Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  The Imjin! The name seems appropriately redolent of the Dakotas, of Custer, of cavalry charges and stockades and embattlements a hundred years ago, when the warriors were the Sioux and the Apache and the uniformed forces ordered down from Washington. And just as the Dakotas have recovered physically from those times but have never allowed them to be forgotten, so this countryside in Korea has sprung back too, as countryside always does, from the immediate physical horrors of conflict. Except that here, as I walked down towards the infamous stream, it was dismaying to see that man had planted more than his customary share of memorials, since this war had only been halted in its tracks and was still always on the verge of being fought again. The peace that bathed the Imjin Valley today could be broken in an instant, in a way that it never can be again ten thousand miles away on the high plains of America.

  I rounded a bend, passing beneath another bridge barrier, its giant building bricks looking as though they might topple and flatten me at any instant. And then, just ahead, was a glitter of parked cars and a long, low building festooned with flags and surrounded by monuments and, I could see as I came closer, khaki-coloured tanks and half-tracks and spiked guns. This was the Imjingak Museum—the most northerly point on Route I that ordinary South Koreans are permitted to visit. The place is dominated by a huge permanent exhibition of the follies of war, and each day—as on this Friday lunchtime—it is crammed with bus-hauled visitors chattering with rapt fascination as they are led from picture to picture, from tank to howitzer, from atrocity to atrocity, to be reminded yet again of the war that has resulted in what seems the permanent division of their peninsular country. From time to time a distinguished visitor passes through Imjingak and changes cars, and the crowds have more to gawk at than usual: this morning a South Korean general was due to come on up to the Line for a meeting with an American colleague, and a caravan of long black cars swished into the bus parking lot, and heavily armed soldiers and aides with walkie-talkies conferred as jeeps manoeuvred alongside them, and a small, fattish man in uniform, wearing dark glasses, was helped from the deep leather of the Lincoln on to the more austere vinyl of the Willys. A gold-braided South Korean national flag, with its colourful taeguk emblem, was raised on the jeep’s wing, the outriders’ visors were snapped down, powerful motors were gunned, and the new convoy sped away, and Army drivers parked the empty limousines under a shade tree and waited for orders, while curious children examined the paintwork and grinned at themselves in the gleaming chrome.

  Billy Fullerton was waiting with my rations, which I fell upon with glee—I hadn’t eaten breakfast back at Kumchon, and had been walking fast for the last three hours. And then here was a new man, a tall, kindly looking American lieutenant wearing the shoulder patches of an elite corps of foot soldiers. ‘Hi, sir,’ he said, stepping forward briskly and giving a half-salute. ‘I’m Lieutenant John Wiegand, first of the five-oh-sixth. Glad to meet you, sir. Well done. I’m your military escort for the last miles. Shall we get going? We’ve a fair way to march.’ He had an automatic pistol in a holster, and canvas walking boots, and he looked very fit. I collected my pack and my shepherd’s stick and marched smartly past the parked limousines and the coaches filling up or disgorging their charges, and came to the sentry box at the left bank of the Imjin and the southern end of the Freedom Bridge.

  ‘Stand Alone—Suh!’ screamed two voices in near unison, and the two American sentries shouldered their automatic rifles and slapped their hands across the magazines, making as much clatter and noise as they could. John returned the salute with equal vigour. ‘Rock Steady, Men!’ he shouted, and we stepped beneath the steady gaze of the soldiers and onto the wooden planking of the rickety structure. ‘Sorry about the display,’ John said, once we were out of earshot. ‘But that’s the way we do things up here. It keeps the morale up, they say. These cute little exchanges between officers and men remind everyone why we’re here. We used to have a little routine going where the soldiers would say “One Man, Sir!” and we’d return the salute by shouting “One Bullet, Men!” and everyone would get the message about economy with ammunition, and of effectiveness of fire. Nowadays we stress the simple importance of being up here, close to the Communists. We say “Keep up the Fire, Men!” or “In Front of Them All, Men!” They like it. It makes them feel good. And up here there’s little enough opportunity for feeling good—especially in the winter.’

