Stretching 155 miles wide and two and a half miles deep across the entire peninsula, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) divides the two Koreas. It also separates the universes of a war long forgotten by most Americans and a peace tantalizingly close for nearly all Koreans.

Patrolling soldiers, miles of barbed wire fence, mine fields, guard posts and observation decks serve as reminders that the three-year Korean War ended on July 25, 1953, with a military armistice rather than a peace treaty.

In the five decades since, U.S., South Korean and North Korean soldiers have patrolled the Zone, operating under a dizzying array of initials and acronyms. Those are a legacy of a war fought under the United Nations flag, with troops from 17 nations, under an American commander against the combined forces of North Korea and China.

While helping prevent a resumption of all-out war, even as tensions waxed and waned on the peninsula, the Zone has seen its share of small-scale combat. Some 92 Americans have been killed there since the armistice. In 1976, two U.S. junior Army officers were hacked to death by axe-wielding North Koreans, and in 1994, a U.S. warrant officer was killed when his helicopter strayed across the divide and was shot down.

In the absence of fatal fighting since that incident, daily routines involving the supervision of the armistice go on in a Kabuki-like series of interactions between military officers assigned by the allied and communist sides to the Military Armistice Commission that maintains the truce.

One "temporary" building where they meet sits astride the military demarcation line that is now the de-facto border between South and North Korea. The conference table inside also sits atop the line. Officers from the allied and communist sides enter and leave through separate doors. In one classic case from the 1960s, generals from both sides sat across the table for 11 hours without exchanging a word.

When American officers bring in visitors, South Korean soldiers guard the closed north door.
Should it be opened, the soldiers stand one in front of the other, the one in the back holding the belt of the one ahead to make sure North Koreans do not try to repeat an attempt to pull the front man out of the door and make him a prisoner.

Gradually, the U.S. has turned more responsibility in the Zone to South Koreans. Only 40 Americans are now on patrol duty. Those numbers reflect the drawdown of U.S. forces in Korea from 37,500 four years ago to 25,000 by next year. But two-thirds of South Korea's 450,000-man army (military service is still mandatory for males) is stationed near the divide and expected to bear the brunt of a North Korean attack.

As distant a possibility as such an assault now appears, it was all too real on June 27, 1950, as thousands of North Korean soldiers poured across the 38th parallel (the post-World War II dividing line agreed upon by the U.S. and Soviet Union). Meeting little resistance, they struck Seoul barely 50 miles south and advanced all the way south to Pusan. Four times, allied and communist troops criss-crossed the 38th parallel, the allies pushing north and then being repelled by a wave of communist Chinese, then the allies pushing back again, all by the middle of 1951. The next two years were subsumed in a stalemate and cease-fire talks that seemed to go on forever in a village called Panmounjon. The death toll: 800,000 to a million Koreans; 115,000 Chinese; 36,400 Americans killed and another 8,100 still unaccounted for; the total allied killed and wounded, over 140,000. Buried even more deeply are the recollections that a clutch of American POWs defected to the communists and that the United States government several times considered using nuclear weapons to try to resolve the conflict.

Of the dozen editors and producers in our group, I am the only one with vivid childhood memories of that war, of the newspaper and newsreel photos of GIs freezing in the Korean winter and the political conflicts it unleashed at home, especially after President Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the American commander, a decision that produced the greatest test of civilian control of the military in American history. It all seems so distant now, driving to the DMZ through the bustling metropolis of Seoul, which was little more than rubble by war's end.

In the DMZ itself, the absence of war mixes incongruously with the remnants of war. There's a one-hole, par three golf course built amid mine fields. The hundreds of thousands of visitors now can purchase souvenirs at two gift shops. The allied side of the Zone, where humans don't tread because of landmines, has become one of the world's great nature preserves, full of rare birds as well as deer and wild boar.

From an observation post onlookers can see in the distance, now nestled on the communist side of the demarcation line, the one-story building thrown together in 48 hours for the signing of the armistice. The history books and the guides tell visitors that the American signing the armistice document was Adm. Turner C. Joy. What they don't tell you is that there is no end of history. Barely a decade later, in the summer of 1964, two U.S. Navy ships were involved in an encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin that led to a congressional resolution authorizing full-scale American involvement in the Vietnam War. One of those two ships was named the Turner Joy.

-- By Michael Mosettig, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer