DMZ - There but for the grace of God go we

I usually don't sent these this close together, but I have some pictures I want to send about both of them...so here's a little about a trip I took last week...

 

I rode with my Korean friends the day before I went to see the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).  I debated whether I should tell them I was going.  It’s like going to see the country’s greatest scar, its greatest wound.  The chasm that tore apart friends and families.  The chasm that they blame partly on us.  I wonder what they think about Americans going to see it as tourists.

 

It occurs to me that we came close to having a DMZ.  We fought amongst ourselves once.  Other countries came in and helped us fight.  You could say history worked out for us, or you could say God saw fit to keep our nation together, in His plan to make it a great nation.  How much of history would have happened differently if we had been two separate countries since the mid 1800’s?  There but for the grace of God…

 

There is a huge difference between us and Korea, though.  We fought against ourselves of our own volition, over our own values.  Korea sees their division as caused by other countries’ wars on their soil.  The USSR, the US, Japan, China.  Their monuments at the edge of the 4000 meter-wide demilitarized zone are monuments to the hope of unification.  There is a stone etching for each province now engulfed by North Korea; for each province on the far side of the chain link fence, the concertina wire, the mine fields that stretch from coast to coast.  Every few meters a 1-meter-tall white post marks the border.  Rusty signs also depict the border, in Hangul and English on our side, and Hangul and Chinese on their side.  White rocks balance half way between each fence post on the barbed-wire-topped chain link fence that marks the edge of the DMZ.  In many places stacks of flat white rocks with a single red line painted down the stack balanced between chain links near the bottom of the fence.  The theory is that these stones will fall if anyone tries to cross the fence, and alert the ROK soldiers that monitor the border from concrete bunkers every hundred meters or so.

 

We took a bus up from Kunsan to Imjingak House, home of a Liberty Bell, an alter surrounded by stone etchings of the provinces now behind the barbed wire to the north, an amusement park, and a rail bridge over the river that forms the border for many miles, though not here.  From there we bussed further north to Camp Bonifas, named for a US Army Captain killed in an altercation over the pruning of a tree.  A memorial now stands on the spot.  The tree was removed, but not before the US put more fire power in the air and on aircraft carriers off the coast than had ever been used in support of any previous forestry operation. 

 

From Bonifas, we were bussed to Combined Security Area (CSA), past more checkpoints, past Freedom Village (a south Korea village of farmers working the land just south of the mines), past the mine field, past several observation points, and into the CSA.  Baby blue buildings belong the non-communist side and silver, to the communists.  Several buildings cross the line between North and South.  Including one we walked into, which has housed talks between countless dignitaries over the years.  Walking to the far end of the building, I crossed into North Korea.  Outside, a concrete slab not more than a foot wide stretched from building to building, marking the border.  South Korean soldiers stood at a ready position, half hidden behind buildings, keeping an eye on the “Freedom Building” in the North, with its partly open window rumored to house a man watching us with binoculars.

 

The next bus stop let us off at Checkpoint 6 in view of a North Korean checkpoint on the next hill, partly hidden in the overgrown brush.  At the edge of the clearing below the checkpoint, a rusty sign marked the Military Demarcation Line (MDL).  Further into the haze stood the flag pole in deserted Propaganda Village that holds one of the largest flags in the world.  It’s nearly 30 meters long and weighs almost 600 pounds.  Invisible through the thick air, the guide told us of a tower that scrambles any TV or radio signal before it reaches citizens of the north.  Below us, brush had grown too high to see the Bridge of No Return, so named for an incident in which prisoners were allowed to choose where they wanted to go, but forbidden to return to either side once they had crossed over.  Flocks of birds made themselves at home above an overgrown lake nearby, flying across the border uninhibited, oblivious to the laws of man.  What would it take for us humans to be as oblivious of demarcation lines, borders, and property lines as they?  To just live and let live and enjoy life?