Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  Since 1973 the most effective counter to this particular threat has been to place American forces, in very considerable numbers, in the area through which the North Koreans would have to advance—the area through which I was now walking. This would have a dual effect: first, it would bring the North Koreans into direct conflict with what the Pentagon regards as some of the best-trained and best-equipped fighting men it is possible to find—and the Communists might then lose the battle; and second, it would pit the North Koreans against the unique political disadvantage of doing battle with Washington. It is one thing, the argument goes, for the North Koreans to fight their Southern brothers, even if the Southern brothers are linked by treaty with a United States that is more than willing to help defend them; it is quite another for North Korea to take on the United States from the very start. Pyongyang, it is thought, would not wish to take the risk of a direct conflict with the United States—hence the decision to place American troops well forward, almost as pickets, tempting the Northerners into striking a blow, is also a carefully constructed way of warning them not to play with the kind of fire that battle with Washington would inevitably bring down on them. (It is said that the latest battle plan, should the presence of the American troops fail to deter a North Korean attack, requires the Southern forces to mount a major counterattack, crossing the DMZ and pouring deep into the North Korean heartland. Since a huge proportion of the Southern troops are well to the north of Seoul, the presence of dynamited bridges and collapsed river crossings would not present too much of a problem in logistics, since the barriers would all be well behind them.)

  The countryside around me had all the delicacy of an old watercolour—the blue sky lapped vaguely against the blue hills, a distant tracery of lime green poplars framed a rice paddy that glinted softly in the evening sun, the tractors purred distantly, there was a sweetish smell of woodsmoke in the air. But the place-names, the signboards, the half-hidden camps—all of these had the feel of war about them, a reminiscence of misery and glory and brief episodes of heroism. The sinuous strip of asphalt ahead of me was after all a classic Korean invasion route, a road that had been tramped or rumbled or fought along by Chinese and Mongols, and by the First and Second Corps of the North Korean Army just three decades before. Over the low ranges to my right—where road signs pointed to quiet market towns that had been terrible battlefields not so long ago—there were, I knew, two more valleys, near parallel, that made up the notorious Uijongbu Corridor, along which hundreds of tanks and infantrymen had swept on that bleakly wet summer Sunday in 1950 when, as one author put it, ‘the South Korean soldiers mistook the rumble of enemy artillery for the sound of thunder’.

  So all the names round here—Munsan, Komchon, Tongduchon, Pyokche—are to many Koreans (and to not a few Americans) redolent of gunsmoke and defeat, then victory and defeat again, and final stalemate. (Uijongbu means ‘the City of Ever Righteousness’, which some may find ironic.) ‘Down these roads came the North Korean 3rd and 4th Divisions,’ wrote Robert Leckie—one of the Civil War’s most recent historians—in The Korean War. ‘The 4th was on the west road [close to where I was now stepping out], the 3rd was on the east, and both were behind the bulk of the tanks of the 105th Armored Brigade. There was no stopping these armored columns, for there was nothing with which to stop them. The American 37 mm antitank guns were hardly better than pistols against the T-34s….’

  Today the preparations for war are more impressive, and they look more impressive too. No one, this time, is going to be caught napping. Up on the hills, above the canopies of the pine woods, radar dishes that point ever northward rock and turn rhythmically. Convoys of American Army trucks grumble along the road. Korean foot soldiers, their rifles tipped with bayonets, clamber over stiles on their way to patrol the fields. And every few miles there is a camp—usually American, with a prosaic name like Camp Smith or Camp Edwards—behind barbed wire entanglements and lines of arc lights. The sentry posts, the Quonset huts, the pay offices, the water towers, and all the other paraphernalia of a foreign base are familiar enough; they look less threatening, being merely the conventional aspect of the new American colonialism, if you like, that you see in Turkey or the Philippines or in East Anglia. But then, at the far end of each camp, is the vehicle park—and that invariably looks very threatening indeed. Up here, so very close to the Zone, the parks are jammed solid with camouflage-painted, net-shrouded battle tanks and howitzers and armoured personnel carriers, jeeps, scout vehicles, machine gun platforms, field ambulances, ammunition trucks, mine scourers, bridge layers, mobile mortars—a concentration of battlefield equipment for a great field army, ready and waiting in its lair to fan out and deal death to the enemy or, in the case of the ambulances, to deal with the death and the dying of its own.

