Dateline Panmunjom, South (and a Little North) Korea<br />As we filed into the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission building, our South Korean military minder told us<br />not to gesture at the North Korean soldiers gazing down on us from a building on the other side of the demarcation line.<br />I had come to the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the peninsula to report on Taesung, a tiny farming village inhabited by 197 civilians on the South Korean side of the DMZ<br />and from which we could look across a field and see North Korea.<br />But it was on a media tour of Panmunjom, the uninhabited village inside the DMZ where the 1953 armistice suspending the Korean War was signed,<br />that I got to step across the military demarcation line between the two countries and officially walk in North Korea for a few minutes.<br />He had surprised his security detail when he decided at the last minute to step up close — but not over — the demarcation line, telling The Washington Post<br />that he wanted the North Koreans to "see our resolve in my face," presumably alluding to the Trump administration’s vow to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions.<br />In keeping with that spirit, one of the public affairs specialists from the Combined Forces Command<br />that represents the United Nations and the United States military in South Korea whipped out Flat Stanley, a cutout figure of a character from a children’s book series.<br />It all seemed a bit detached from the geopolitical crisis, although I admit after we went back outside I felt a ripple of apprehension when North Korean guards came down a flight of stairs<br />and walked to the back of the building we had just been inside.<br />Meanwhile, two South Korean soldiers stood stiffly on the north end of the room, their arms bent at the elbows and their fists clenched.
