High Tension and a Cold Shoulder at Border of Two Koreas

Panmunjom, South Korea: Lt. Cmdr. Daniel McShane dashed from the rainstorm into the sentry post. Minutes earlier, he had walked up to a strip of concrete that marks the de facto border with North Korea and, through an interpreter, read out a request: A US colonel wanted to meet face to face with his North Korean counterpart.

He had used a bullhorn for emphasis, and a North Korean soldier had stood opposite him recording with a video camera.

For more than a year, that has been the way McShane, a US naval officer attached to the UN Command here, has been forced to carry out one of his main duties - conveying messages to the North Koreans. On the second floor of the sentry post, he opened a box and pulled out a peach-colored landline telephone to show how officers here used to communicate with the North Koreans, starting when the United States gave the other side a similar phone in the late 1990s.

But when the United Nations imposed new economic sanctions in March 2013 after North Korea's third nuclear test, the North Koreans stopped taking the calls meant to help administer the Demilitarized Zone between the two countries peacefully. The soldiers here keep dialing the North Koreans to see whether they will end the boycott.

"We try them four times a day," McShane said. "It rings, but no one answers."

So goes life at Panmunjom, about 30 miles north of Seoul and on the front line of what is technically the continuing war between the two Koreas. The convoluted communications - a reflection of particularly chilly relations between North and South in recent years - has added to the strains in a border zone that has long been an odd mix of high tension and the more mundane. (One example: settling how to pass back a North Korean officer's body carried into the South by a river.)

With most of South Korea's and North Korea's militaries arrayed along the border, no one is willing to fully let down his guard. But there has been less violence here in recent years than along the disputed western sea border, where North Korea sometimes lobs artillery shells at waters controlled by South Korea and the South conducts live fire exercises.

When violence has erupted on the land border, it has sometimes been in surprising ways. Last weekend, at the eastern end of the zone, a 22-year-old South Korean Army sergeant tossed a hand grenade at fellow soldiers and opened fire, killing five and injuring seven. Several such bloody acts by South Korean soldiers have taken place near the border in recent years, while North Korea has not attempted a ground attack in decades.

"It's a paradox of Korea, where the threat is both real and contrived on both sides," said John Delury, a historian at Yonsei University in Seoul who has visited military units in the zone. "Both sides do feel threatened, but they're also manufacturing a sense of threat."

The Demilitarized Zone, which was established by the terms of the 1953 armistice that ended fighting on the peninsula, is a buffer between the North and South that stretches 150 miles from coast to coast and is 2 1/2 miles wide. Panmunjom is on its western end.

For the UN Command here, one of the major chores these days is trying to keep open the channels of communication with North Korea. ... The North had boycotted use of the landline phone during periods of heightened tension in 2008 and 2010, but each of those spells lasted only a few months.

"This is the longest in a while," McShane said.

Still, the UN Command and South Korean government have been able to communicate enough in recent months to keep open a nearby border crossing - one of just two in the demilitarized zone. The crossing allows South Korean managers to travel to work at the Kaesong Industrial Park in North Korea. There, 123 South Korean companies run factories employing 53,000 North Koreans, one of the rare instances of true cooperation between the two enemy countries.

The armistice agreement was signed at the village of Panmunjom in 1953 after three years of intense fighting. The village itself is now abandoned, but near its original site is the Joint Security Area, a green patch of land with buildings where talks between the parties are supposed to be held. It has been years since general staff officers from the two sides have met here.

This part of the border is protected by the U.N. Command Security Battalion-Joint Security Area, a force that is 90 percent South Korean and 10 percent American. McShane is part of a much smaller group here, which is charged with monitoring and enforcing the armistice.

South Koreans guard the rest of the southern half of the Demilitarized Zone. In 1991, the US military, which keeps troops elsewhere in South Korea, handed two guard posts over to the South Koreans, ending its watch at the zone.

"You go back in time to the Cold War," said Christopher Bush, a spokesman for the UN Command. "It's very much a reality here."

The heart of the Joint Security Area is a set of three conference rooms in separate blue buildings. The border runs right down the middle of the rooms. Inside the center building, it splits a conference table.

Two towering South Korean soldiers stand guard in the room during the day, wearing helmets and aviator sunglasses. The regular North Korean guards stay outside. Once, a South Korean soldier in the room had to fight off North Koreans who tried dragging him away. But on a recent afternoon, it was possible for a US visitor to step across the room into North Korea without drawing any attention.

Minutes later, the thin North Korean soldiers standing outside the three buildings snapped to attention. Five North Korean men dressed in tan or olive suits walked down the steps of a gray Stalinist building on the North Korean side and posed for photos in front of the blue conference halls, just as tourists from the South do on their side.

McShane said one recent change at the border was that more Chinese tourists could be spotted in both the North and the South.

"You hear more Chinese being spoken on both sides," he said.

Nearby is the Bridge of No Return. In 1976, two US soldiers tried cutting down a tree by the bridge to improve visibility. Twenty-eight North Korean soldiers rushed out of their sentry post, grabbed the men and hacked them to death with the Americans' own ax.

That attack has passed into the legend of the place and is still told in great detail to visitors, as if it had happened just yesterday. Delury, the historian, said officers here had their reasons for heightening the sense of imminent danger.

"In general, the commanding officers have to keep up morale and readiness," he said. "They need a clear and present danger."