Over the Border Line

I may have been living just a couple miles from the border between the two Koreas for the past 6 months, but it wasn't until last weekend when it actually hit me that HEY!! This border is a legitimately big deal!  Anne and I went on a tour of the Demilitarized Zone with the USO on Saturday morning and it was fascinating to be so vividly reminded that we are all so very close to what is still, technically, an area of serious conflict.  Serious conflict and serious acronym action.

A handy map.

The USO tour is definitely "the" definitive DMZ tour. There are lots of other tour companies that take visitors to certain areas around the DMZ for about half the price of the USO, but only the USO takes you inside the DMZ to the Joint Security Area (JSA) administered by the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission. To elaborate: the DMZ is actually a 4-kilometer-wide buffer zone that runs the length of the Korean peninsula between the ROK (the South) and the DPRK (the North).  The Military Demarcation Line, or MDL, is the actual, for-real "border" between the two countries, the line across which no person can venture, from either side, and which rests smack-dab in the middle of the DMZ.  This means both the ROK and DPRK have a buffer of 2 kilometers between their countries and the MDL and each of these buffer zones lie empty, devoid of all people save tourists and military personnel (with the exception of Freedom Village, which I'll get to later).  Since no other tour takes visitors inside the buffer zone and right up to the MDL, the USO was a no-brainer for two nerds like me and Anne  :)

Our US military guide, pre-briefing.

We got on a bus at the Yongsan base USO office in Seoul at 7.30 am (on a Saturday, bleeeeh). After a 60-minute drive to the border, we stopped at Camp Bonifas at the edge of the DMZ to receive our official briefing and sign liability waivers (naturally). The waivers were interesting because they had lots of edicts that we had to follow, like not communicating with or gesturing toward the DPRK soldiers. We learned that Bonifas was named after one of the US soldiers killed in the DMZ axe murder incident in the '70s which helped establish the MDL; before the incident, ROK and DPRK soldiers were all kind of mixed up within the Joint Security Area but ever since they have remained separated by the MDL. The briefing gave us some of the basic history of the DMZ and covered the few events (like the axe murder incident) that have caused actual fighting to break out inside the DMZ since it was established 57 years ago. After getting all our do's and don't's, we headed through the chain-link fence into the mine-ridden no-man's-land.  No photos were allowed to be taken from the bus until we got to the 'safe area' of the JSA.

Freedom House, on the South side of the JSA. Just on the other side of this building is the MDL.

Peace House, next to Freedom House, was built to serve as a venue where reunification talks can be held.  To date, the building has not been used.

This is Conference Road, behind Freedom House. Conference buildings for UN and military use sit on this road, literally right on top of the MDL (meaning the buildings technically rest half in the ROK and half in the DPRK). Across the way is Panmun Tower, the North's equivalent to Freedom House.

See that raised strip of cement running between the buildings? That marks the MDL, the true Korean border.

The blue buildings belong to the South, the silver ones to the North.

A closer shot of Panmum Tower. Yes, that North Korean soldier is watching us through binoculars.

Inside the blue UN Command Staff Conference Room, guarded by an ROK soldier. Those microphones on the table actually serve to delineate the MDL inside the room, so anyone you see standing on the right side of the table is technically standing in North Korea!

My turn to stand in North Korea (probably the only time I will ever do so).  The ROK soldier was blocking the door to the North in case any of us got any bright ideas. Seriously, these men are made of stone. They never move or breathe, they are adept at multiple forms of martial arts, they are truly hardcore. We were warned many times not to touch them if we wanted to keep our skulls intact.

After we left the JSA, we drove past a couple other points of interest that we weren't allowed to get close to:

From the observatory, the view of the flagpole at Freedom Village. Freedom Village is the only place of residence inside the DMZ. When the war ended, there was already a village located within the South side of the newly designated DMZ so the government allowed the residents to stay there, with conditions. Everyone who lives there is a direct descendant of the original village residents (or woman who married in from outside - no male outsiders), they are all farmers who must spend at least 240 nights per year in the village, they have a curfew of 10 pm after which they must be indoors, they pay no taxes to the Korean government and their men are exempt from the mandatory military service. Happening upon wayward mines while farming remains a distinct possibility. I wondered why anyone would choose to live there until I learned that the average Freedom Village farmer makes over $90,000 per year tax-free.

