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An army of ossifying bodies rests unseen beneath the soil that divides two Koreas. Unwittingly entombed by the tides of war, flesh and bone have faded into the earth and mingled with the roots—their nationalities rendered unrecognizable by the passage of time.
Stretching 150 miles along the 38th parallel, the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was established in 1953 as a buffer zone between the warring communist north and capitalist south. Today, the DMZ proliferates in popular culture as one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world and a living vestige of the Cold War era—it’s also a tourist attraction.
Though they are now known as two distinct, intensely polarized nations, for more than a thousand years Korea was a unified territory. In 1945, at the conclusion of World War II, the United States and Soviet Union partitioned the peninsula at the 38th parallel with little regard to the sentiments of the Korean people. Arbitrarily divided by ideologically opposed, interloping regimes, tensions between the North and South soon escalated into the three-year Korean War that ravaged the population. On...
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