  Freedom Bridge is the one surviving link across the lower Imjin, the shattered stumps of the other (both were railway bridges, with the rail lines meeting at Munsan Junction) lying a hundred yards upstream, the brown waters of the flood swirling around them. The railway has gone from the surviving bridge, too, and now only a single line of road traffic—military vehicles or official cars granted permission by the UN authorities—bumps across the old planks, with American sentries at each end ordering southbound traffic to halt until the northbound convoys have cleared, and then vice versa. The bridge is in terrible condition, with dozens of holes gouged by armour-piercing gunfire, which remain unrepaired; when heavy trucks grind past the entire structure wheezes and groans.

  But its symbolism alone is important enough to ensure its survival, just as it is. This, after all, is the bridge across which, once the armistice had been signed in 1953, thousands of prisoners were repatriated from Communist hands. They came streaming down from Panmunjom and from the tiny circle of noman’s-land where they had been checked and examined by the neutral inspectors; they had marched or been carried on litters down Liberty Lane, and they had arrived at Freedom Bridge and crossed the Imjin to the tent city known as Freedom Village. After all they had gone through, one can almost forgive the sentimentality.

  The lieutenant and I marched steadily northward, up the other side of the valley. Billy Fullerton, who would be the first to admit that he is not a slender man, puffed and panted along behind us. His driver brought up the rear in the car. It was very hot, and we all had rivulets of sweat coursing down our faces. With the soldier as my pacemaker I was going a great deal faster than normal, and the miles slipped away easily. The countryside rose and fell, fire bases and battalion headquarters and ready rooms and forward-fire directorates appeared on the horizon, then came abeam, and fell away behind us. Finally, after about two hours of steady progress, we came to the brow of another long slope, at the bottom of which was a massive fence, sentry post, and a collection of heavily armed soldiers. This was the southern edge of the Demilitarized Zone—the DMZ.

  The Korean Armistice Agreement—signed on 27 July 1953 in Kaesong by Marshal Kim II Sung, supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army and by Peng Teh Huai, commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, and in Munsan by General Mark Clark, the American commander of the UN Forces—is the document that effectively created the division of the Korean Peninsula into two violently opposed countries. No treaty, no concordat, no instrument of state recognized by the real world created a country called North Korea or fashioned this miracle state called South Korea. Article One of the armistice says it all:

  1. A Military Demarcation Line shall be fixed, and both sides shall withdraw two (2) kilometers from this line so as to establish a Demilitarized Zone between the opposing forces. A Demilitarized Zone shall be established as a buffer zone to prevent the occurrence of incidents which might lead to resumption of hostilities.

  2. The Military Demarcation Line is located as indicated on the attached map….

  And so it was—the line the two groups of forces were deemed by their respective commanders to have reached when fighting was brought to a close. To a great extent it matched the line drawn at the Cairo Conference of 1945, which drew an arbitrary line across a map of Korea—north of the line the Russians would accept the surrender of the Japanese, and south of the line the Americans would. The conferees stood in their hot Cairene hotel suite poring over a map of the Korean Peninsula. Rear Admiral Matthias Gardner, probably keen to get away for a glass of beer, pointed to the thirty-eighth degree of north lati
tude—the famous 38th Parallel—and said simply: ‘Why not put it there?’ And thus was the world’s most heavily defended borderline created, for when the fighting was ended and the armistice signed, the armies were found to have reached a new line that more or less matched Admiral Gardner’s parallel; it was a little to the south of it on the western side of the peninsula, a little to the north of it near the Sea of Japan. But essentially—and it remains one of the crueller ironies of a war that killed so many and maimed so many more, on both sides—the armies did not, in the end, either gain or lose any territory for their respective political masters. They ruined cities, they destroyed heritages, they ended and they broke hundreds of thousands of lives, but after three years of pounding and pillaging, the generals found themselves almost exactly where the admiral suggested they should be. They might as well have not fought at all.

