Korea's no-man's-land

Rolf Potts describes a visit to Korea's DMZ, one of the planet's oddest tourist attractions, where visitors can pick up everything from propaganda to perfume.

By Rolf Potts

Feb 3, 1999 | Just behind the video-projection screen in the basement of the Cass 'N' Rock sports bar in Pusan, Korea, there hangs a large red flag that reads: "If the South Would've Won, We Would've Had it Made."

Never mind that this is a Confederate battle flag. Never mind that this slogan is written in English. Never mind that the flag also bears the visage of Hank Williams Jr.

At the Cass 'N' Rock -- where Korean university students gather to drink beer, eat dried squid and watch soccer games on the big-screen TV -- the South in question has nothing to do with Robert E. Lee, King Cotton or the Heart of Dixie. At this South Korean sports bar, the Stars and Bars banner is a quirky, sorrowful symbol of a different war -- one that began 48 years ago, killed more than 2 million Koreans and resolved nothing.

For those keeping score at home, this war is technically not over: 250 miles north of the Cass 'N' Rock, upwards of a million troops are locked in a 45-year-old standoff between North Korean and United Nations Command forces along the most militarized border in the world.

Holding true to the absurdities of Cold War-era nomenclature, this border is called the Demilitarized Zone.

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It's just after 8 in the morning, and I am taking a USO bus north from Seoul to the DMZ. This trip is not as sensitive and dangerous as it sounds: Approximately 70,000 people took the trip last year, including President Clinton.

In the seat next to me, a 50ish woman from Virginia is entranced by the empty yellow countryside that surrounds us. She's been staying in the urban madness of Seoul for four days, and she says she never knew that the Korean landscape could look so quiet.

But the landscape is not as empty as it appears at first glance. Gaze long at these roadside foothills and you can just make out trenches and camouflage netting, infantry soldiers and artillery. A mere 40 road miles separate Seoul from the entrenched front rank of a million-man North Korean army, and every inch of the space in between has been groomed to defending South Korea's capital from attack. As we near the DMZ, the military presence becomes more obvious: razor-wire fences on the Imjin River, anti-tank barricades framing the highway, medieval-looking iron-spiked barrels gracing the asphalt.

The Virginian asks me if I've ever been scared, living and working in Korea for the past two years. I tell her that Korea is a strange place where gruesome traffic deaths are an hourly occurrence, rival sects of Buddhist monks get into public fistfights and department store buildings collapse because the local building inspectors live off bribes. If anything, I tell her, I am scared of getting run over by a delivery truck or smashed by a poorly installed I-beam. The threat of war is a forgettable annoyance that I think about only when a civil defense drill halts my bus when I am late for work, or when my middle-age landlady tells me how she learned to throw hand grenades in her high school gym class.

What I don't tell her is this: If the North were to launch an all-out surprise attack on Seoul this evening, we'd stand about a 50-50 chance of living through the first hour. That's a statistic I don't dwell on much.