  I seemed always to feel a tingle and a chill of apprehension creeping along my spine as I walked past these camps; and the camp fences were very long, and so my walks under the great grooved barrels of the howitzers and the siege cannons took time—too much time for comfort. I think I felt much as I remember feeling when I saw my first IRA man holding his smoking rifle in a Belfast slum street years ago. To read about such people, or even to see them on film, manages to be not at all chilling. Print or celluloid, however graphic, can be a neutralizing medium. But to see a gun in the hands of an angry man—or to see, as on this day, hundreds of mighty weapons in the hands of ever-watchful and ever-fearful guards—that was a frightening thing. I was glad each time to walk away free of the wire fences, to get away from the malevolent presence of the guns, and back to the colour-washed quietude of the Korean pastoral.

  I made the dirty little village of Kumchon by twilight and found a yogwan where a matronly concierge gave me a room with a Western-style bed. She had hung up a poster of a naked girl, who peered coquettishly down at me, and the matron stood in the doorway pointing at the girl and then at me, and looked enquiringly. I muttered something about having a bath and began to ease off my socks, and she retired to her room muttering, and I could hear her switch on the television. I sat in the little bath—Korean baths, when you find such things, are engineered for tiny people who sit bolt upright, and they are not kind to those of us longer creatures who like to languish in the foam—and I felt a little depressed: there were only twenty miles to go now, and I was coming to the end of a journey that I wished could go on forever. Why couldn’t I carry on across the borderline? Why could I not, as I had originally wanted, walk to Pyongyang, or indeed right up to the banks of the Yalu River? Wretched politicians! I cursed, and lathered myself furiously.

  But an hour later, cleansed and refreshed and my feet powdered and dried, and wearing the last fresh shirt I could find in the bottom of my bag, the gloom had lifted. I called a friend in Seoul, a pretty interpreter called Choon-sil whom I had tried to find while I had been walking through the city, but without any luck. This time she answered the phone and seemed instantly excited. ‘I have been so very sad,’ she said, without further explanation. And now I am a little drunken. But you not mind? I come to see you? In Kumchon—that’s only half an hour in the taxi.’ I was pleased, of course, though a mite offended by the casual way she had reminded me that a distance I had taken a day to walk took less than thirty minutes in a cab. But, then, all Korea would only take eight hours by car: I could be back in Mokpo by dawn, if I started now.

  Choon-sil was very ‘drunken’, as she would say, when she arrived. She had come home from work at six and had started on the beer—four cans, and another in the taxi on the way. She insisted on taking me to a café she knew well from her student days, and she swayed slightly as she walked.

  We sat in the candlelit gloom of this cavelike bar late into the night. The tables were worn sections of an old oak, the rings picked out by a decade of student ballpoints. The chairs were deal, the floor was warm stone. Each table seemed to be enveloped by low, rough walls, and all manner of intimacies were encouraged in the fuggy cosiness of the place. We ordered pindae-ttuk, a b
ig, steaming-hot bean-flour pancake, and endless bottles of beer. Rosa—her parents, devout Christians, had suggested the name to her when she was fifteen—was indeed very sad. She suffered the classic dilemma of so many intelligent Korean women—for intelligent she very much was, with a mind like a razor, a splendid facility for language, a wide assortment of clever, and foreign, friends. She was thirty-two, her teenage prettiness perhaps fading a little. Her parents had wanted her married, and she had duly gone to the matchmakers and seen what was on offer. But she had always made it clear that she would never warm to the idea of performing the kind of uxorial duties expected by a Korean husband. So she had turned all suitors down and opted for an independent life, teaching English, interpreting, doing research work for foreign visitors. She was much loved and admired, but she knew, as the years slid by, that she had a diminishing chance of marrying or bearing a child.

