"At the DMZ, troops fight a 'ghost war'"

[Mike Yared <mikeyared@yahoo.com>]

At the DMZ, troops fight a 'ghost war'
By Willis Witter
Published May 27, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030527-124710-6791r.htm
     
    OBSERVATION POST OUELLETTE, South Korea - The
American soldiers turn their heads slowly, examining
ridges, trees and even tiny twigs that explode in
detail amid green hues in the night-vision scopes
suspended from the rims of their Kevlar helmets. The
M-16 rifles in their camouflaged hands follow in a
sweep across a mist-covered North Korean landscape
that begins only yards away with shadows cast by the
full moon. 
    For the next 10 days, the squad of a dozen men
will sleep in barracks covered by camouflage nets on
the protected south side of Ouellette's wind-swept
ridge. They might encounter North Korean soldiers
while on patrol. From time to time, the enemy slips
south across a border marked only by rusted yellow
signs spaced several hundred yards apart. 
    Should that happen, the Americans will make their
presence known and the North Koreans will probably
flee to their side of the Military Demarcation Line,
the official North-South border that bisects a
2.5-mile-wide buffer zone established nearly 50 years
ago by a truce that ended fighting in the Korean War. 
    American soldiers struggle to describe their
existence here — whether at Ouellette, Camp Bonifas
less than a half-mile to the south, or at nearby
Panmunjom, a Cold War display of guard booths and
scowling North Korean soldiers that is visited by
150,000 tourists each year. Of that place, one often
hears words such as "surreal" or "mind-game." 
    One American officer compares life here to a Dr.
Seuss book he read as a child, in which hostilities
between two creatures flare to absurd levels from a
disagreement over the proper side on which to butter a
slice of bread. 
    "It's like a ghost war," says U.S. Army 1st Lt.
Keith Hager while escorting two visitors on a rare
nighttime visit to Ouellette. 
    The silence is broken only by a howling north wind
that sets hoist ropes banging against aluminum
flagpoles, from which Old Glory, the United Nations
and South Korean flags were retired hours earlier at
sunset. 
    Against that backdrop, the soldiers hear reports
on the latest nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula,
from Seoul, Pyongyang, Beijing, Tokyo and Washington. 
    Impoverished North Korea is once again making a
bid for both attention and aid by threatening to
envelop its enemies in a nuclear "sea of fire," a
strategy it successfully used a decade ago to win
billions of aid dollars from the United States, South
Korea and Japan. 
    This time it looks as if the fanatical Stalinist
state has made a bad play, with the Bush
administration recoiling more with disgust than fear,
Japan beginning to shed decades of postwar pacifism to
arm itself against an attack, and South Korea starting
to abandon a policy of providing aid and investment to
North Korea regardless of how it behaves. 
    But life for the 200 or so American soldiers here
in the Demilitarized Zone — a tiny but elite fraction
of the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea —
moves to a rhythm of its own, seemingly disconnected
from political events outside. 
    "From here, it's hard to tell what the North
Koreans are doing or not doing," says Lt. Col. Matthew
Margotta, commander of the U.N. Security Battalion at
Panmunjom, a combined unit of about 550 soldiers, 60
percent from the South Korean Army and 40 percent from
the U.S. Army. 
    Col. Margotta's command includes Ouellette,
Panmunjom, Bonifas, the farming village of
Taesongdong, and the farmers' vast expanse of softly
terraced rice paddies that step up all the way to the
border. 
    The area has had its share of incidents over the
years including an ax murder, several defections and
shootouts, all documented in great detail as July's
50th anniversary of the armistice approaches. 
    There are tourists, too. They come by the busload.
American and South Korean soldiers escort them to the
border at Panmunjom, where they snap pictures of North
Korean soldiers in crisply pressed olive uniforms.
Moments later, they load up on souvenirs at nearby
Bonifas while waiting for the camp's one-hour photo
shop to develop their film. 
    "We do our best to make transparent to the
tourists just how dangerous this place can be," says
Col. Margotta, of San Antonio. "What they don't see is
the security behind all this, a quick-reaction force
and extensive surveillance capability." 
    In his office, its walls lined with
black-and-white photos from the Korean War, he speaks
in the context of recent tensions that began with an
October disclosure by North Korea of a secret program
to make atom bombs. "Looking at history, incidents
here have tended to occur when tensions were high,"
Col. Margotta says. But as tourists stroll through his
military base, he adds with emphasis: 
    "We've seen nothing here now that we can pinpoint
as being related to outside events." 
    Soldiers speak of cycles here in which tensions
ebb and flow in their own rhythms, not those of global
politics. 
    "When the alert is high, things can get pretty
tense," says Lt. Hager, 25, of Adams, N.Y. 
    "How often does that happen?" one of his guests
asks. "We can't discuss operational details," he
politely replies. 
    Late in the afternoon, as shadows of trees and
guard towers grow long, Lt. Hager takes his guests to
barracks housing a unit of South Korean soldiers at
the Panmunjom crossing. 
    Green mosquito nets cover the South Koreans'