  The southern border of the DMZ, then, is an impressive frontier indeed, though it is not, in law, a frontier at all. There is an immense fence topped with coils of razor wire. There are trip lines. There is more barbed wire, bundled into rusting piles. Small notices with death’s heads signal minefields two hundred yards deep. There are searchlights and ground sensors, sentry towers and constant patrols, and, ready to be rushed into action at a moment’s notice, massive pieces of artillery, guns of awesome power and accuracy.

  The soldiers checked our identities, and I was ordered to wear the sky blue armband identifying me as a noncombatant. I had to read and sign a piece of paper absolving the United Nations from any responsibility should I be subjected to hostile fire. And I had to promise that if I saw any Chinese or North Korean soldiers, I would make no gesture, no expression, no provocative act that might reasonably lead to a complaint or, worse still, to a retaliatory act. I read and signed and put on my armband. Soldiers saluted—‘Keep Up the Fire, Suh!’—and a white car with a UN flag fluttering from its roof moved into the lead. Three large American soldiers—two of them black—joined as escorts. We were now eight—two cars, one ahead, one behind; four soldiers; Billy Fullerton, still game but pursuing; and me. And on we marched, deeper and deeper into neutral territory.

  The DMZ is 151 miles long, stretching across the country like a scar. Almost no humans go there—there are no farmers (other than a few I shall mention in a moment), no towns, few soldiers (since the vast majority operate outside the DMZ). The consequence of this is a profusion of wildlife within the zone—wildlife that is untroubled by the threat of artillery that points menacingly in its direction, since it is wise enough not to understand the threat. So all manner of birds and beasts that have vanished from the more developed parts of Korea still live within the frontier fences. The Manchurian crane, Grus japonensis, a redcapped, black-wing-tipped bird of wonderful magnificence, still struts its stuff among the sedges of the DMZ; the Korean wildcat prowls beneath the arc lights; the little Korean bears—Ursus thibetanus ussurious heuda—that have a white stripe down their black furry backs can also be seen grubbing for food at the edge of the minefields. It is an ironic counterpoint to the awfulness of war that so much that is beautiful and rare flourishes where the human anger is greatest, and yet in those places where peace has translated into commerce, so much loveliness has vanished clear away.

  A bus hurtled down the road towards us, swerving to avoid our scout car, and there was some good-natured fist-waving. ‘The damned Czechs,’ said the lieutenant, with a grin. ‘Off to go shopping in Seoul.’ There are representatives from four neutral nations up by the borderline—the Swiss and the Swedes on the southern side, the Poles and the Czechs to the north—and while for some unaccountable reason very few Swedes appear to want to go trawling through the bazaars of Pyongyang for bargains, the Poles and the Czechs make weekend expeditions to the South (as they are permitted to do under the terms of the armistice) to savour some of the delights of capitalism. ‘But see how they’re all in civvies,’ said Wiegand. ‘The North Koreans take a very dim view of their neutral nations people going down in uniform. Great loss of face all round, it seems.’

  And then, around another corner, we came to a dirt road that led to a village half a mile away on a hilltop. It was a place called Taesong-dong, or ‘Attaining Success Village’ some Americans like to call it ‘Democracy Village’. The men and women who live and work there are paid by the government to do so. They all wear yellow hats to identify them to soldiers. Their town is dominated by a gigantic flagpole, which looks like the Eiffel Tower and on top of which, hundreds of feet above us, cracked and whipped a mighty edition of the taeguk-ki, the national flag. It is a show village, designed principally to display to the North Koreans that a full and productive life can be lived under the eccentric ways of near-beer democracy.

  The North Koreans pay no heed. They have an identical village on the other side of the line—the Americans like to call it ‘Propaganda Village’, and they make much of the fact that at night it seems empty, as though workers only toil there during the day. It too has a flagpole, and it is the first real glimpse of North Korea I had, even though I had been aware for some miles that the distant blue hills were in another world, a world as unattainable just now as were the stars. But here, not more than a mile in front of me, was the reality of North Korea—a mirror of the reality of the South—a flagpole.

