Camp Bonifas

The bus ride from Camp Kim in Seoul to Camp Bonifas in the DMZ is about 40 miles and takes a little over an hour to complete at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. After getting out of the center city, you drive along the Han river, which divides Seoul in two, following it up to where it enters North Korea. The first sign that something is unusual is when you realize that, as soon as you get outside of the city, the highway is cut off from the river by an unbroken barbed wire fence that goes for about 30 miles. In 1968, North Korean guerillas swam from the North into the South and attacked the Blue House, the residence of the South Korean president. So now there is a fence there to stop them.

The DMZ itself runs 240 kilometers long and is 4000 meters wide--each side has backed off from the actual line of demarcation by 2000 meters. It is heavily fortified with land mines, barbed wire, and tank traps, and guard towers stand on both the Norther and Southern side (you can see the North Korean guard towers from several points). The land has essentially been untouched by humans for over 50 years, since the cessation of the Korean war in 1953. One interesting side-effect of this arrangement is that the 4000 meter-wide strip has become a natural paradise, with a wide variety of unusual birds and animals thriving without human interference.

You must bring your passport with you to visit the DMZ. Ours was checked twice; a soldier boarded our bus when we crossed from the civilian territory, and at a later checkpoint we were made to disembark, show our passports, and return to the bus. There is a strict dress code, and if you don't follow it you will not be allowed off the bus. You also have to sign a waiver acknowledging that you are voluntarily entering an "active combat zone" and absolving the Army of any liability in the event of "enemy action."

We arrived at Camp Bonifas for a briefing given to us by a U.S. Army soldier. The camp is named for a U.S. Captail who was killed in the so-called axe murder incident 1976. A tree was blocking the view from one of the observation towers into the North. The U.S./South Koreans wanted to cut down the tree, but agreed in a compromise with the North to simply trim the branches. When Bonifas led a patrol to cut the tree down, several North Korean soldiers attacked, killing Bonifas with an axe.

The camp itself actually looks a little like my old summer camp, but with a far more somber attitude. There is a tennis court, and even a one-hole golf course (bordered on one side by land mines). The motto of Camp Bonifas is "In Front of Them All," since if the North Koreans decided to attack, Bonifas would face the brunt of the assault (North Korea has approximately 17,000 pieces of artilery pointed towards Seoul). Following the briefing, we left our tour buses and got on on special military buses to visit the Joint Security Area, the area within the DMZ that is patrolled on one side by soliders of the KPA (Korean People's Army, the North) and the other side by units of ROK (Republic of Korea, the South).