On the DMZ

I asked to go to Korea. I wanted to patrol the DMZ, I wanted to see "Freedom's Frontier." There, I was told, I would find the hottest pan of the Cold War - a country split in half by a four-mile-wide "demilitarized zone" that separated capitalism and communism.

I had signed up for the Army while still in high school. After taking basic training at Ft. Benning, Georgia, I completed a 21-month "tour"' in Germany.

My unit had been stationed just west of the highly militarized border of what was then a divided Germany. After serving nearly two years in the U.S. Army, I had a lot of questions about what the generals called "forward deployed U.S. troops."

President Ronald Reagan had just been re-elected and was in the early part of his second term. Tnsions were high between the U.S. and the "Evil Empire," as Reagan called the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.