  A few months before she had met and fallen in love with a married man—the only kind of man, she had to acknowledge, who might yet marry her. And by what she regarded as great good fortune he was also, she felt, the sort of man who would regard her as a spiritual and intellectual equal: she would not have to follow meekly in his wake, as is the lot of most Korean wives. But her pleasant fantasies were not to be: a week before we met he had returned to his wife, and she was cast down into the deepest of glooms. ‘My only chance is with a yangnom,’ she said, forcing a smile. She was probably right. Marriage to a foreigner—however alien to her principles it might be to marry beyond her country-caste—would give her the freedom to travel (she had never been out of Korea, not ever would, she supposed) and a married life that promised her some form of equality.

  She stayed the night—she was far too drunk to go all the way back to Seoul, and besides, an American sentry at one of the pseudobridges had warned that the road was curfewed after midnight, and here it was, 12:45 A.M. So we weaved our way through a cold, spitting spring night, to the flickering lights of the Arirang yogwan. The matron was still awake, idly watching the television, and she poked her head around the door as we were removing our shoes. (There were a dozen pairs, and all, as is common in Korea, had their backs broken down—a conse quence of a system of politesse that requires the shoes to be taken off and put back on maybe twenty times a day. Cobblers, and shoe shops, make good money in Korea.)

  The concierge whispered a few words to Choon-sil, who promptly collapsed in a fit of drunken giggles, and I had to hush her and take her to the room and quieten her down. When she had caught her breath she explained: the old woman had remarked on how sad it would be for this nice room—Western bed, naked girl on the wall, deep bath, and so on—to be wasted on a man alone. So good, she said to Choon-sil, that someone was going to share. ‘Except,’ Choon-sil said, her voice slurred both with weariness and an excess of maekju, ‘that I go to sleep, right away.’ And she did just that, and she snored boldly for hours. When I woke at seven she had already gone, and there was a note in English, saying how sorry she was for her distemper, and how she wished me good fortune with my final few miles. She had to be in her office in Yoido at eight: given the rush hour she had to wake at six, and the concierge had duly obliged.

  I was up and on the road by nine. It was a brilliant Friday morning. The roadside grass was still damp from overnight rain, but the sky was now cloudless and clear, and a cool and quite stiff wind was blowing down from the north. Kumchon sits a half mile off the road, and I had to walk along a crowded spur road—a market was in full swing, and there were dogs and chickens and piles of vegetables on sale from a hundred tiny stalls—and cross the railway line—well fortified, with machine-gun emplacements beside it and another collapsing bridge—before I was back on the highway. I had been walking for ten minutes along Route I when I suddenly became aware that passing motorists were waving at me much more cheerily than ever they had done before. I realized what had happened. I must have been on television.

  The day before, when I had crossed the Han River, a small television team had been waiting for me. MBS, one of the two Korean networks, had heard that an Englishman was making a journey along the path taken by the sailors from the Sparrowhawk and had sent a crew out to find me. I had had some kind of warning the day I left Kunsan base, when one of the American airmen had reported hearing from a Korean news agency, who had been asking how to find me. He told them I had already left. The MBS people had missed me at Chonan and missed me again at Anyang; they therefore laid an ambush on the south side of the Mapo Bridge, and I walked straight into it.

  The interview was short and much as I had feared. Koreans are properly proud of their country, or they are in public, at least, even if a lack of confidence, and self-pity, and deep and inconsolable melancholy sometimes seem to be the national malaise—and while they find foreign attention flattering, they regard themselves as eminently deserving of it. So there is—I had been warned—a touch of condescension about their response to anyone who takes an interest in them—much as there is in Japan. And so the interviewer asked me to speak in Korean, not to laud my efforts with the language but rather to show how badly a foreigner speaks so complicated a language. Then again, I was asked to sing a Korean song—to demonstrate how difficult it was for anyone other than a son of Choson to tackle the mournful rhythms of the local music. No one in the interview had wanted me to lose face; it wasn’t as crude as that. But I was expected to offer a display that would reassure the viewers of their unassailable superiority in all things I might attempt—and I, having been told exactly what to do, wasn’t going to disappoint them. The television people knew what they wanted, and I think they knew that I knew what they wanted—so everything was conducted in good spirits, and the results, I thought, were probably usable. They apparently were. It turned out the network had used seven minutes of the interview on the MBS breakfast programme that morning—yes, Korea has breakfast-time television—and all the drivers who hooted and waved (and the few who stopped to shake my hand) had evidently watched as they took their morning kimchi and their soup and rice and cold barley tea. I had to realize that I had become, over these past three hundred miles, a small celebrity.

