a headline I never like to see

“Troops exchange fire on Korean border”

It’s one of those things that looks like just another minor world strife item, unless you’ve been to the Korean DMZ and can picture what an exchange of fire there would actually feel like.

It is definitely the scariest place in the world I’ve ever been. You cross the bridge into the DMZ, knowing that if a war starts while you’re on tour you are utterly screwed. The balloons will be cut, the bridges will go up, and you will be trapped inside with a trip-wire force against a land army juggernaut unlikely to be gentle in its treatment of either South Korean soldiers or foreign tourists. (Most of the American forces were transferred to more active theaters during the Rumsfeld years; it’s almost entirely South Koreans there now).

The soldiers on the North do their best to behave in menacing fashion, peering at you with binoculars from behind columns. And photographing you (or at least pretending to do so) with telephoto lenses from inside ominous towers.

If you cross the painted line inside the conference room, which everyone obviously did, you’re in North Korean territory. Technically, the North soldiers can open the door, grab you, and sentence you to 20 years of hard labor for trespassing. That’s why the ROK (South) soldiers first enter the room and lock the door and remain with you in the room at all times.

There was also an incident there in 1974 in which an American officer was axed to death by North Korean soldiers. They’re a pretty humorless group of military personnel, those North Koreans.