Dateline Panmunjom, South (and a Little North) Korea
As we filed into the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission building, our South Korean military minder told us
not to gesture at the North Korean soldiers gazing down on us from a building on the other side of the demarcation line.
I had come to the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the peninsula to report on Taesung, a tiny farming village inhabited by 197 civilians on the South Korean side of the DMZ
and from which we could look across a field and see North Korea.
But it was on a media tour of Panmunjom, the uninhabited village inside the DMZ where the 1953 armistice suspending the Korean War was signed,
that I got to step across the military demarcation line between the two countries and officially walk in North Korea for a few minutes.
He had surprised his security detail when he decided at the last minute to step up close — but not over — the demarcation line, telling The Washington Post
that he wanted the North Koreans to "see our resolve in my face," presumably alluding to the Trump administration’s vow to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
In keeping with that spirit, one of the public affairs specialists from the Combined Forces Command
that represents the United Nations and the United States military in South Korea whipped out Flat Stanley, a cutout figure of a character from a children’s book series.
It all seemed a bit detached from the geopolitical crisis, although I admit after we went back outside I felt a ripple of apprehension when North Korean guards came down a flight of stairs
and walked to the back of the building we had just been inside.
Meanwhile, two South Korean soldiers stood stiffly on the north end of the room, their arms bent at the elbows and their fists clenched.