The best shot I could get on a moving bus of the North Korean Propaganda Village.  The DPRK allege that it's a legitimate village with people who actually live there, but the US has determined the buildings are hollow and the windows are painted on. The government used to blast North Korean propaganda from loudspeakers here to try and persuade South Koreans in Freedom Village to cross the border 'into paradise.' It's nearly impossible to see, but the really tall tower on the left side is the largest free-standing flagpole on Earth. After the ROK built its fairly huge flagpole in Freedom Village, the DPRK just had to one-up them. The North Korean flag at the top weighs 700 pounds!!!

The Bridge of No Return, so named because when the Korean War ended, citizens on both the north and south sides were given the chance to cross to the other side but once they did, they could never return. Apparently this was the scene of a James Bond movie once (filmed on a replica, obviously).

After our short bus tour of the inside of the DMZ, we went to the observatory from which we could look through binoculars at Propaganda Village and Freedom Village (I actually saw a few people moving around in Propaganda Village), and we also visited the 3rd Infiltration Tunnel.  You can see in the map at the top of this entry there are 4 tunnels marked along the length of the DMZ.  These tunnels were built by the North for the purpose of sending troops over in the case of an invasion; they are numbered in the order in which they were discovered by the US military.  The first 3 were all discovered in the late '70s/early '80s but the 4th was found in the mid-'90s and the US military believes there may be as many as ten more undiscovered tunnels up and down the DMZ. The US and ROK are constantly searching for new tunnels. The 3rd Tunnel is the one visited by all the tourists because it is the closest one to Seoul. It's actually pretty far underground; we had to walk quite a ways down to get to it, wearing our yellow hard hats since the roof is so low and of course made of rock. Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed in the tunnel. I'm not gonna lie and say it was exciting... it really was just a tunnel. Still, creepy to know that these things exist.

Our last stop of the day was the Dorasan train station, the last station in South Korea before the tracks lead into North Korea. Yes, there are actually train tracks between the two countries, but they are not being used currently. In the past, they have been used to carry humanitarian supplies across into the North.  In the future, they are intended to serve as the main thoroughfare between the two Korean capitals. The tracks already connect Dorasan to Seoul via a commuter train, and on the other side, the tracks continue on to Pyeongyang. Everything is set to go; all that's needed now is for the border to actually open.

The station is just as modern inside as anything else in the ROK. We were able to get special passport stamps here since this is technically a last point of departure from South Korea.

So weird to see a sign like this.

A very hopeful billboard. The distances on the sign within the sign say 56 km to Seoul and 205 km to Pyeongyang. It's crazy to think that such a short distance can separate two places that share a common people and yet remain worlds apart.

That last sign really drove home the ever-present sense of (cautious? naive?) optimism among Koreans that reunification is both desirable and imminent. It was interesting when our Korean tour guide asked a couple of German tourists in our group if she could talk to them about how their country reunified, considering the 20th anniversary of that event was just a few weeks ago. It almost made me sad that she was looking for answers in a comparison between the two, because really there can't be much of a comparison made between them at all. The situations are so very very different. If there are any lessons to be gleaned from Germany's example, it's to be prepared for what will inevitably come after: extreme economic inequalities and a burden on the more successful half of the country to prop up the failing half, something which will be even more pronounced in Korea than it was (and still is) in Germany.


Many Koreans believe, and honestly I do as well, that reunification is inevitable. It's going to happen. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when and how. I can't even imagine what will trigger such an event but I'm sure it will happen in a way no one can really predict. I just worry about the after-effects and I'm concerned for the Korean people because they really don't deserve the ridiculous hardships and societal upheaval they are most likely going to face as a result of it. Hearing the optimism from many Koreans can be almost painful sometimes because the realities of the world nearly dictate that it is not going to be all sunshine and rainbows. There's gonna be some hard, hard issues for them to deal with.


But these issues are indeed going to be for the Koreans to deal with. Not me, not an outsider. The thoughts pressing on my mind were more than a little exhausting and by and large unproductive. So I opted to forget about these troubles for the time being, with the help of my sole souvenir from the DMZ: a bottle of genuine North Korean soju.

23%. Here's to the night.