IN Panmunjom you feel on the very edge of the world. A hair's breadth away are the possibilities that we all dread: one wrong move and Mutually Assured Destruction, the old MADness, has returned from its late 20th-century slumber.
On a beautiful October day the serenity of the weather conditions made the implicit peril of the situation along the Korean demilitarised zone all the more surreal. But at any moment, the US troops tell you, their rapid response unit can be in full combat gear and on a truck within 60 seconds.
Tension has been high lately on the Korean peninsula. The discovery on September 18th of a North Korean submarine in waters off the east coast in a straight line from Seoul, capital of the South, has created near hysteria in political circles and fear nationally. Although most of the crew of the submarine appeared to have been executed by their own commanding officer when the craft was found, three crewmen escaped.
Despite a massive search nothing was heard of them until the bodies of three villagers who had been picking mushrooms were found in a rural area on the route to the North Korean border on October 9th. Further efforts were made to step up the search, but the only result was that a Republic of Korea (ROK), army captain was shot dead when one of his own, inexperienced, men fired wildly at a movement in the undergrowth.
At Panmunjom, the US soldiers who take the tour groups around tell of similar chilling incidents right in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) or JSA (Joint Security Area) - or whatever other set of official initials apply to this ricefield-dotted countryside. For the threat of a possible Armageddon has not deterred the infiltrators whom the troops see a lot more often than their own North Korean counterparts: the tourists.
The US and ROK soldiers who patrol the South Korean side of the UN joint security area have a busy schedule escorting busloads of curious civilians around their fiefdom. Around 160,000 gawkers a year come to peer across a roadway that could be in a peaceful western suburb at what the South Korean foreign minister, Mr Gong Ro-Myung, calls the "last iceberg of the Cold War".
When The Irish Times visited this surprising holiday hit, these included a press party, South Korean civilians, and 20 mixed race high school kids from New York. The absurdly long, intricately decorated fingernails on some of the girl students were enough to put fear into the heart of soldiers on either side.
Before tourists are allowed to go on the DMZ tour they are required to sign an undertaking that they "will not point, make gestures or expressions which can be used by the North Korean side as propaganda material against the UN command". Neither are they allowed to wear jeans. Some alternative apparel will be found to avoid the impression of western decadence which denim apparently gives the North Koreans.
There are around 500 military personnel in the joint security area which is the administrative heart of the DMZ. Just over half are South Korean troops, with about 250 US soldiers and a small senior group of 12 Swedish and Swiss soldiers whose main job is to check that only 30 men on either side of the 38th parallel are carrying arms. (This is only at the potential flashpoint - the restriction does not apply in the rest of the 420-km long demilitarised zone.)
The South Koreans do a 26-month's stint, but the Americans have a 12-month tour of duty. Perhaps The Irish Times is just an ageing hack, but they look so young and newly-shaven. It is hard not to think of the 54,000 US soldiers like this who died in the three-year Korean war at the start of the 1950s, and almost inconceivably appalling to go on to the memory that millions of Koreans of both sides perished.
In these hopefully more peaceful times there are 13 soldiers detailed to look after the tourists, eight ROK personnel and five US, who have the quaint rank of "Specialist".
"It's pretty relaxed here most of the time," said our guide, Specialist Welch, as we drove through the sunlit fields to potential doom. "There is underlying tension all the time, of course. You notice it when you first get here but after a while you get used to it."
Although the man-made surroundings at Camp Bonifas motto, "In Front Of Them All" are distinctly unglamorous, there is more than a touch of theatre, especially to the civilian, in the carefully choreographed movements? that the US and ROK soldiers make when tourists are taken right up to the observation point and the building in which any talks between military leaders of both sides take place.
Inside the building is a table with an electrical lead attached to a small bank of microphones bisecting its length. On one side of this lead is South Korea; on the far side is the North. "ROK soldier ten-SHUN" shouts the US tour guide when his duties take him away from vigilance at this conference table for one moment. And the ROK soldier materialises instantly to take position at the head of the table. Just in case ...
Outside two South Korean soldiers stand half crouched in a martial-arts stance, their bodies carefully aligned with the edge of the two blue-painted UN buildings which flank the central meeting house. One eye is fixed on the blank wall in front, the other stares across at the North Korean side only a few yards away and the building which houses their tourist groups.
When asked why the men stand in this peculiar half-obscured way, Specialist Welch says laconically: "It's so they would have some protection if firing starts."
When trouble started in July 1976 Capt Arthur Bonifas had no protection from the North Korean axe which ended his life. Capt Bonifas (posthumously promoted to major) was in charge of a small detail charged with chopping down a poplar tree that was obscuring the view of the North Korean side from a UN observation post. But when he and his five men got to the tree they were ambushed by a larger north Korean detachment. Maj Bonifas and his lieutenant were killed, and the camp renamed from Camp Kittyhawk to honour him.
The signs dotted around the joint security area were apposite, although not perhaps in the way they were intended: "Fire will not wait - plan your escape", they read. But Korea cannot escape from its ongoing predicament, and neither can the 500 soldiers who keep the peace in the lovely valley of Panmunjom.