My Humble Take on the Korea Talks
I spent a year in Korea, South Korea that is. I know this because when I arrived there in the summer of 1995 for my job as tank driver for the U.S. Army, they handed each of us “turtles” a map of South Korea made of numbers, 365 of them, little boxes to color in as we did our long slog south of the DMZ.
“Turtles?” you ask. Oh yeah, that’s what we called the new arrivals in South Korea because inside the “turtle farm” at Camp Casey the doors to the in-processing and out-processing quonset huts were right next to each other and it took one year to make the journey. So during long, Friday company runs, when we ran by the turtle farm, we would yell, “TURTLES!” and yell it again if a soldier dropped his tray in the chow hall. During my first month, I fell into a “turtle ditch” the long open trenches all over the base to deal with monsoon runoff. I got an infection, but at least nobody yelled “Turtle!”
My year in South Korea was one of the slowest years of my life. I was young and impatient, too bad with tools to be a tank driver and too addicted to Taco Bell to be living outside the US. But I did my time, occupying myself with books, movies, long conversations, and drinking…a lot of drinking.
Meanwhile, there was this possible reality hanging over all of us. Maybe they’ll invade this year. It was understandable we felt that way. Our first battalion formation after my arrival on the peninsula consisted of our battalion commander, Lt. Colonel Antal, making his case for why North Korea was going to attack that winter and why we all needed to be ready for war.
Antal was an interesting animal. During our gunnery practices at the MPRC, he would blast the soundtrack of Conan the Barbarian, and give speeches standing on the front slope of his tank with his binoculars hanging around his neck, like some George S. Patton wannabe. “Dragon Force” he called us. We all thought he was full of shit.
When two pair of night-vision goggles went missing out the Communications Major’s armored personnel carrier at the end of our two-week gunnery practice, Antal made us stay in the field an additional 30 days, part of it spent walking the muddy hills of the MPRC in long police-call lines searching for what we all knew was already long gone and sold on the Korean black market. When Antal, asked all the soldiers in the battalion to write anonymous tips for where the goggles might be, the soldiers of C (“Cold Steel”) Company (my company) decided to have a little fun with their “suggestions.” One soldier famously wrote “Check Dragon Mama’s ass.” Our company commander took some heat for that.
It wasn’t all fun and games. There were moments of tension. One winter night, when we had our tanks lined up back at base, ready to drive to the field for training, orders came over the radio: “Stand down. Stand down.” We collected around our company commanders and were told that multiple North Korean infiltrators had been caught in Seoul and that “this might be it.” So we parked our tanks, climbed the hill back to our barracks, and the guys on watch on each floor of the barracks that night were given M16s and live ammo just in case.
That night was the closest I came in my life to going to war. I of course can never know how I would have responded in battle, but I was surprised that night by how calm I felt. I just felt focused and strangely safe, despite the fact that, when it came to my life on earth, “this might be it.”
The tense moments in Korea all happened in the winter, and it wasn’t until I made it through that long year that I realized that, on the peninsula, there is a cycle to things. Winter was tense because that was when the rice paddies were frozen and when the North could more easily enter the south. The speeches Antal gave about going to war were what they told everyone just to make sure the soldiers were ready. But as a 21-year-old kid spending his first year abroad, I was pretty naïve about the realities of international politics and propaganda.
About two months before I left Korea, we took a field trip to the DMZ to the UN-monitored Joint Security Area at Panmunjom. My heart raced on the way there. Here we would meet the face of the “enemy” — the guys I had been trained to kill and who had been trained to kill me — but when I arrived there I had a much different experience. The North Korean soldiers wore drab, brown suits and looked bored. Meanwhile the South Korean soldiers, stood firm, their arms cocked to their sides staring into the north. Of the two, I can objectively say that the South Koreans looked more intimidating. By the way, if you ever want to see a buff 6’5” Korean, go to the DMZ.
The area around Panmunjom is full of odd propaganda. Across the border, the North Koreans fly a flag so big, it can’t catch the wind. They also have a village of grey buildings with nobody living there. The South Koreans call it “Propaganda Village.” The North Koreans call it “Peace Village.” Meanwhile, the South Koreans have their own village they dub “Freedom Village” — a small rural settlement surrounded by barbed wire and mine fields where the people must live there 300 days out of the year or lose their property.
Speaking of propaganda, did you know that along the DMZ, the North Koreans float balloons that drop little bazooka-bubblegum-style comic strips that show American soldiers beating Korean civilians? During my guard shifts in the gunnery range motor pool, I would find them lying in the mud. I kinda regret not bringing a few of those home.
This is just one of the many games the North Koreans play as they perpetuate the bogeyman of their eventual invasion of the South. Every fall and winter they complain about and threaten invasion over the US and South Korean joint war games, a necessary exercise to maintain readiness for that invasion. Every spring they run some other shenanigans in relation to the international community, and every Korean-hosted Olympics and World Cup, they soften relations until there is a glimmer of hope that maybe these two governments will sort things out.
One day, when I was in Seoul on a weekend pass, my friend and I decided to just ride the subway and hop off on random spots. One of those excursions took us to a small park where many old men sat, chatting and playing board games. At the center of the park was a statue of two brothers holding each other. One brother was fighting for the south and the other for the north, and one was dying. The image came to me again a few weeks ago when I saw young North Korean Olympic athletes hugging their South Korean teammates and crying as they said goodbye. Both of these were moving images that told me more about the how the Koreans feel about their situation than any foreign policy “expert.”
This last week Donald Trump announced that he would meet with Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea. Liberals are skeptical because it’s Donald Trump. Conservatives are skeptical because it’s Kim Jong Un. The establishment is skeptical because it’s just not the way things are done. But for me, I can’t help but feel like this odd interchange between insane megalomaniacs might just work. Work to do what? I don’t know. But I feel this odd sort of optimism about it and the feeling comes from that statue in the park and those embracing Olympians. It comes from the recognition that at the end of the day, North and South Korea are not two different countries, really. They are family. That said, would you want Donald Trump mediating a family fight? Probably not. But right now, the Koreans seem to want it, so I think we should listen.
