, whether on the battlefields of Europe, Korea or Vietnam or in other lesser-known conflicts.
More than 33,000 American troops were killed in the three-year Korean War, which ended in 1953. Many fell in what is still communist North Korea, and about 8,000 men remain missing. The Korean War Project has created a human link to that traumatic, little understood period of Cold War history.
Ms. Burgess and untold numbers of other devotees of the Korean War Project are worried, however, that it may be forced offline for lack of financial support. The site's founders and sole operators, brothers Hal and Ted Barker of Dallas, say that after four years of sinking their own money into the Korean War Project, their self-described cyberspace obsession is on the brink of collapse.
``We just have to go back to making a living,'' Hal Barker, 51, said in an interview.
The Barker brothers' father, Edward L. Barker, of Crockett, Texas, was a Marine Corps helicopter pilot and Korean War hero. He was awarded a Silver Star for his role in a failed attempt to rescue a downed American airman in October 1951 on Heartbreak Ridge. The Korean War Project is dedicated to the memory of that lost airman, Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Arthur Donald DeLacy, of Chicago.
The Barkers have built an Internet resource that is a forum for communication among people interested in the war, but it also offers reference materials such as a database of men listed as killed in action and missing in action, and it is helping to fill gaps in official information about missing POWs.
The Korean War Project also has given veterans and their loved ones a renewed pride, a sense of value in the painful memories from their long-forgotten war, a conflict that took a terrible toll on this country.
George F. Drake, of Bellingham, Wash., says the Korean War Project is a labor of love for the Barker brothers and a virtual outlet for the long-buried emotions of veterans traumatized by the war.
``Their labor is of significance to veterans such as I who use the project to `go back' to Korea via their Web page and come out of it again a bit healthier for having had this contact with memories good or bad,'' wrote Drake, who served in a radio intelligence unit in Korea during the war's final two years.
Jan Curran, of Diamond Bar, Calif., was 3 years old when her father, Navy Lt. Charles Garrison, was shot down over North Korea in May 1951 and never heard from again. She used the Korean War Project to find the person who last saw ``Snapper'' Garrison alive in a prisoner-of-war camp. She has collected enough other information to hold out hope that his remains might be unearthed and returned home.
For Gail Morris, of San Anselmo, Calif., the Korean War Project brought a moment of exhilaration when she received an e-mail message from a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who had flown fighter missions with her father, Air Force Maj. Thomas Ellis Myers, and remembered poignant moments they had shared.
He told her, for example, of being with Myers when he received the announcement of Ms. Morris's birth. Five months later he was shot down in his F-80, captured and imprisoned. He never made it home and never saw his daughter.
``I can't tell you how happy I am'' to have learned details for the first time of his wartime experiences, she said in an interview. ``I had always had this cloud hanging over me, never knowing.''