The students have arrived in America, and I’m sure their consciousness will join them soon; it takes a while to recover from jet lag (about l day for each hour of change, and it’s about 11 hours difference here), but our last day in Korea was quite structured.
As I mentioned, we went to the DMZ, which is a somber reminder that the cold war is not quite over, and that North Korea can be a threat to peace in this area. On the way up (it’s probably less than 30 miles from Seoul to the border), there are increasing reminders that the area is on alert. There are reminders of the war monuments, trains that stopped in June 1950 with the invasion, tunnels marking efforts of the North Koreans to sabotage the peace, etc. Our goal was to visit Panmunjom, where neutral UN countries help the U.S. and
South Koreans keep the peace with the North Koreans. We were given our instructions to be somber, not provoke the North Koreans, don’t point or wave, don’t take pictures in certain areas, and the atmosphere is such that you don’t dare do so.
We stopped at one tunnel, which was kind of a propaganda against the North (you can see the northern aggressors did it because the dynamite holes are placed from the north, etc. My thought was that when Korea unifies, the propaganda line may well be that the tunnel was dug by the CIA to prevent the Koreas from being unified), and North Korea, particularly under Kim Il-Song, did present several threats to South Korea, including sending assassins who were caught in the Blue House, Korea’s presidential capital, trying to kill the Korean president.
It is sobering to think that that war, which cost around 34,000 Americans and 1-4 million South Koreans, still has not been resolved, over 50 years later. The peace was an uneasy truce (the fighting up and down the peninsula took about a year; the stalemate over the peace talks took almost two years, with bitter battles for a few yards to move the front line and ultimately the demilitarized zone). The war has never formally ended.
Still, when I was there over a decade ago, the North had built a fake village with signs and loudspeakers talking about how great the North was and that’s no longer operating. There have been a few efforts to allow North and South Koreans to visit each other. There is a tour to Caesong, about 12 miles from the border, that Hyundai helps operate. Our guide took it and said before she got off the bus in South Korea, North Korean police examined every one of her pictures and deleted ones they thought were derogatory and fined her $100. That tour is about the only way Americans can visit North Korea, which remains one of the last of the real dictatorships of my youth. There’s been interesting rumors that Kim Jong-il is dead, vehemently denied, but his death will throw leadership up for grabs, as it usually does in a dictatorship.
It was time to send them home, and me onto more adventures.