Truce Village: The Last Combat Zone

The so-called Demilitarized Zone --a 151-mile-long strip of mountains and fields separating North and South Korea--is in fact the only area on the entire peninsula that the U.S. still officially designates a combat zone. Thousands of armed soldiers patrol the entire length of the 2 1/2-mile-wide land-mined strip. Artillery and missiles on both sides are aimed at hills pockmarked with trenches. Since the zone was established by the armistice agreement of July 1953, 49 Americans have been killed and dozens of others wounded in clashes in and near the DMZ. The death toll for North and South Koreans is more than 1,000.

The most intense skirmishing took place in the late 1960s. In 1966, six American soldiers were killed in a North Korean ambush near Panmunjom. In 1968--the year the U.S. warship Pueblo was seized by North Korea while on a reconnaissance mission--there were 760 incidents in the DMZ, including 356 outbreaks of shooting, with a total of 500 deaths on both sides. In the past 2 1/2 years, however, the zone has been relatively quiet. Until last week, there had been no American deaths since November 1974. In the interim, the most serious injury was suffered by Major Darryl Henderson, whose larynx was crushed when he was attacked and beaten unconscious last year by North Korean guards in Panmunjom.

Of the 41,000 U.S. soldiers now stationed in South Korea, only 160 are assigned to Panmunjom, while South Koreans patrol the rest of the DMZ. The American volunteers--specially chosen for their conspicuous brawn and even tempers--serve 13-month tours of duty at the "truce village" of Panmunjom, where 379 vituperous sessions of the Military Armistice Commission have regularly failed to accomplish anything. At a long wooden table that is half in the North Korean and half in the South Korean zone, North Korean and Chinese representatives argue fiercely with Americans representing the U.N. Command. Of the 35,000 truce violations charged to them in the past 23 years, the North Korean commission members have admitted only two. The U.S. and South Korea have admitted fewer than 100 of the nearly 150,000 violations charged to them. The exchange of insults across the table often becomes so heated that American troops on duty at the negotiation sessions are ordered to wear athletic supporters with plastic cups in case of scuffling. "The North Koreans are absolutely unbending," said an Eighth Army officer on duty at Panmunjom. Spitting, name-calling and obscene gesturing, he added, are "almost a point of honor for them." When off duty, the 43 U.S. officers at Panmunjom mingle at an officers' club called The Monastery, where each man has a brown, velveteen monk's robe and hood that he dons for elaborate induction ceremonies. Each officer also owns a black baseball cap, which is hung on a hook above the bar. The most veteran member of the group hangs his hat on a hook around the corner, and when his time to go home comes his robed colleagues recite an elaborate liturgy of farewell toasts, and move their hats up one peg. They all know that the next assignment has got to be better.

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