Pacific Rim: off and running

National Review, August 17, 1992 by Priscilla L. Buckley, William F. Buckley, Jr.

The first sign that we are approaching the DMZ is an isolated group of barracks on a hillside and the laconic notice: "506th Infantry Stands Alone." Colonel Thomas Turner, commander of U.S. forces in the DMZ, greets us at the Monastery Visiting Center, which sells refreshments and souvenirs to the 100,000 tourists who visit the DMZ each year. He commands 400 troops--60 per cent American, 40 per cent Korean--and 220 civilians. His troops face a million-man army, 80 per cent of which is deployed dose to the DMZ.

We are turned over to Specialist Sadler, who rattles off his presentation with no-nonsense precision, and then, after a quick lunch at the canteen, we are taken to the MDL, the Military Demarcation Line. We drive up to it preceded by armed soldiers in a Humvee--which has replaced the Jeep as the Army's utility vehicle--past a landscaped sunken garden over which a pitched battle was fought not so long ago. In November 1984, a Soviet defector, breaking away from a North Korean visiting group, crossed into the South Korean section of the DMZ pursued by North Korean guards, their guns blazing. They were driven back with a number of casualties, and the Soviet defector saved.

Beyond the sunken garden we come to the quonset hut in which the Military Armistice Commission (MAC) has held periodic meetings since 1953. Beyond it on a hill is an imposing North Korean building of vaguely Palladian architecture, which we are told was built solely to impress: it is only 18 feet deep. Specialist Sadler tells us to enter the MAC hut single file and not to speak as we enter, and to form a horseshoe circle around the table in the center of the room. On either side of the table four open mikes hang from the ceiling, live 24 hours a day so that both sides can hear what is going on. An electric cable runs down the center of the table. This is the demarcation line. Bill Buckley asks Sadler a question, and the young soldier, so serious up to this point, replies: "You have lost the moral high ground, Mr. Buckley. You are standing in North Korea."

Once back outside we climb to the roof of a nearby building and look across the valley at the North Korean village the troops call Propaganda Village--from which Communist loudspeakers blare out music and propaganda night and day, occasionally addressing a soldier by name, Tokyo-Rose-like--and at the "bridge of no return."

It was over this narrow, low-slung span that the POWs of the Korean War, North and South, crossed in the repatriation that followed the armistice. There is no monument here, though there should be, to South Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee. Kim Il-sung had insisted that there would be no armistice unless all North Korean prisoners--like it or not--were returned to him, and the allied authorities, anxious to end the war, were preparing for a Far Eastern version of Operation Keelhaul. But Rhee settled the matter, unilaterally: one fine night he ordered his men to open up the prison cages and allow those North Koreans who wanted freedom to take off.