"In Front of Them All"

Our civilian tour guide told us that he was not so sure whether or not we would make it back to Seoul alive.

Welcome to the DMZ: one of the most trigger-itchy places on the earth. Trigger-itchy because there aren't any gunshots flying around, but I'll bet that Lil' Kim is hankering for a reason to attack Seoul. Why else were there 4 tunnels discovered by the South Koreans, dug by the North Koreans and covered in black paint to look like a coal mine?

I'll get to the tunnel in a minute.

Everyone in the bus chuckled, as we went through our two military checkpoints, but I couldn't help but be a wee bit wary; if one thinks about it, this will probably be the closest ever (God-willing as the saying goes) that I will be in a "war zone." There was only an armistice signed at the end of the Korean War so technically, SK and NK are still at war and the DMZ was created as a buffer. Doesn't mean that "incidents" don't occur. The last one was in 1984, when a Capt. Boniface (the man that Camp Boniface, the American base just outside the DMZ and the point where we had United States MPs join us with the stern "Do NOT point, gesture, talk, ANYTHING to the North Koreans.") wanted to cut down a large yew tree that was blocking Guard Station 4 on the American/SK side of the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) and the "Bridge of No Return." They were accompanied both by SK and NK military peeps, but in the middle of the tree cutting, the NK army lashed out with an axe attack, killing Boniface and another American high-ranking officer. There is a memorial where the tree once stood, with a circular stone base of about 3 feet in diameter, indicating how large the tree was.

Now to the Bridge of No Return. In the 1970s, SK and NK exhanged POWs at this bridge. The POWs had the option of defecting and staying in the country that they were a POW in, or going back home. However, once you step onto that bridge, you can't go back. Hence the name.

Allow me to backtrack a bit. During the many "briefings" that we tourists (of all the places to make a tourist attraction, really!) one of the things I liked was the slogan that the Americans use in the DMZ/Camp Boniface/Joint Security Area (JSA)-Pan Mun Jom (too many names, IMO) was that they are "In Front of Them All" - "them" being the North Koreans and the very high possibilty of enemy attack right under their nose.

I emphasize - right under their bloody noses. The MDL which divides the 4km wide DMZ runs right through the JSA, cutting buildings literally in half. At one point NK soldiers would literally just come up to the border and look right into the face of an SK soldier. These guys (SK soldiers) are INTIMIDATING from here to kingdom come. They stand in the UN building that is used for "talks" between NK and SK and outside on the SK side of the MDL - in order to be considered for a post in the DMZ, they have to have at least 1st-degree black belt tae kwon do. When I stood back in the single file line to go back into the main building on the SK side, I turned around to get one more look at the room. This guy turned his head in my direction, slowly, and so smoothly it was robot-like I think I muttered an "eep!" and turned back around quickly.

An interesting thing about the UN building that we were in was that it straddled the MDL. So when I crossed to the other side of the building, I was technically in North Korea. Hello, Kim Jung-Il. One interesting factoid that I learned: some of the roadsigns in NK that indicate how many kilometers to your destination don't inidcate how many kilometers to the DMZ (and effectively, the end of NK) - they indicate how many kilometers to Seoul. Creepy stuff.

After the 1 hour tour in the JSA, lunch and another briefing, we headed to the "3rd Tunnel." In the 1970s, SK discovered that NK was building tunnels to prepare for an invasion of Seoul and SK, like I said. Now, we can walk 73m below ground and go into the tunnel for ourselves. As with most places on the DMZ tour, we couldn't take pictures; the MPs and our civilian guide told us when and when not to. We had to wear hardhats in the tunnel - it sort of reminded me of the Caves of Diro near Sparta, where I with my mom and sister rode a boat propelled only by a stick a la Venetian gondolier, with the boatman pushing off the walls or the ceilings. Good thing I did wear a helmet - the ceiling was low, and I am tall so my head actually got knocked about and very far back a few times. It didn't hurt, it was rather the shock of it.

So at the end of the day, and with my trip to the War Museum the day before, I was quite Korean War-ed out, and filled with enough military shorthand and acronyms to maybe give Cat a run for her money - a quick summary of the trip:

"When I went to the DMZ, I visited the JSA and crossed the MDL in a UN building under the eye of a ROK soldier and an MP."