neatly made bunks. Because North Korea has yet to wipe
out malaria, hordes of mosquitoes bred in nearby rice
paddies become a menace in the hot summer. 
    A South Korean officer, Capt. Yang, explains that
his soldiers sleep with their boots on so they can
respond to any incident within seconds. 
    In an adjacent room, a group of soldiers monitors
a bank of TV cameras covering every square inch of the
border-crossing area. All is quiet and the pictures
are more like photographs, but the soldiers gaze as
intensely as if watching a television thriller instead
of an empty road, swamp or quiet North Korean guard
post. 
    As the sun moves toward the horizon outside, the
tourists are gone and only the calls of rare birds
such as the stately white Manchurian crane break the
silence. 
    Inside a central one-story building that straddles
the Military Demarcation Line, a muscle-bound South
Korean guard who maintains a fierce Taekwondo stance
during tourist hours is nowhere to be found. 
    The building is empty except for Lt. Hager, Capt.
Yang and two guests, a reporter and photographer from
The Washington Times. 
    "I was hoping the North Korean guards would come
down and stare through the window, but I guess they
saw your blue [journalist] armbands and weren't
interested," Lt. Hager says. 
    The building smells of fresh paint, a coat of U.N.
light blue applied to spruce things up for the
upcoming armistice anniversary. 
    Negotiations take place here, sometimes over inane
details such as the size of miniature flags that the
North and South Koreans place on a conference table
that literally straddles the border. 
    The Americans and South Koreans sit on one side,
the North Koreans on the other. Once, the North
Koreans slipped in at night and sawed a few inches
from the legs of their adversaries' chairs, so they
would look smaller during talks the next day. 
    The psych-games are not one-sided. 
    North Korean negotiators face the flags of the 10
nations, led by the United States, that fought under
the U.N. flag to rescue South Korea from the 1950
North Korean invasion. The miniature flags are
enclosed in a glass picture-frame at the building's
South Korean entrance. "It really irritates the North
Koreans because they only want to deal with the United
States," Lt. Hager says. 
    The glass-covered display is designed to stop the
North Koreans from repeating one incident in which
they entered the building and used an American flag to
wipe their boots. 
    Later, Lt. Hager takes his guests on a stroll to
the nearby Bridge of No Return, a low and crumbling
cement structure where prisoners of war were exchanged
at the end of the Korean War. 
    In 1968, the 82 surviving crewmen from the seized
U.S. surveillance ship Pueblo crossed here to freedom
just in time to spend Christmas Eve with their
families. 
    The North has since built a wall blocking its end
of the bridge, now overgrown with weeds. As Lt. Hager
and his guests approach a dividing line at the
bridge's center, a North Korean soldier steps from a
guard booth and stares at the intruders with World War
II-vintage binoculars. 
    Near the bridge lies a simple monument to victims
of a 1976 ax murder in which North Korean soldiers
picked up axes being used by a party of six South
Koreans and four Americans to trim a tree. They hacked
two American officers to death. 
    The encounter, documented in a series of
black-and-white photos, shows Americans defending
themselves with their bare hands. At the time, the
"rules of engagement" prohibited firing even in
self-defense. 
    Because the DMZ is designated a combat zone,
American soldiers come for one-year tours, officially
as members of the U.N. Command Security Battalion,
while their families typically remain home. That can
make it a tough assignment. 
    "I was worried when I came here because some men
who come forget about their families," says Sgt.
Francisco Gonzalez, 24, of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Pictures of his wife, Yaidza, and two young children
cover his locker door. Every day he calls home, prays
with his wife and chats with his daughter, Yadiel, 3,
and son, Anis, 1. 
    "Everything I do in Korea is not for me. It's for
them. With the Army I can give them everything they
want," says Sgt. Gonzalez, who is to rejoin his family
in October for his next posting. 
    It was also tough for soldiers here during the war
in Iraq, albeit for different reasons. The all say
they turned to television at every opportunity and
wished they could have been there. 
    "It felt bad not being with so many of the guys I
knew," says Lt. Bryan Ash, 36, of Huntington, W.Va.,
whose former unit processed prisoners at the airport
in Kandahar, Afghanistan, before being sent to Iraq. 
    But he adds, "Most of us enjoyed watching the
embedded reporters. The world could see what we do." 
    Television reports also gave military families a
morale boost, says Staff Sgt. Rick Bryan, 35, of
Castle Hayne, N.C. "They could watch and feel good
about what we were doing." 
    The high point of the war, he says, came when U.S.
troops helped Iraqis pull down the statue of Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad, and the low point was when TV
reporter Geraldo Rivera drew his map in the sand
telling the world where his unit was headed next. 
    Sgt. Bryan's assessment of the reporter draws
chuckles from a group of soldiers taking a short break
in the garage where they repair and maintain the
battalion's fleet of Humvees and other vehicles. 
    The 10-day assignment for the squad at Ouellette
begins on a sunny afternoon with a tactical rehearsal.

