Home » Travel » Seoul » What the DMZ meant to me (part 1 of 3)

What the DMZ meant to me (part 1 of 3)

© Athan Rodostianos

The little powder blue building felt good against my back as my fingers deftly danced over the Zippo. It came to life, the cigarette lit, I closed my eyes, inhaled the sweet smoke deeply, and reflected.

My mind gently drifted back to April of 1998. Back to a traveler's meeting with a German trekker in a little bakery cum coffee shop in Namche Bazaar, Nepal. It was then that I swapped a quite forgettable, heavily dog eared paperback for a copy of a book by William H. Vatcher Jr. titled PANMUNJOM.

The book was tired. Forty years of existence must have seen it pass through countless pairs of hands, and perhaps, through just as many airports. Its labored account of the Korean War Armistice negotiations droned on and on, yet something lived. I had been captured by an intrigue; disbelief that humanity could be so stupid as the book accounted.

Two hours earlier our tour bus crossed into the Military Exclusion Zone on the forty kilometer journey from Seoul. Since that moment the words of the book took on an overwhelming material form. In its place of genesis the volume came to life.

The tank traps, guns, countless barriers, bunkers, security checks, helicopters, signed minefields, rigid instructions and warnings, UN and Communist Guards and masses of barb fencing were real.

Korea was still at war, despite the opinion of some of the South's youth. This military milieu provided the perfect backdrop for the stories I had been told by those that knew. Stories of spies, infiltration, death, propaganda and covert actions. The Communists and the 'free world' still tussled, face to face, for keeps.

I had found my way to the "truce village" of Panmunjom, ironically on the same day that South and North Korea held the first joint meeting between their leaders since the war started 50 years ago.

Gone were the traditional thatched roof dwellings and neatly tended fields that I had seen in the U.S. military photo archives replaced by a number of gloating edifices, a row of nondescript huts, manicured lawns, paved roads and a collection of observation posts.

My powder blue brace, 'Checkpoint 3', perched atop a little hill overlooking North Korea, was the most famous of these posts.

Two kilometers either side of me razor wire topped chain link fences ran coast to coast. These defined the neutral 250 kilometer wide winding corridor, the landmine Elysium, that is the Demilitarized Zone, a buffer established as part of the Korean War truce to keep the two Koreas apart.