Soldier Boys

12 August 2006.

The Korean countryside is passing by our train window. It takes from early morning to late afternoon to get from Gyeong Ju to Seoul.

All Korean boys are put in the army right out of high school. You see them everywhere, in camoflage head to toe with sleeves rolled up crisply and hats drawn low over their eyes, shiny tall black boots. They all walk the same, sit the same, they're all straight and young and healthy, 18 or 19 or 20, with clear, bright skin.

They all do a few week long tour at the DMZ, and they live in tents and don't get regular showers, and they are ordered to shoot people who climb the wall from the North, or so we're told, and they do sometimes.

Koreans and Koreans face each other down and tell the tourists at the front not to move, don't take pictures, any sudden movements could send the bullets flying. It is, after all, still an active line of combat in the most bizarre standoff in East Asia, a 60 year arms race and staring contest.

After world war II the powerful countries divided Korea for reasons all their own, and stuck the Northern brothers in the attic with Stalin and their own proto-tyrant, left the South to permanent occupation by the piranhas of the eastern Pacific.

The powers poked and prodded Korea from each side, and ugly iron communism overran the border first, took Seoul quickly with Soviet tanks, pushed through all this green country the whole way to Busan,
and in perhaps the first war of the cold war the capitalist world pushed right back and put landmines everywhere, like the one that blew my cousin's eyes out decades later,
and the General in charge was frothing at the mouth to turn it nuclear. That's when he was forced out by a president who wasn't quite so ready to destroy everything in Korea, or maybe launch a third world war.

These things I'm learning slowly. It's hard to conceive of the twentieth century. It flung my generation out like a slingshot, before we were ready and before we could come to grips with where we were.

The twentieth century poured out its buckets of blood and ash and airplanes, its internet, refugees, space missions, corporations, liberations, psyops, chemical fertilizers, holes in the ozone,
and it said, here you go kids, this is how we've blessed you. Here's one hell of a fucking mess on your hands. You figure it out.

In the west there's boredom and luxury, hedonism, there's a drug war and corporate rule and everyone's sleepily waiting for the Apocalypse. At any small provocation we have little fits of fear and stockpile duct tape, water, guns. Then we forget about it and go back to watching the people we pay to be more beautiful than us live their beautiful lives, date each other, have babies, lose weight, get in trouble, get old, get surgery, die.

We don't know what's going on. When we talk about living in the "real world" we show how far we've flown from anything close to that.

In Korea boys put on military uniforms before they're taught to think. Before they're allowed to experiment with peace they're indoctrinated into making war, into watching out for other Koreans who might scale the wall bestowed on their country by foreigners two generations ago.

If they go to college they go after learning how to march in a line, handle a rifle, shoot a stranger because someone says so. They go certified in Tae Kwon Do, driving tanks, inspecting missiles, eating vaccuum sealed food, shining their tall black boots till they look like black mirrors.

The big problem with humans is we live too little and such a preciously short time. By the time we're half concious of our actions and their consequences we're too invested to get out. It takes too many years of study and inquiry to get past even the most basic layers of bullshit, misconceptions, prejudice, and propaganda to see "our people" for what they are.?We don't have the time to figure out our place in history and what's really happening, to figure out how and why Korean 19 year old boys stone up their faces and stare across the DMZ at other Korean boys, and why they'll kill and die at the whim of other men who don't even know their first names.