    First they review the rules of engagement. Then
they practice hand signals for basic commands and
notices such as "pick up; move out" and "obstacle." 
    The soldiers move silently across a practice field
in the hot sun, form a tight circle with rifles
pointing outward, and later move on in an extended
single file, without uttering a word. 
    "Stop, look, listen, smell, attune yourself to the
battlefield, the animal chatter; sniff for cigarette
smoke; look for broken sticks, matted grass and other
signs of the enemy," explains Lt. Hager. 
    As the 12-soldier squad practices, a pair of South
Korean soldiers stand guard as flooded rice paddies
ripple in the wind. 
    The Ouellette assignment begins for real about an
hour later. The soldiers drop their gear in the
barracks and begin blending shades of green and brown
camouflage paint on their faces and hands. 
    Slowly they move out, down the mountain slope,
into a wooded ravine and out of sight. Later, they
pass several tombstones engraved with Chinese
characters. 
    The Americans stay on their side of the border. 
    But North Korean soldiers are known to slip into
the South, with paper and pencil, to stencil the
Chinese characters from the tombstones in an act
considered a right of passage. It produces a souvenir
proving they set foot on South Korean soil. 
    The patrols continue at irregular intervals, day
and night, in dense forests and atop denuded ridges.
The timing, routines and formations are deliberately
varied to keep the enemy off balance. 
    When this patrol finishes its 10-day stint it will
head back to Bonifas to train. The Army expends more
ammunition here per soldier in training than anywhere
else on Earth. Soldiers get just four days off each
month. 
    Newly arriving troops are called "turtles," Lt.
Hager explains. "They're pretty nervous at first but
after a few months they begin to relax." 

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