  The plan for the final few miles had had to be agreed on in Seoul with the commander of the UN garrison. To walk right up to the frontier, to the strange border-that-is-not-a-border that is formally known as the Military Demarcation Line, requires special permission. Military escorts are needed. Sentries need to be forewarned. One of the North Korean duty officers is told, out of politeness, and to head off any possibility of trouble that might stem from so unexpected an arrival in the sensitive area. And so that everything is expected—and because soldiers run the final miles—a timetable has to be agreed on. I had thus promised to be at the southern end of Freedom Bridge over the Imjin River at noon precisely. Provided I did that, the officer had told me over the phone a few days before, everything should go like clockwork.

  At eleven I was striding past yet another sprawling military base at the city of Munsan. A band was playing, its sousaphones and serpents gleaming in the steady sunshine. Two hundred soldiers in gleaming ceremonial helmets and white uniforms were wheeling and marching and countermarching on the parade ground. My feet moved involuntarily to the infantry pace, and I was out of town in moments and back in open country once more.

  The railway line—the line that had been with me, on and off, ever since I left Mokpo more than a month before—passed across the road. But here it was rusty from disuse, and I saw that a few yards north of the road the rails had been taken up, and there was a pile of old sleepers and a small hill of sand, and the cutting that went under the old iron bridge was choked with grass and rosebay willow herb, and the bridge itself, still with its black stain of smoke, was thick with moss. This was the main line to Pyongyang—the line to Manchuria, to Mongolia, to Peking. It had been a busy line forty years ago, a trunk route, its timetables in Baedeker and the Cook’s Continental. But now it stopped dead a couple of miles south of the Imjin and ran into a pile of
old sand, and all because of the vagaries of politics, or ideology, and of war.

  Suddenly from behind, a toot on a car horn, and a cheerful shout. ‘Hey! You’re gonna make it, ol’ son! Keep goin’! Don’t stop!’ It was Billy Fullerton, a large, ebullient Texan who has worked in the information office at the Yongsan U.S. Army Base for the last twenty years and who has befriended and helped everyone and anyone who has ever been interested in the country that he has adopted as his second home. It was Billy who had persuaded the UN bosses to allow me to walk to the Line—‘Figured it’d be pointless you stopping at Seoul. You gotta go as far as you can git. They bought the argument in the end, but they weren’t eager, I can tell you’—and it was Billy who had arranged the necessary escorts and the blue armband that the North Koreans insisted that I wear whenever in their line of sight. His driver slowed to my speed, and Billy took my order. ‘Gotta eat when you get to the bridge. What’ll you have—chocolate, peanuts, ice cream? All on me. Glad to help.’ He was a blessing. I asked for a couple of cans of orange juice and a Hershey bar, and then he zoomed off ahead of me, promising to have them ready.

  Forty minutes later I came to the summit of a low rise and was looking down into the valley of the Imjin-gang. Here on the hill it was sunny, with the damp smell of balsam pines wafting from the thick woods beside me. Wildflowers grew in abundance. There were small houses with orange and bright blue roofs, and farmers were tilling their fields for the late spring crops. It had all been so different thirty years before: this small river valley, so savagely fought over for so long, by so many forces going so many different ways as the war ebbed and flowed, advanced and receded, had been utterly torn and bombarded to shreds. Twisted metal, huge artillery holes, discarded equipment, stranded tanks, spent shell cases, ruined houses, and legions of dead and maimed men—the valley had been littered with them all, whether they had been covered by snow, half sunk in yellow mud, or baked in the summer sun.