  ‘See the flag on top of that?’ said one of my soldier-escorts and pointed to the blue and red-starred monster swinging heavily in the stiff breeze. ‘They say it weighs nearly half a ton. Know what? You get that son of a bitch down and down to the Blue House and over to President Chun, and you’ll get a million dollars just like that. That’s what they tell us. No one’s been crazy enough to try. But just give it some time.’

  The breeze was still coming from the north, and wafting on it, distinct at most times, were martial tunes and the harsh, doglike barking of a North Korean propagandist in full spate. ‘It goes on all day and often all night,’ said the lieutenant. ‘That’s the price those suckers pay for living in Taesong-dong. They have to listen to that garbage all the time. It gets real loud at times, when the wind’s in the right quarter.’ And just as he said that, there came a gust of wind, and the sound blasted loudly, like a trumpet. But the yellow-capped workers in the rice fields didn’t react at all. They had heard it all too many times before.

  And now the end was but a few hundred yards away. We were nearly a mile inside the DMZ and were reaching the tiny island of neutrality that has long gone by the name of the village that—before the tank fire destroyed it utterly—once used to stand there. It was called Panmunjom, and by all accounts it was a miserably unspectacular hamlet, all thatch and kimchi jars and rice paddies, much the same in aspect and in the daily lives of its fifty or so inhabitants as any other farm village in the province of Kyonggi-do. But all had changed since the war, and where the haetaes might once have stood there was instead another guard post, and a UN soldier, and although the shorthand word Panmunjom is indeed used for this strange place, its official title is now the JSA—the Joint Security Area.

  It is a rough circle, half a mile across, and it straddles the Demarcation Line. It is very heavily guarded—and on the Southern side there are barracks from where American troops, kept ever ready, their guns loaded and cocked, can pour into the neutral circle in a matter of seconds in case of trouble. The soldiers designated for duty in the JSA are all mighty specimens—none shorter than five feet ten, most of them well over six feet four—so that they tower above their North Korean colleagues (if ‘colleague’ is the most appropriate way to describe the participants in this most curious of charades). Six of them detached themselves from various duties and walked beside me, with a large black sergeant in command. He greeted me expansively: he had been based in England once and knew the English liked walking. ‘Wish I could have done it all with you, sir,’ he said.

  On the southern side of the line, inside the Panmunjom circle, are barracks and support buildings and a tall and vulgarly ornate viewing stand, modelled on those from which co
ntemplative Buddhists might watch the rising moon or the stars. I clambered up the marble stairs and looked down on the strange assemblage of buildings below—and for my first view of a real, live North Korean.

  There were in fact half a dozen of them, all on their side of a white-painted line that ran along the ground and then passed transversely through the long, warehouselike shed in which the truce talks stagger on, week after week after week. Each man wore a green drab uniform and one of those red-brimmed hats with unnaturally wide brims that seem to be favoured by those who go soldiering for the Communist bloc. Each man wore a bright yellow armband, and a couple carried field glasses. They all looked profoundly uninterested in whatever their function was, except that as I watched one lazily raised a camera and pointed it at me and shot a couple of frames, for the record. He looked bored and not at all impressed by what he had seen.

  I came down from the platform and ventured closer to the line, peering in through the windows at the infamous baize-topped table where the talks have stuttered on and off and where, it must be said, some measure of peace has been preserved across this most fragile of frontiers. The American soldiers began to shuffle uneasily at my wanderings, and a couple of them began to walk briskly towards me. There was a North Korean just a few feet away now—a man who looked no different at all, aside from his ill-tailored uniform coat, from all the soldiers I had seen in the three hundred miles behind me. Suddenly he smiled at me. I nearly jumped. I grinned back and said ‘Annyong-haseyo’, and he tipped his head towards me.