South Korea, alongside a U.S. nonprofit foundation, unveiled a 1950-53 Korean War memorial to the public in San Francisco on Monday to honor U.S. soldiers who boarded ships to fight to defend freedom on the Korean Peninsula more than six decades ago.

The Korean War Memorial Foundation, established to build the memorial in the U.S. city for Korean War veterans, opened the memorial, a 3-meter-high black granite wall, in the Presidio of San Francisco, near the entrance to the San Francisco National Cemetery.

Monday's erection of the memorial in the city, which served as the embarkation point for many U.S. service members headed overseas to fight, came 66 years after U.S. soldiers departed the west coastal city for the Korean Peninsula to take part in the three-year conflict.

Prior to the unveiling of the memorial, the foundation held a ceremony at the national cemetery to mark the inauguration of the memorial, which faces south in the direction of South Korea and carries the engraved words on the war's progress and achievements of felled U.S. soldiers.

Among the 300 participants to the ceremony were retired Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp, chief of the foundation's board; South Korean Ambassador to the United States Ahn Ho-young; former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Kathleen Stephens; U.S. Congressman Mike Honda; and former U.S. Congressman Paul McCloskey.
During the ceremony, McCloskey, who fought in the war as a U.S. Marine officer, said, “It was a war that had to be fought, and I was proud to have fought in it.”

The South Korean envoy recalled the sacrifices that U.S. soldiers made in the war, which is often called the forgotten war, saying, "Americans came to fight for a country they never knew, for a people they never met."

 Korean-American residents, Korean War veterans and various companies provided a combined 2.8 billion won ($2.5 million) and the ministry provided another 1.1 billion won to build the first Korean War memorial in the western part of the United States.

The U.S. led the 21-nation Allied Forces to help South Korea repel the Chinese-backed communist troops invading from the North.

Nearly 38,000 U.N. troops, most of them from the U.S., were killed in action during the conflict.

The war ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, leaving the divided peninsula still technically at war. (Yonhap)